The Four Fallacies at the Heart of SCOTUS’ Decision on Trans Athletes

This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.

The Supreme Court on Tuesday authorized further discrimination against transgender students. In a split ruling on two cases about whether states could ban trans students from school sports matching their gender identity — Little v. Hecox and West Virginia v. B.P.J. — the court ruled that it’s permissible to exclude trans students from the teams that align with their gender identity.

Fundamentally, both cases were about stopping trans girls from playing school sports. The court decided both cases together under the name West Virginia v. B.P.J. by ruling against both the Title IX and Equal Protection claims made by the trans students. In short, the Court decided that Title IX permits banning trans students by deciding that Title IX only pertains to biological sex, sex assigned at birth. The conservative justices also ruled that the equal protections guaranteed to all in the Constitution are not violated by state trans sports bans. 

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, in her dissent, pushes back on that narrow understanding of Title IX, writing, “The majority is wrong to suggest that the term ‘sex’ in Title IX ‘cannot plausibly be interpreted to refer to anything other than biological sex.’ Title IX makes room for individuals to live in the gender they choose; it cares not just about sex assigned at birth but also about individuals’ ability to match (or not) their gender presentation to their gender identity. Because West Virginia’s law forces B. P. J. to live—in this case, to play—as a boy though she is a girl, it might well run afoul of Title IX properly construed.”

As a former teacher, a former principal, a former coach, and now an education professor, this ruling is painful. I’ve spent this Supreme Court term thinking about Cal, a middle schooler I met last fall. Cal, a transgender girl, is a kid who tried out for her school’s soccer team and made it (just like the rest of the team). We met when I was visiting a former student of mine who is now an assistant principal, doing the hard work of leading a school in a politically purple community. During my visit, I got to see Cal and her team scrimmage during soccer practice. 

The Court’s decision in these cases rests on four fallacies. Cal’s soccer season put a face to each of them.

The first fallacy is that trans youth are pretending to be trans

Cal is not pretending. That should not need to be said, but this ruling necessitates saying it. Trans sports bans are built on the assumption that transgender students — particularly transgender girls — are misrepresenting their gender identity in order to compete “unfairly.” There is no evidence for this. But, it is worth sitting with how outlandish that assumption is. 

The SCOTUS ruling clings to the notion of “biological sex,”  dismissing the overlapping reality of gender and gender identity. Justice Clarence Thomas in his concurrence calls trans girls “boys who identify as girls,” asserting that he knows they are actually boys and that to state otherwise “is to lie to the public.” Likewise, the ruling refers repeatedly to trans students, like Cal, as “males” and “biological males” as a way to signal that they are not real girls in the eyes of the law — they are only pretending to be girls. But gender identity is not a tactic. Organizations like the American Medical Association are unambiguous that gender identity is a reality. Trans youth do not experience their lives as though they have found an angle — but as complex people with joys, dreams, and, far too often, as children navigating hostility, exclusion, and harm. The Court’s ruling gives this falsehood legal shelter.

The second fallacy is that the harm of exclusion is acceptable

Consider what athletics actually provide. The research is clear: sports build physical competence, teach teamwork, and give young people a structure in which losing with dignity and winning with integrity become real, practiced abilities. For many students, their sport is the thing that ties them to school when everything else feels precarious. The Court’s ruling ends with a litany of these benefits, that children “learn to endure losses with grace, to lift up their teammates, and to respect opponents who have beaten them fairly and squarely. They learn to win with class—to look a defeated opponent in the eye, shake her hand, and congratulate her on her effort. Whether the star of the team or the last player on the bench, they form lifelong friendships and lifetime memories. They savor their athletic accomplishments and cherish them for years, even decades, after their playing days are over.” SCOTUS makes plain that those benefits are only for cisgender children.

Yet it is clear, for trans students, participation carries additional weightiness. In 2025, researchers from the University of Minnesota and Northwestern University found that transgender students who play sports report lower rates of psychological distress, self-harm, and suicidal thinking than trans students who do not. Cal having the opportunity to play on her soccer team is not a hypothetical benefit. It is a documented, measurable one.

The Court’s ruling sets that evidence aside and does not consider the pernicious harm they promote to trans students. It tells Cal that the state’s desire to exclude her is a legitimate interest — more legitimate, apparently, than her wellbeing. Justice Sonia Sotomayor makes this plain in her dissent, “Playing sports can lead to benefits that are immeasurable, and many are understandably invested in ensuring that competition stays fair and safe. Because the majority, however, inflicts a hardship on those it disfavors without giving them the fair and full opportunity the Constitution requires to litigate their contentions, I respectfully dissent.”

And the damage spreads. Researchers from Penn State have documented for decades that when a school permits targeted discrimination against one group, other students absorb it. Some with relief, but others with unease — a recognition that belonging has conditions, that those conditions can be revised, and that those revisions can eventually exclude them. Banning trans athletes does not calm a school community; it quietly unsettles it. The Court’s ruling sanctions that unsettling.

The third fallacy is that these bans protect girls

These cases involved banning only trans girls, not trans boys. The lawyers for the trans athletes’ argued (and lower courts agreed) that this discriminates on the basis of sex because only females can have their sex (or gender identity) challenged but males cannot. This results in only females being subject to invasive sex verification procedures to implement the law. The Court’s ruling ignores this controversial and stigmatizing aspect of the reality it just sanctioned.  

In addition, the “protecting girls” framing also deserves specific scrutiny. It rests on the idea of girls as inherently fragile — physically overmatched, unable to compete, in need of outside intervention to manage their athletic environments. It is the same logic that has historically been used to justify excluding women from making their own healthcare decisions and girls from rigorous math and science; that physically demanding work is simply beyond them. That logic never changes — girls need to be shielded — and in each case the shield turns out to act a great deal like a ceiling.

Banning trans athletes is not an act of solidarity with girls. It recruits girls as the justification for a new version of an old argument — one that has always ended with girls having fewer options.

The fourth fallacy is that Cal represents an urgent fairness crisis in school sports

K-12 athletics exist to serve ordinary kids. Investing in school sports has nothing to do with producing elite athletes — it is about what participation does for regular students: the teamwork, the commitment, the sense of belonging, the thread connecting a kid to school when other threads are fraying. Title IX reflects that same understanding. It is a guarantee of opportunity, not a pipeline to the Olympics.

Trans athletes are not overrunning the record books. At the K-12 level, they are not accumulating championships or pushing cisgender students off rosters in any documented, systematic way. Cal is not reshaping the competitive landscape of middle school athletics. She is just a kid who likes to play soccer.

Supporters of these bans argue that Cal took a spot from a cisgender girl who deserved it — that her inclusion is, by definition, someone else’s loss. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, writing for the majority, states this plainly: “At almost every turn, someone wins and someone loses. Every athlete who makes a team takes a roster spot from another athlete. Every player who earns playing time reduces the playing time of a teammate. Every player who makes the starting lineup sidelines another who remains on the bench. Every competitor who wins a race or competition deprives another athlete of that victory, or medal, or prize.” But beyond individual anecdotes, a 2021 report from the Center for American Progress does not show that transgender participation reduces cisgender students’ access to athletics in any systematic way. 

The biological argument — that male physiology creates an insurmountable advantage, making trans girls a permanent threat to fair competition — is presented by ban supporters and the Court’s majority as settled science. It is not. The breadth of research on the effects of hormonal transition on athletic performance is complex, varies considerably across sports and individuals, and does not support the blanket conclusions written into sports bans. It is important to note as Sotomoyor does in her dissent that “the ban replaced a policy of case-by-case assessment that had been in place since 2016. Back then, sports were also sex-separated, as they had been for decades, but transgender students could participate on teams matching their gender identity if their schools ‘determined that ‘fair competition’ would not be impacted by the student[s’] participation.’”

The Court’s ruling does not resolve these evidentiary gaps. As Sotomayor concludes, “In the end, to the Court, the facts do not matter, even though the consequences are serious.” This ruling simply steps over the facts — and in doing so, scapegoats students like Cal as the pressing problem.

In recent years, these four fallacies have become political currency. Much of the political right uses them deliberately — not to engage in a genuine conversation about fairness and opportunity, but as part of a broader effort to be culturally divisive and push trans folks out of public spaces.

Much of the political left has sat this one out. This silence in the face of targeted discrimination is not neutrality — it is a decision that lets the fallacies metastasize.

Regardless, the medical advice is clear. The American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the American Psychiatric Association, the Endocrine Society, and the Pediatric Endocrine Society all oppose these bans. That consensus has been consistent and it has been ignored.

These four fallacies were codified in the recent West Virginia v. B.P.J. decision. For that, the Court earns a failing grade. This ruling ignores evidence, dismisses expert consensus, and causes documented harm to children. Evaluated against everyday educational standards, that is failure.

The Supreme Court allowing blatant discrimination against trans children, that these children are not entitled  to the equal protection enshrined in the 14th Amendment, will not get the attention that many of the cases decided this week or last week received. That does not change how devastating and deeply troubling this ruling is. 

This calls for speaking up because Cal has not been banned yet. That “yet” matters. West Virginia v. B.P.J. gives the greenlight to the 27 states who currently ban trans students from playing sports that align with their gender identity, and to the Trump administration’s desire to nationalize these bans. But SCOTUS is not the only institution that will determine what happens next. Every politician who seeks these bans, every state that enshrines bans into law, every court that upholds them, and every person who watches in silence participates in the same failure.