By Michael Phillips | MDBayNews
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that states may lawfully restrict girls’ and women’s school sports teams to biological females, upholding sports bans in West Virginia and Idaho in a pair of consolidated cases, West Virginia v. B.P.J. and Little v. Hecox. The 6-3 decision, authored by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, holds that neither Title IX nor the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment prevents states from defining eligibility for women’s sports based on sex assigned at birth.
The ruling resolves a question the Court has been circling since last year’s decision in United States v. Skrmetti, which upheld a Tennessee ban on certain gender-transition medical treatments for minors. Tuesday’s opinion goes further, establishing that states have wide latitude to draw categorical lines in school athletics without conducting individualized assessments of transgender athletes’ physical characteristics.
What the Court held
Writing for the majority, Kavanaugh framed the case around two state interests: safety and competitive fairness. “Schools may determine eligibility for women’s and girls’ sports based on biological sex,” the opinion states, rejecting arguments that the laws must carve out exceptions for transgender athletes who have not undergone male puberty or who are receiving hormone therapy. The Court held that requiring judges to evaluate individual athletes’ physical capabilities on a case-by-case basis would create what Kavanaugh called “a judicial quagmire” that states are not constitutionally required to wade into.
The Court split more narrowly than the bottom-line 6-3 tally suggests. Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson agreed that the Title IX claim failed, parting ways with the majority only on the constitutional question — arguing the case should have been sent back to a lower court for additional fact-finding rather than decided outright. Justice Jackson, writing separately, went further than her colleagues, contesting the premise — accepted by all parties in this case — that Title IX’s use of “sex” refers only to biological sex.
The ruling directly affects only West Virginia’s Save Women’s Sports Act and Idaho’s Fairness in Women’s Sports Act, but the Court’s reasoning is written broadly enough to cover the 27 states that have already adopted similar restrictions.
Maryland is not one of those 27 states
Maryland has no statewide law restricting transgender athletes from competing in school sports consistent with their gender identity. Instead, eligibility has been governed since 2012 by guidance from the Maryland Public Secondary Schools Athletic Association (MPSSAA), which directs local school systems to determine participation on a case-by-case basis, weighing competitive fairness alongside a student’s gender identity. The Maryland State Department of Education incorporates that same guidance into its own policies, and individual districts — including Montgomery County Public Schools — have built their own intake and appeals processes around it.
That permissive framework was the subject of a legislative challenge during this year’s General Assembly session, which has since adjourned. Senate Bill 50, the “Fairness in Girls’ Sports Act,” sponsored by Sens. Mary Beth Carozza and Ron Watson, would have required every interscholastic and intramural team in the state to be designated by biological sex, barred students “of the male sex” from girls’ teams, and shielded schools that maintain such designations from regulatory or legal challenge. The bill received a Senate committee hearing on February 18 but never advanced further, dying in committee — the same fate it and earlier versions of the bill have met in every session since 2022, according to testimony submitted by Trans Maryland. The Public School Superintendents’ Association of Maryland, representing all 24 local superintendents, opposed the bill, arguing the state’s locally controlled system “is working well” and that a statewide mandate would override districts’ existing authority under the 1991 Master Agreement governing interscholastic athletics in Maryland.
What changes now — and what doesn’t
The Supreme Court has now foreclosed those arguments as a matter of federal law.
Tuesday’s ruling does not compel Maryland to adopt a ban. The decision establishes only that states may restrict girls’ sports to biological females, not that they must. Maryland’s MPSSAA policy remains in effect unless and until state lawmakers or the State Board of Education act to change it.
What the ruling does change is the legal terrain underneath that debate. Opponents of bills like SB50 have previously argued, among other things, that excluding transgender athletes from girls’ sports raises serious Title IX and Equal Protection concerns. The Supreme Court has now foreclosed those arguments as a matter of federal law — a state law modeled on West Virginia’s or Idaho’s would no longer face a credible federal constitutional challenge on the theory advanced in B.P.J. and Hecox. That removes one of the principal legal headwinds facing SB50-style legislation in future sessions, even though it does nothing to compel its passage.
Tuesday’s ruling does not compel Maryland to adopt a ban. The decision establishes only that states may restrict girls’ sports to biological females, not that they must.
It also reshapes the argument on the other side. MPSSAA’s current case-by-case approach — explicitly designed to weigh “competitive fairness” and “the integrity of women’s sports” alongside gender identity — was built in part to answer fairness objections without a categorical ban. The Court’s opinion treats that kind of individualized assessment as exactly the model states are not required to adopt, on the theory that courts and case-by-case administrative processes cannot reliably parse the medical and scientific questions involved. That reasoning doesn’t outlaw Maryland’s current approach, but it removes any colorable claim that the approach is constitutionally compelled, leaving the policy resting entirely on choices made in Annapolis and by local superintendents — choices now squarely up for a legislative fight with one less court to answer to.
Whether SB50 returns in the 2027 General Assembly session — and whether the Supreme Court’s ruling gives it a stronger path through committee than it’s had in any of its five prior attempts since 2022 — will be the question to watch. MDBayNews will continue tracking the legislation as it develops.
The legal debate is over. The political debate in Maryland is just beginning.
Sources
This article draws on the official slip opinion in West Virginia v. B.P.J. and Little v. Hecox, 609 U.S. ___ (2026), published by the Supreme Court at supremecourt.gov. Maryland-specific reporting draws on Maryland General Assembly committee testimony on SB 50, the “Fairness in Girls’ Sports Act” (2026 session), submitted by the Public School Superintendents’ Association of Maryland and Shore Pride Alliance; MPSSAA’s published Guidance for Participation of Transgender Youth in Interscholastic Athletics; Montgomery County Public Schools’ athletics gender-identity policy documentation; and prior reporting by Spotlight on Maryland/Fox Baltimore on SB 50’s bipartisan sponsorship and local district responses.
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