When Nicholas and Daniella Knight sat down with their 11-year-old daughter, Gabi, to sign her up for the local soccer league for the fall, they finally decided to register her for the girls’ team after years of consideration.
Gabi, who is transgender, has been on boys’ soccer teams since she started playing the sport seven years ago, even as she began presenting as a girl. But the Knights got an email from the league a few weeks ago saying Gabi cannot play on the girls’ team because she wasn’t born female.
A week later, the U.S. Supreme Court said it’s OK for states to set the same policy.
To the Knights, the court’s ruling that states can choose to exclude transgender athletes from women’s and girls’ public school sports felt personal – even though the ruling doesn’t apply to local soccer leagues like Gabi’s.
“She was excited about the possibility of how this was going to be,” Daniella Knight said. “But now she’s thinking ‘Do I even want to continue to play if they tell us that I have to play with the boys?”’
The court’s 6-3 decision in West Virginia v. B.P.J. dealt specifically with laws in West Virginia and Idaho that restrict participation by transgender women and girls in women’s and girl’s sports in publicly funded educational institutions. The court said 27 states have similar laws that prohibit transgender women and girls from competing in sports consistent with their gender identity.
Writing for the majority, Justice Brett Kavanaugh said that since Title IX – the 1972 federal law that mandates equal educational opportunities regardless of sex – permits the segregation of athletic competition, states can limit players’ participation based on biological sex. Such rules by states, and athletic organizations, are designed to let women and girls compete “on an equal playing field, without fear of physical injury from biological males or being forced to compete against biological males,” Kavanaugh wrote.
In her dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor agreed that the benefits of athletic competition can be “immense.” But the majority’s ruling will let a state deny those benefits to transgender athletes, she wrote, because it “thinks they have an inherent athletic advantage, even if the facts show that they do not. In the end, to the Court, the facts do not matter, even though the consequences are serious.”
The June 30 ruling is one of several actions restricting the rights of transgender people and youth in recent years, as the debate on whether to allow transgender girls on sports teams that align with their gender identities has become a divisive political and social issue.
The ruling comes as the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights said it was launching a Title IX investigation late last month into the Maryland State Department of Education and three local school districts for policies allowing transgender students to use bathrooms and play on the sports teams that best align with their gender identities.
As of this week, neither the state department nor the three districts — Montgomery, Frederick and Prince George’s counties’ school systems — said they had any updates on the investigation.
In Maryland, there are currently no active bans against transgender women playing on their preferred sports teams. But some lawmakers who hope to change that said they are encouraged by the Supreme Court’s ruling.
Del. Kathy Szeliga (R-Baltimore County) has introduced legislation in the General Assembly for the past five years that aims to prohibit participation by transgender athletes in girls’ sports. Her bill this year did not even get a vote in committee.
Szeliga and state Sen. Mary Beth Carozza (R-Lower Shore) vowed in a statement Monday to reintroduce the Fairness in Girls’ Sports Act during the 2027 legislative session. The bill would bar transgender girls and women from participating in intramural and school junior varsity and varsity teams, Szeliga said in an interview.
She believes that transgender women have an unfair advantage in women’s sports, and hopes lawmakers will view the legislation differently in light of the Supreme Court ruling.
“I think every human being should find joy in athletics somewhere,” Szeliga said. “But when we talk about those two specific categories of junior varsity and varsity girls sports, that’s where girls set records and get opportunities for college, be that a scholarship or a roster spot or even working towards the Olympics. The pride, the dedication, all the hard work that goes into competing at that level needs to be respected.”
Del. Kris Fair (D-Frederick), the chair of the Maryland Legislative LGBTQ+ Caucus and the executive director of a Frederick-based pride center, said he believes efforts to restrict transgender athletes are a “large smoke screen for individuals to create wedges between communities,” given Maryland’s very small transgender population – particularly transgender women who want to play sports.
There are about 12,900 transgender people ages 13 to 17 in Maryland, which is about 3.2% of the youth population, according to estimates from the Williams Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law.
Fair said he hopes efforts to restrict transgender women in sports will again fail in the General Assembly, and that he plans to introduce legislation that strengthens protections for transgender people.
“I believe that the General Assembly understands that data is important, facts are important, and the facts and the data are unequivocal,” Fair said in an interview. “Allowing trans women and girls to play in sports does not in any way impact cisgender women’s and girl’s experience.”
Fair also said it is important to him that constituents know that the Supreme Court determined that sports policymaking is best left to the states, and doesn’t require the state to change any of its protections for transgender people.
The courts ruling also only applies to sports, Other issues surrounding the rights of transgender people, like access to public restrooms and pronoun use, are not part of the ruling.
Soon after the ruling, Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown released a statement condemning the decision, and highlighting the fact that Maryland has not adopted a ban on transgender youth participating in athletics. He wrote that such bans “deny young people the simple joy of playing alongside their peers and participating fully in one of the most meaningful parts of childhood.”
While the Knights feel like Maryland’s government officials are generally supportive of transgender rights, the Annapolis family wants to see a more permanent affirmation of transgender rights in the state.
“It feels like a giant step backwards,” Nicholas Knight said. “Politicizing their [transgender youths’] existence just because it makes other people uncomfortable is not really what the founding principles of this country are about.”