This high school sophomore is aiming for a Supreme Court upset in transgender sports case

(CNN) — Becky Pepper-Jackson, the high school sophomore at the center of the Supreme Court appeal on transgender sports, flashes a grin when asked to describe the basic technique of the shot put, one of her favorite track and field events.

“It’s just throwing something that’s heavy,” the 15-year-old West Virginian said. “Far.”

That description could also apply to her blockbuster legal case.

While Pepper-Jackson sounds like any teen navigating school assignments, friends and a demanding practice schedule, the transgender girl has also been carrying the weight of a national cultural and political battle that will reach a crescendo Tuesday when the Supreme Court debates two appeals dealing with state bans on trans girls playing on women’s teams.

And Pepper-Jackson understands that — in the hands of a 6-3 conservative court that has been increasingly skeptical of transgender rights — her effort is a long shot.

“Someone has to do this because this is just a terrible thing,” Pepper-Jackson told CNN in an interview with her family and attorneys. “I know that I can handle it and it’s never crossed my mind to stop, because I know I’m doing it for everybody.”

The Supreme Court over the past year has repeatedly ruled against LGBTQ Americans. In May, it allowed the Trump administration to enforce a ban on transgender service members in the military. In June, the court let stand state laws that bar transgender care for minors. Nearly five months later, a majority of justices let the administration require US passports to include a traveler’s sex at birth, rather than a person’s gender identity.

Now, in one of the most divisive issues on the court’s docket this year, the justices will decide if state laws banning transgender athletes from competing on sports teams that align with their gender identity violate the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment or the landmark 1972 anti-sex discrimination law known as Title IX.

The appeals have arrived at a moment of enormous political backlash against transgender people. Roughly two-thirds of Americans believe that athletes should play on teams that match their sex at birth and more than half of US states have enacted laws similar to the one in West Virginia.

Supporters of those bans say that the promise of Title IX, and the vast expansion of participation in women’s sports in the decades since, is threatened by transgender athletes. Cisgender women, they say, would be forced to compete against “bigger, faster, and stronger” athletes who were born as males and would ultimately lose.

“To say that allowing only biological females to compete in girls’ sports violates Title IX fails the commonsense test,” West Virginia Attorney General JB McCuskey, a Republican, told CNN. “What we’re talking about here is the need to have fair and safe playing fields for them to compete.”

Critics say that assumes an influx of transgender students trying out for girls’ sports teams. Court documents suggest that, in fact, West Virginia has identified only Pepper-Jackson.

McCuskey said that shouldn’t matter.

“It may be that we have one defendant,” he said, “but there’s a nationwide issue here.”

‘Women deserve equality’

Pepper-Jackson says she’s been a girl for as long as she can remember.

She began transitioning socially in the third grade and, by the end of the sixth grade, she was taking hormone therapy. Given those treatments, her attorneys stress, she has “never experienced the effects of testosterone on her body” and doesn’t have the inherent biological advantages states like West Virginia are attempting to regulate with their laws.

Nor does Pepper-Jackson come across as a teen driven to win her weekend track meets at any cost. She jokes that she found her way to shot put and discus only because she “sucked at running.” She says she hasn’t thought much about competing in college. She said she likes to play sports because of her friends and the “life skills that you won’t learn anywhere else.”

She is proud of her personal record in discus, 120 feet. But she says she achieved it because of hard work, not her sex at birth.

For Pepper-Jackson, feelings of accomplishment are often followed by self-doubt. What if, she wonders, a long throw becomes ammunition for those who believe she doesn’t belong?

Heather Jackson, Becky’s mother, recalled watching her daughter’s face shift from pride to fear when she toppled a previous personal best a few years ago.

“She knew that’s what they were going to focus on,” Jackson said of her daughter’s critics. “No kid should feel guilty for doing their best.”

But others say they are uncomfortable competing against transgender girls whom they believe have an inherent advantage.

Lilyana Williams, a former team captain of her high school track team in Pennsylvania, helped to organize a policy at her school prohibiting transgender students from competing on teams that match their gender identity.

Williams, who recently graduated from nursing school, said she worked with the religious Pennsylvania Family Institute to implement that policy after a transgender student briefly competed on her team. She said that arrangement didn’t just hurt the team’s top athletes but also many others who were “just wanting to finish in a specific spot.”

“None of it was coming from a perspective of hate,” Williams told CNN, “but rather the idea that women deserve equality, both on the field and off the field, and we deserve a right to fairness.”

Race to enact anti-transgender laws

Transgender sports bans have spread like wildfire across the US in just a few years. The popularity of the laws on the right was so strong that three statehouses overrode vetoes from Republican governors to codify them.

The legal backlash has also been swift. Groups like the American Civil Liberties Union, part of the team representing Pepper-Jackson, challenged several of the bans and secured early court victories that – at least temporarily – prevented full enforcement of some of them.

The Supreme Court will hear arguments Tuesday in two of those cases – one from Pepper-Jackson challenging West Virginia’s law. The other comes from a student at Boise State University, Lindsay Hecox, who is challenging Idaho’s law.

The decision, expected by the end of June, will almost certainly decide the fate of other laws across the country.

The Idaho law, enacted in March 2020, was blocked later that year when a judge appointed by President Donald Trump ruled it was likely unconstitutional.

In that ruling, US District Judge David Nye pointed to a “dearth of evidence in the record to show excluding transgender women from women’s sports supports sex equality, provides opportunities for women, or increases access to college scholarships.” The San Francisco-based 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed that decision in 2024, leading to Idaho’s appeal to the Supreme Court.

In Pepper-Jackson’s case, a federal district court sided with West Virginia. But the Richmond-based 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in 2024 that the state’s ban violated Pepper-Jackson’s rights under Title IX, a federal law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex at schools that receive federal aid.

The Supreme Court in 2023 allowed Pepper-Jackson, then a middle-school student, to temporarily continue competing in cross-country and track while her litigation played out. Two conservative justices – Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito – dissented from that decision.

LGBTQ advocates frame the issue as a manufactured new front on the right and have taken aim at groups like the Alliance Defending Freedom, the religious public interest law firm that has brought many successful challenges to the Supreme Court. ADF is part of the legal team in both the West Virginia and Idaho cases.

“People believe this stuff that ADF tells them because they don’t know a trans kid who’s playing sports, and so they don’t have a frame of reference for how completely egregiously untrue these claims are,” said Cathryn Oakley, the senior director of legal policy for the Human Rights Campaign.

Matt Sharp, a senior counsel at ADF, insisted that “it very much was an issue” before the avalanche of laws banning trans athletes from competing on teams that align with their gender identity. He pointed to a long-running case in Connecticut, where several cisgender athletes were challenging a permissive state sports policy.

“These lawmakers were saying, ‘We want to prevent this from ever happening in our state,’” Sharp said. “And that’s what led to 27 states ultimately looking at this and coming up with a solution to preserve the fairness that Title IX had originally given young women.”

Playing a long game

Title IX bars schools that receive federal funding from treating students differently based on their sex. Pepper-Jackson and her attorneys say that is exactly what categorical bans on transgender student athletes do.

“When Becky is prevented from being on teams with other girls just like her, she is subjected to discrimination that effectively excludes her from participating in the school’s educational programs,” said Joshua Block, a senior counsel with the ACLU who will argue the case before the Supreme Court on Tuesday.

McCuskey counters that the law treats biological males the same as biological females.

Lurking behind that debate is a landmark Supreme Court decision from 2020, Bostock v. Clayton County, that concluded that a federal law that bars discrimination in the workplace “on the basis of sex” also protects gay and transgender employees.

Writing for the court, conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch stressed that the opinion applied only in the workplace. But given that the two anti-discrimination laws are worded similarly, the court – if it sides with the states – will have to explain why the logic of Bostock doesn’t apply in other contexts, like sports.

And that is likely to be a central debate in the arguments Tuesday.

So, too, is the question of whether transgender people are entitled to the same anti-discrimination protections that race and sex have under the 14th Amendment. The Supreme Court dodged that question in last year’s decision on transgender care bans, US v. Skrmetti, though several conservative justices indicated in separate opinions that they believe the answer to that question is “no.”

Pepper-Jackson and her family are aware of those challenges. But, they said, they believe they’re engaged in a longer game.

“Getting this far and bringing light to this case and showing that this is an issue,” Pepper-Jackson said, “is a win.”

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