SCOTUS to hear cases on laws banning transgender athletes from female sports teams.
Gee, I wonder what the Supreme Court has in mind with its latest grant of certiorari? Based on some news reports, it might sound as though the top court got pushed into this fight:
The Supreme Court announced on Thursday that it would hear two cases testing the constitutionality of state laws that bar transgender athletes from girls’ and women’s sports teams.
The justices’ decision to hear the disputes signals that the court is willing to delve back into the fraught battle over transgender rights. In June, the court, split along ideological lines, upheld a Tennessee law that banned some medical treatments for transgender youth.
The cases accepted on Thursday stem from legal challenges to state laws limiting transgender athlete participation in Idaho and West Virginia.
Did the court get pushed into settling this controversy, though? The Supreme Court generally takes up controversial policy issues such as these either because two appellate circuits have issued contradictory rulings, or the court really desires to correct a ruling made by lower courts.
And as ABC News points out, there’s no circuit split on this issue. Two different courts have instead struck down state laws that limit the definition of « sex » for Title IX enforcement to biological sex:
The cases from West Virginia and Idaho — which will be scheduled for argument during the court’s next term — will decide whether the Constitution and Civil Rights Act prohibit the bans based on an athlete’s sex assigned at birth.
Lower courts in each of the cases sided with the student athletes in finding the state laws violated either the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause or Title IX of the Civil Rights Act.
If the court wanted to let those determinations stand, they wouldn’t have accepted the appeal from Idaho and West Virginia.
