The Supreme Court will hear a pair of cases Tuesday that could shape the future of women’s sports, as state laws limiting women’s sports to biological women come under the microscope.

Idaho’s Fairness in Women’s Sports Act and West Virginia’s Save Women’s Sports Act are at the center of back-to-back arguments at the Supreme Court, with the justices’ eventual ruling in both cases set to have implications for women’s sports across the country. The cases will hinge on two key pieces of law.

Title IX

Title IX is a landmark piece of legislation that allowed women’s sports to grow and flourish since its enactment in 1972. In the case West Virginia v. B.P.J., the state’s law has been challenged under both the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution and Title IX. Advocates on the side of West Virginia warn striking down the Save Women’s Sports Act would unravel the achievements of Title IX , which ensured women have equal spaces for sports.

John Bursch, senior counsel for the conservative law firm Alliance Defending Freedom, which is helping West Virginia and Idaho in their cases, told the Washington Examiner that the fate of Title IX could be determined by these cases.

“Title IX has done its job, which is to promote women’s participation in sports by giving them a fair playing field where they don’t have to worry about injury, they don’t have to worry about boys in the locker room, they don’t have to worry about male athletes taking their places in conference championship meets or taking their place on the medal stand,” Bursch said.

“And these male athletes have completely reversed that with the blessing of ideologists on the other side and some lower courts, and it’s time for the Supreme Court to put a stop to that and to save Title IX,” he added.

Arguing for B.P.J., the biological male who sued the state to be allowed to participate in women’s sports, the ACLU claimed in its brief to the high court that the law violates Title IX because excluding biological men who identify as women from women’s sports is exclusion on the basis of sex.

“In the absence of any connection to fairness or safety, excluding B.P.J. from every girls’ sports team does not reasonably implement Title IX’s prohibition on discrimination,” the ACLU’s brief claimed. “It unreasonably inflicts discrimination in violation of both the Javits Amendment and Title IX itself.”

West Virginia Attorney General John B. McCuskey explained to the Washington Examiner that the state’s law fits with Title IX because it follows the intent behind the law.

“Title IX’s specific legislative intent and purpose was to ensure that spaces in academia and athletics were reserved for women, to ensure that women and men had equal access to both playing fields in academia,” McCuskey said.

“And what the West Virginia Save Women’s Sports Act does is ensure that biological women have access to athletic playing fields and spaces without fear of competing against biological males,” he said.

He noted that if the Supreme Court were to find that the West Virginia law violates Title IX, “then every girl sports team in America would be illegal.”

Equal Protection Clause

Both in the West Virginia case and in the case regarding Idaho’s law, Little v. Hecox, the state laws are being challenged under the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment, a frequently used basis for challenging laws that affect transgender people.

In the case United States v. Skrmetti, the Biden administration asked the high court to strike down a Tennessee law banning transgender medical procedures for children as unlawful under the Equal Protection Clause. The high court ruled 6-3 in June 2025 that the law did not violate the Equal Protection Clause, and that ruling could be an indication of how the Supreme Court views the limits of the Equal Protection Clause when it comes to transgender-related statutes.

“The court made clear in that case that simply because a law talks about gender identity or sex, that it notices somebody’s sex, that doesn’t necessarily mean that heightened constitutional scrutiny applies,” Bursch told the Washington Examiner. “The court should do the same thing here.”

“The statutes do not draw any lines based on gender identity, they only draw them based on sex. They say, ‘If you’re male, you go on the boys team, if you’re female, you go on the girls team,'” Bursch said. “And the plaintiffs in both cases aren’t really challenging the idea of having separate teams for boys and girls. What they’re saying is that the states are wrong in defining ‘female’ to exclude males who identify as girls or women, and I don’t think the court is going to find that’s a persuasive constitutional argument at all.”

The ACLU, in its brief for both the Hecox and B.P.J. cases, argues that transgender people constitute a class under the Equal Protection Clause, and the laws therefore should face heightened scrutiny when looking at possible unlawful discrimination. The briefs also claim that under that strict scrutiny, the laws would fail to pass muster and should be found as unlawful for discriminatory reasons.

McCuskey told the Washington Examiner that in his case, there are various arguments for why the West Virginia law is constitutional under the Equal Protection Clause, but the simplest one is that the state law should be looked at by courts with a “rational basis” rather than the strict scrutiny standard required for protected classes.

“What we have here is an actual problem with a rational solution that solves the problem in a nondiscriminatory way,” he said.

Implications beyond the two states

While the cases involve two specific state laws, dozens of similar laws across the country could also be affected by the ruling. Aside from other laws about women’s sports, McCuskey stressed the significant impact the cases will have beyond the sports world.

“What’s at stake is our system of ensuring that young women have access to all of the benefits that team athletics and individual athletics offer. And when you look at the data, over the last 50 years, since Title IX has been implemented, the amount of women who are CEOs of companies in the United States has jumped astronomically,” McCuskey told the Washington Examiner.

“And if you look at the numbers, more than 50% of all the female CEOs in this country either played competitive college or competitive high school athletics,” he said. “And so what Title IX is doing is working.”

McCuskey also invoked his two daughters, both of whom play sports, when he explained how “hyper focused” on this case he has been.

“I’ve spent a lot of time on this case, and it matters a lot to me,” he said.

Bursch specifically discussed how gender ideology and putting aside biological differences between sexes can inflict harm beyond sports.

“This is an ideology that is not just a concept, it’s something that’s being put into practice and harming people,” Bursch said. “And when it comes to the sports issue, you can’t build fairness on the falsehoods that males can be female. That’s just not true.”

“So these cases might be about sports, but they really have much bigger societal ramifications because of the way gender ideology has been rammed down people’s throats,” Bursch said.

The high court will hear arguments in both Little v. Hecox and West Virginia v. B.P.J., beginning at 10 a.m. Tuesday in Washington, D.C.

After oral arguments are concluded, the high court could issue a ruling in the coming months. All decisions for every case heard this term are expected to be released by the end of June.