- United States
- Mich.
- Letter
The Supreme Court's June 30th ruling authorizing state bans on transgender athletes is a disaster, and Congress needs to fix it now. The 6-3 decision rewrites Title IX to mean "biological sex" — a reading that erases decades of lower court precedent protecting transgender students and hands states a blank check to exclude trans girls from sports entirely.
This ruling doesn't just affect athletics. It strips away the legal shield that schools in inclusive states used to resist federal pressure campaigns, and it endorses the "displacement" framework — the junk theory that every trans girl on a team takes a spot from a cisgender girl — which is now the foundation for ADF lawsuits spreading across the country. Worse, the majority ruled that even if the factual premise of a ban is wrong, the ban survives anyway. That's not law. That's ideology.
Congress has the power to amend Title IX and restore explicit protections for transgender students. I want you to introduce or co-sponsor legislation that does exactly that. As Lambda Legal's Sasha Buchert said, these are kids who only asked to play sports with their peers. They deserve better than a Court that just told six states — and counting — that excluding them is constitutional.