I am getting sick and tired of hearing, "It is to protect the girls from the big, bad trans girls!" That is complete bull! In K-12 girls' sports, there is an average of roughly 1.72 million total injuries. Out of all of those, I could only find a news article on one trans player: the Payton McNabb case, which the Republicans love to trot out via their favorite witness... singular.
The thing is, Republicans are trying to create fear of these "burly, hairy girls" playing against "little, petite girls." But it is all based on lies.
The Supreme Court says its ruling protects women’s and girls’ sports. That’s not the history I lived—or the law that put my generation on the field.Ms.by Jennifer LeviJuly 9, 2026In 1991, I stood on a pitch in Cardiff, Wales, with my teammates at the first Women’s Rugby World Cup. I want to be honest about how I got there. I was not the most talented player on that team—not close. I wasn’t a starter for the final match. Most of my teammates were extraordinary multi-sport athletes who could have excelled at anything. I mostly worked hard, and I had the good luck of coming along at a particular moment in the development of women’s sports: Opportunities for girls had been so scarce for so long that it was still possible to arrive at elite competition without having spent a childhood committed to it. I landed in a sweet spot, and it gave me an experience I never stopped being grateful for.[...]So when the Supreme Court says, as it did earlier this month in West Virginia v. B.P.J., that banning transgender girls from school sports is about protecting the safety and fairness of women’s and girls’ sports, I hear that claim against everything I actually lived.The loudest voices for “protecting” women from rough sports were never in the scrum with me. They were the ones telling us (and there were many) that rugby was no place for women at all. What actually threatened women’s sports was never a girl who wanted to run cross-country with her friends. It was the belief—dressed up, then as now, in the language of “protection“—that girls don’t belong on the field at all.
These are almost exclusively men passing these laws! Out of 271 Republicans in Congress, only 40 are women. It is a white male club!
The Supreme Court ruled to uphold West Virginia’s "Save Women’s Sports Act," allowing the state to prohibit transgender women and girls from competing on female scholastic sports teams. How many trans girls actually play in West Virginia school sports? As stated during the Supreme Court proceedings, there was only one known transgender girl publicly seeking to play public school sports in the entire state of West Virginia. You got that? ONE!
True story: I tried out for Little League baseball in Easton, Pa., in the early 1970s. Exactly two girls did that year, me and Peggy Goulet, and we got placed on a team that was literally called the Rejects. And, still, we were just happy to play. That’s what it looked like, within living memory, when the people in charge decided in advance which kids belonged and where.And here’s what far too few people know about West Virginia school sports policy: The state already had a solution. For five years before the ban, it used a case-by-case approach, taking into account factors like age, experience, competition level and the sport itself. Transgender students could play if their school determined fair competition wouldn’t be affected.
So what changed? Trump!
What is the purpose of high school sports?
- Character Development and Life Skills
- Physical and Mental Well-being
- Academic Engagement and Accountability
- Community and Social Unity
So, when you deny trans athletes the right to play school sports, you are denying them those precise advantages. Not only that, but:
- They are denying trans athletes the skills learned playing sports.
- They are increasing social isolation of trans students.
- They are increasing the mental stresses on trans athletes.
They know this, and it is almost like that is their exact goal.
If that sounds abstract, consider how the Court once approached exactly this question. In 1992, in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, Pennsylvania required married women to notify their husbands before an abortion, and defended the law by saying it barely affected anyone; most women tell their husbands anyway. The Court rejected that in words worth remembering: The analysis “does not end with the one percent of women upon whom the statute operates; it begins there.” The proper focus is “the group for whom the law is a restriction, not the group for whom the law is irrelevant.” The women with abusive husbands were few. They were also the whole point.Last week, the Court inverted that. The people transgender sports bans operate on were dismissed as too few to count. In 1992, constitutional analysis began with the people a law burdens. In 2026, the people didn’t matter.
This is Trump's hand picked court.
One last thing... have you ever seen people play beach volleyball? Are the teams co-ed?
Jennifer Levi has spent decades fighting for LGBTQ equality. I first met her in 2006 while we were working to pass Connecticut's nondiscrimination law. It comes as no surprise that she would one day be arguing a case before the U.S. Supreme Court.
