Justice Neil Gorsuch joined five other conservative justices on June 30 to uphold state laws banning transgender athletes from girls’ and women’s sports teams, ending years of speculation about where he would land on the issue. The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 on the constitutional question that Idaho’s Fairness in Women’s Sports Act and West Virginia’s Save Women’s Sports Act do not violate the 14th Amendment’s equal protection guarantee.
Gorsuch’s decision to side with the conservative majority disappointed transgender rights advocates who had hoped his 2020 opinion in Bostock v. Clayton County—protecting gay and transgender workers from employment discrimination—might signal support for transgender protections in other contexts. In his solo concurrence, Gorsuch said any assumption he would rule differently was a “mistake.”
“All of that is consistent with the course the Court takes today,” Gorsuch wrote, referring to his Bostock decision. He emphasized that his earlier ruling was a “narrow circumstance” tied to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act and that it did not require the same result in the sports context under Title IX.
Gorsuch’s reasoning focused narrowly on how Title IX operates as spending clause legislation. He argued that Congress must “clearly and unambiguously” specify conditions on federal funding recipients and that nothing in Title IX “clearly and unambiguously alerts funding recipients that they are prohibited from restricting a school-sponsored sports team to biological women or girls.” This textualist approach allowed him to reach the same outcome as the other conservative justices without fully embracing Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s broader reasoning about biological differences and athletic fairness.
The majority opinion, written by Kavanaugh, rested on the view that states have legitimate interests in athletic safety and competitive fairness and may therefore limit women’s sports teams to biological females. All nine justices agreed that the laws do not violate Title IX itself, but the three liberal justices—Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson—dissented on the constitutional question, arguing that the Court should have allowed fact-finding on whether transgender athletes on puberty blockers posed the same competitive advantages.
Gorsuch’s concurrence drew criticism from transgender rights advocates and legal scholars who saw a tension between his 2020 Bostock reasoning and his current position. In Bostock, Gorsuch wrote that “an employer who fires an individual merely for being gay or transgender defies the law” because sex plays a “necessary and undisguisable role” in such decisions. Anthony Sbardellati, a lawyer who filed a brief supporting transgender athletes, said he could not understand how Gorsuch squared that logic with his new stance. “In Bostock, he seemed to agree that discrimination on the basis of transgender status was a violation of the law, and in these most recent cases, he seems to have discarded that under the guise of there’s a different legal rubric at play here,” Sbardellati said.
Gorsuch was not the most aggressive voice on the conservative side. Justice Clarence Thomas wrote separately to assert that “men and boys with gender dysphoria are not women or girls,” even if they believe they are. Thomas rejected the idea that transgender people constitute a “suspect class” entitled to heightened constitutional protection, language that Gorsuch did not echo.
The ruling came just over a year after the Court upheld a Tennessee law banning puberty blockers and hormone therapy for transgender minors, also by a 6-3 vote. The Court has signaled it will review additional cases next term involving religious exemptions to LGBTQ nondiscrimination rules and parental notification in gender-affirming care cases, suggesting the Court’s conservative majority will continue shaping transgender rights law in coming years.
Sources
- The Hill — Gorsuch’s solo opinion, his statement that assumptions he would rule otherwise are a “mistake,” and his description of Bostock as a narrow circumstance.
- SCOTUSblog — Full opinion analysis, vote breakdown (6-3 on Constitution, 9-0 on Title IX), Kavanaugh’s majority reasoning, Gorsuch’s spending clause approach, and Sotomayor’s dissent.
- Reuters — Confirmation of the June 30, 2026 ruling date and the states’ laws upheld.
- AP News — Reporting on the Supreme Court upholding state laws and the broader context of the decision.
