What Female Athletes, Scholars, & Scientists Are Telling the Supreme Court About Women's Rights to Fair & Separate Sport

Snippets from Fourteen Amicus Briefs Filed for Upcoming Sports Cases

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The erosion of biological sex-based protections in sports would have severe adverse effects on women and girls, including extreme forms of discrimination and heightened risks of violence, not limited to physical injuries but also including sexual harassment, voyeurism, and physical and sexual attacks. — United Nations

Supreme Court cases coming up this fall could confirm that American girls and women have a legal right to their own sports and locker rooms. Or not.

The Court agreed to hear two related cases: West Virginia v. B.P.J. and Idaho v. Hecox.¹ Both involve boys who claim a right to play girls’ sports. The justices will consider whether the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment prevents states from offering boys’ and girls’ sports teams based on sex. The West Virginia case also raises the question regarding Title IX.

We have selected salient quotes from fourteen amicus (friend-of-the-court) briefs that support of the position that female sports (and, by extension, locker rooms) must be restricted to females. The cases are likely to be argued this fall but are not yet scheduled. The court’s decision is expected by June 2026.² Here are the quotes from the amicus briefs, grouped:

Congress Members

Bicameral Group of 48 Republican Congress Members

Because Title IX was enacted under the Spending Clause, its requirements must be clear and unambiguous, and those provisions say nothing about gender identity. Congress should be given the option and ability to consider the policy implications of importing gender identity into the text of Title IX.

Organizations

Emma Hilton & International Consortium on Female Sport (ICFS)³

Modern scientific methods of sex screening are non-intrusive, highly sensitive, and can be inexpensively and discreetly applied to easily verify the eligibility of 99.9% of women to compete in women’s sports. This case presents an excellent opportunity for the Court to recognize that sex-verification-screening is a reasonable tool…to confirm eligibility to compete in women’s sport and make clear that Title IX requires the implementation of reasonable practices to protect women’s equal opportunities in scholastic sports.

Independent Women’s Law Center

Allowing male athletes to take roster spots on women’s sports teams harms the women and girls who are cut in favor of the male athletes. Even on no-cut teams, women and girls lose out when coaching resources and playing time that would otherwise be devoted to them are instead directed toward their male teammates.

Sex Matters

Women are a legally protected class because of their sex—not notions of gender. To mix biological males into categories that are reserved for women precisely because they are women undermines the entire point of the protection in the first instance. If men are admitted to female-only categories—whether it be women’s sports or women’s locker rooms—this literally renders the provision mixed sex and defeats the purpose of the provision.

United States Conference of Catholic Bishops

What students see often has more influence than what they hear. To witness day after day on the field or in the locker room that men can compete as women conveys a false vision of reality.

Women’s Declaration International

Our entire society—globally, including the U.S. judiciary—appears to be gripped by the notion that there is a category of people called “transgender” who are somehow members of the opposite sex, members of a nonexistent third sex, or for whom the category of sex is irrelevant, even though most people know sex is real and relevant in various situations.⁴ More often than not, when people say they believe in the concept of “gender identity,” they are doing so in order to avoid discord with their peers.⁵

Athletes

Female Athletes United

A read of Bostock as requiring the participation of males self-identifying as women in same-sex sports flips Title IX on its head. Instead of eliminating sex-based discrimination from education, it restores it. It allows access to males self-identifying as women that is not afforded to females self-identifying as women. It threatens to return women to their pre-Title IX athletic status, as not only second-class athletes but absent nearly altogether.

Riley Gaines and 32 College Athletes

The policies of collegiate athletic associations perpetuate privacy and dignity injuries and emotional trauma upon female student-athletes in violation of Title IX in locker rooms, showers, restrooms, hotel rooms on team road trips, and in other private places traditionally reserved for women.

Scholars and Scientists

Chad Carlson and Five Other Doctors of Sports Medicine

Numerous scientific studies show that, even before puberty, males are, on average, bigger, faster, and stronger than females. Now, however, many schools and sports leagues permit males to compete in female athletics based on gender identity.

Tommy Lundberg and Five Other Sports Scientists

Recently, some individuals and organizations have advocated a new set of categories based partly on testosterone levels…. [but] evidence shows that testosterone suppression does not erase the male advantage in athletics and that it does not diminish men’s physiological advantage at all if paired with a sufficient regimen of physical exercise.

Gregory Brown and Four Other Sports Physiologists

The separation of sports and teams by sex has long been recognized as necessary to preserve opportunities for girls and women to train, compete, and succeed on equal footing. That fundamental truth is confirmed by decades of scientific research demonstrating that male athletic advantages exist from childhood, are rooted in biology, and persist despite medical interventions.

Michael J. Joyner and Five Other Biomedical Researchers

Biological sex differences in human performance exist from childhood, driven by sex differences in anatomy and physiology. Biological males have male advantage regardless of gender identity and that advantage is only partly mitigated by testosterone suppression and female gender affirming hormone therapy.

Daniel Kodsi and 23 Other Philosophy Professors

The Idaho and West Virginia statutes enable female persons, and only female persons, to participate in certain spaces—namely, in certain sports teams, leagues, events and competitions. To achieve this aim, the Idaho and West Virginia statutes preclude male persons, and only male persons, from participating in those sports teams, leagues, events and competitions... Organizing sports around the sex categories is fully justified.

United Nations

Reem Alsalem, United Nations Special Rapporteur On Violence Against Women And Girls, Its Causes and Consequences

The erosion of biological sex-based protections in sports would have severe adverse effects on women and girls, including extreme forms of discrimination and heightened risks of violence, not limited to physical injuries but also including sexual harassment, voyeurism, and physical and sexual attacks.

Incredibly, the Women’s Sports Foundation, American Civil Liberties Union, National Women’s Law Center, and League of Women Voters all oppose female-only sports.

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Yours in female-only sports and spaces and respect for all, the Women’s Sports Policy Working Group:

Martina Navratilova, OLY
Donna de Varona, OLY
Nancy Hogshead, J.D., OLY
Donna Lopiano, Ph.D.
Mariah Burton Nelson, MPH
Tracy Sundlun

We’d love to hear your comments or questions.

1. After SCOTUS agreed to hear the case, one plaintiff, a male athlete named Lindsay Hecox, requested that his initial lawsuit be dismissed as moot. This is unusual and it has not yet been announced whether SCOTUS will proceed with that case.

2. Thanks to Kim Shasby Jones and ICONS for orchestrating and organizing most of this list.

3. This is the brief signed by the Women’s Sports Policy Working Group as members of the International Consortium.

4. See, e.g., SurveyUSA, Strong Majorities Prefer Female-Only Interactions for Women, Girls, in Athletics, Restrooms, Other Situations (“4 of 5 Nationwide Say Word ‘Women’ Means Adult Humans Who are Biologically Female”) (Sept. 28, 2023).

5. See, e.g., Forest Romm and Kevin Waldman, Performative virtue-signaling has become a threat to higher-ed, The Hill (August 12, 2025). “Seventy-eight percent of students told us they self-censor on their beliefs surrounding gender identity… Perhaps most telling: 77 percent said they disagreed with the idea that gender identity should override biological sex in such domains as sports, healthcare, or public data — but would never voice that disagreement aloud.”