The Supreme Court’s trans sports ruling is a cautionary tale for all left-leaning lawyers

If you’re a liberal, and you’re thinking of bringing a case to the Supreme Court, don’t.

The Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday that states may bar transgender women from competing on women’s sports teams at secondary schools, colleges, and universities. More than two dozen states have laws barring trans athletes from competing on teams that do not align with their sex assigned at birth.

The results were not surprising. Two years ago, during oral arguments in another case that ended in a major defeat for transgender rights, Justice Brett Kavanaugh made it very clear how he would vote if anyone brought a case involving trans athletes to his Court.

Get the latest developments on the US Supreme Court from senior correspondent Ian Millhiser.

If trans people were given heightened constitutional protection, similar to the kind of safeguards the Constitution provides against laws that discriminate on the basis of sex, then Kavanaugh worried that trans women would gain a right “to play in women’s and girls’ sports … notwithstanding the competitive fairness and safety issues that have been vocally raised by some female athletes.”

His concerns were amplified by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a conservative Republican who sits close to the center of this very conservative Court, when the Court issued its decision in United States v. Skrmetti (2025). Barrett wrote a concurring opinion arguing that trans people do not enjoy any constitutional protections beyond those enjoyed by any other American.

Both Kavanaugh and Barrett’s statements were a warning to trans litigants about what would happen if they brought the question of whether transgender women may play on women’s sports teams at the high school or college level to the Supreme Court. Yet two of those cases, which were consolidated under the name West Virginia v. B.P.J., wound up before the Supreme Court anyway.

On Tuesday, B.P.J. reached its inevitable conclusion. In an opinion by Kavanaugh, which was joined by all five of the Court’s remaining Republicans, the Court ruled that states may bar trans women from women’s sports. Both of these cases were filed years ago, and the plaintiffs did receive fairly favorable rulings from lower courts, even as justices like Kavanaugh and Barrett dropped hints that those lower court decisions were doomed.

But both the Court, and the Republican Party more generally, have........

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