The Supreme Court agreed on Thursday to take up two cases that could give states the right to ban transgender female athletes from participating in school sports teams, setting off a major transgender rights battle just two weeks after it ruled in favor of a state law that banned gender-affirming care for young people. 

The conservative-majority court will hear cases from Idaho and West Virginia after two transgender athletes, both born male, won injunctions against recent state laws prohibiting them from competing on college and middle school girls’ track teams. 

More than two dozen states have passed laws barring transgender women and girls from competing in what Republicans say is an effort to maintain athletic fairness in women’s and girls’ sports, setting off legal battles in both state and federal courts.

On Tuesday, the University of Pennsylvania changed three school records belonging to swimmer Lia Thomas, the first transgender athlete to win an NCAA Division I title, after the Department of Education found the school had violated the rights of female athletes. The White House withheld $175 million in federal funding to UPenn in part due to the school’s Title IX violations. Under the agreement, UPenn will send apology letters to those who lost to Lia Thomas, who competed in women’s sports after receiving hormone replacement therapy. 

In 2020, Idaho passed the “Fairness in Women’s Sports Act,” the first such law to ban transgender women from participating in sports teams at the high school and college levels. 

A Boise State University student, Lindsay Hecox, sued the state, alleging it violated her rights by prohibiting her from participating in the school’s women’s running and soccer clubs. Despite winning a preliminary injunction, Ms. Hecox tried out for the school’s women’s track and cross-country teams and failed to make them.

Another case, West Virginia v. B.P.J., challenged the state’s Save Women’s Sports Act, enacted in 2021, which the state says protects biological female athletes by ensuring only women and girls who were born female can participate in public school and collegiate girls’ and women’s sports. 

After the law’s passage, a male-born middle schooler who wished to compete on girls’ track and cross country teams, Becky Pepper-Jackson, sued West Virginia, claiming the law was both unconstitutional and violated her Title IX rights.

Becky Pepper-Jackson won an injunction to continue competing on girls’ sports teams. In 2024, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals court ruled in favor of the plaintiff in two areas, under Title IX and the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause. Now in high school, Becky Pepper-Jackson recently qualified for West Virginia’s state track meet and finished third in discus and eighth in the shot put. 

West Virginia’s appeal of the lower court rulings will be heard by the Supreme Court during its October term.

“It’s a great day, as female athletes in West Virginia will have their voices heard,” the West Virginia attorney general, J.B. McCuskey, said in a statement Thursday. “It is time to return girls’ sports to the girls and stop this misguided gender ideology once and for all.”

In a statement, the American Civil Liberties Union, which represents Ms. Pepper-Jackson with Lamda Legal and Cooley LLP, said laws that exclude transgender youth from school sports “will only make our schools less safe and more hurtful places for all youth.

“We believe the lower courts were right to block these discriminatory laws, and we will continue to defend the freedom of all kids to play,” the ACLU senior counsel, Joshua Block, said in a statement. 

On Fox News Thursday, a former UPenn swimmer, Paula Scanlan, who was an outspoken critic of Lia Thomas’s participation in the school’s women’s team, called the court’s decision to hear the Idaho and West Virginia cases “absolutely a huge deal.”

“When we first got started in this, we knew this had to end up in the Supreme Court, because this issue is that serious and that culturally widespread,” Ms. Scanlan told Fox News.

This will be the second major case on transgender rights that the Supreme Court will hear. Two weeks ago, the court’s conservative majority ruled in United States v. Skrmetti that Tennessee’s state law banning gender-affirming medical care for transgender youth did not violate the 14th Amendment or discriminate based on sex or transgender status. The court has since vacated lower court rulings in four states and ordered judges to review decisions involving transgender individuals.