When the Supreme Court decided West Virginia v. B.P.J. and Little v. Hecox on June 30, several headlines suggested transgender athletes had been banned from school sports nationwide.
That is not what the court decided.
The ruling allows states to exclude transgender girls and women from girls’ and women’s school sports. It does not require them to.
For Connecticut, that distinction is everything. Our state remains free to continue its longstanding policy of allowing transgender students to participate consistent with their gender identity. Nothing in the decision invalidated Connecticut’s existing policy or required a single school district to change its rules. The only question is whether we will choose to.
The SCOTUS decision stems from cases brought by Becky Pepper-Jackson, a West Virginia student who competed in girls’ cross-country and track and field, and Lindsay Hecox, a Boise State University student who sought to try out for the women’s track and cross-country teams and competed in women’s club soccer. Both challenged categorical state bans under Title IX and the Equal Protection Clause.
The court rejected both claims, but its reasoning was narrower than many realize. On Title IX, the court held that schools can maintain separate girls’ teams based on “biological sex.” On equal protection, six justices upheld the bans, but sidestepped the bigger question of whether laws targeting transgender people deserve heightened scrutiny, reasoning that these laws would survive either way. And importantly, the court said whether a school may choose to include transgender athletes is a “distinct question” it wasn’t deciding.
But Connecticut’s own record answers that question. The Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference (CIAC) adopted its inclusion policy in 2013, grounded in state anti-discrimination law. In the 13 years since, the fiercest controversy centered on exactly two athletes, Terry Miller and Andraya Yearwood —the runners at the heart of the lawsuit against the CIAC (Soule v. CIAC). In that case, the cisgender plaintiffs beat the transgender runners they were suing over.
Two of the four plaintiffs had already earned college scholarships, and when asked whether racing against transgender athletes cost the others theirs, the plaintiffs’ own attorney conceded, “We’ll never know.” Just two athletes, across thousands of competitions, over more than a decade.
This is the “crisis” Connecticut is now being asked to legislate against. And before we treat exclusion as inevitable, we should look closer at how that conclusion was reached.
The court’s majority leaned heavily on what it described as a consensus among states and athletic organizations. But much of that agreement emerged only after the federal government threatened institutions with the loss of funding if they allowed transgender women to compete — a consensus the Trump administration conjured into existence, then treated as independent expert judgment. Three Connecticut Title IX investigations (Cromwell, Bloomfield, Canton) remain open and unresolved as of this writing. No Connecticut district has actually lost funding.
I was one of the first openly transgender athletes to compete in the NCAA, over a decade ago, before this became a national controversy. So you can imagine my reaction reading Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s thoughts on what sports mean— the effort to train, overcoming injuries, the friendships, the trophies on the bedroom shelf. Although he is right about all of it, he is wrong about who it belongs to.
Sports taught me resilience, teamwork, discipline, and gave me a community. These are the things categorical bans deny transgender children. The majority insists that athletics are “zero sum,” but Pepper-Jackson’s own record shows otherwise: everyone who tried out for her team made the roster. No girl lost her place for participating.
Connecticut should also understand exactly what kind of framing it is being asked to adopt. Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that gender dysphoria is a “mutable mental state” and insisted that transgender girls are simply boys. The only mutable mental state here is the one needed to believe that statement as fact.
Once the government decides that “biological sex” alone determines who belongs, someone must police that boundary; that scrutiny rarely stops with transgender athletes. It falls on any girl whose body does not conform to conventional expectations of femininity: girls who are naturally stronger, more muscular, have naturally higher testosterone, or are intersex. Policies sold as protecting women often end up subjecting women themselves to suspicion and invasive scrutiny over whether they are “woman enough.”
That is not a future Connecticut should embrace.
We have spent 13 years proving that inclusion and girls’ sports can coexist. The Supreme Court gave us permission to abandon that record. It did not give us a reason.
Taylor Edelmann of Brookfield is a former NCAA trans athlete and health equity consultant.