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Supreme Court rules against trans girls participating in single‑sex sports, but leaves open larger questions of trans rights
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled on June 30, 2026, that West Virginia and Idaho did not violate the Constitution by preventing transgender students from joining female sports teams, and that states can restrict who participates on women’s and girls sports teams based on a student’s sex assigned at birth.
Marie-Amelie George, Wake Forest University
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled on June 30, 2026, that West Virginia and Idaho did not violate the Constitution by preventing transgender students from joining female sports teams, and that states can restrict who participates on women’s and girls sports teams based on a student’s sex assigned at birth.
This ruling, focused squarely on transgender students participating on single-sex sports teams, does not resolve other major questions that are important to trans rights. These issues include what bathrooms transgender or nonbinary students can use at school, as well as whether transgender individuals can update their names and gender markers on identity documents.
The court folded two related cases that address sports team participation at the middle, high school and college levels – Little v. Hecox and West Virginia v. B.P.J. – into one single decision that resolved both. The justices ruled 6-3 on the cases.
This ruling backs 25 other states that, over the past few years, have passed new laws restricting transgender students from participating on female sports teams.
Twenty-one states also have some sort of restriction on transgender and nonbinary students using school bathrooms designated by sex.
As a legal scholar and expert on LGBTQ+ rights, I believe that based on the court’s reasoning, it is likely that the conservative majority on the court would uphold states’ right to restrict school bathroom use based on sex assigned at birth. However, this ruling leaves bigger questions regarding transgender students’ broader rights in school, at work and elsewhere unanswered.
A political flash point
There were estimated to be fewer than 10 transgender athletes who participated in collegiate athletics in 2024.
But the issue of transgender students participating on sports teams is a hot-button issue for the Trump administration and Republicans, who argue that transgender female students have a biological advantage in competitive sports over athletes assigned female at birth.
The issue is nuanced and depends on factors including the athletes’ age and whether they have undergone gender-affirming hormonal therapy.
Some recent research shows that transgender female athletes who have undergone gender affirming hormone therapy have a comparable level of strength to cisgender female athletes.
What the rulings covered
At issue in these two Supreme Court cases were what protections Title IX – which bars sex-based discrimination in education programs and activities that receive federal funding – as well as the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment gave transgender students.
Little v. Hecox challenged Idaho’s 2020 law that allows only students whose sex was designated female at birth to participate on girls and women’s school sports team.
Lindsay Hecox, a transgender female student at Boise State University, alongside a cisgender student, filed a lawsuit against the state in 2020. Hecox, now 24, could not try out for the school’s track and cross country team because of the law. She instead ran at the club level.
In West Virginia v. B.P.J., a transgender middle school student athlete named Becky Pepper-Jackson similarly sued the state so she could continue participating in track and field. Pepper-Jackson won a state title in girls shot put in May 2026.
The state’s 2021 Save Women’s Sports Act requires public middle schools, high schools and colleges to designate all school athletic teams by biological sex.
Understanding Title IX and how it applies
The Supreme Court determined that states are permitted to restrict sports team participation under Title IX and its regulations, which explicitly permit schools to have separate male and female sports teams.
The opinion started by emphasizing there are “enduring” physical differences between males and females, and that if there were unified sports teams, females could be at a disadvantage.
“Separate sports teams for biological males and biological females are reasonable: Given the inherent physical differences between the sexes, allowing only biological females to play on women’s and girls’ teams can reduce the risk of physical injury and ensure fair competition,” the court ruled in its opinion on West Virginia v. B.P.J., authored by Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett joined the ruling.
Pepper-Jackson argued that this part of Title IX did not have relevance to her case because she had taken puberty blockers and never gone through male puberty.
As a result, she argued, she did not have heightened levels of testosterone or other physical differences that could raise the concern of a competitive advantage over cis female students in sports. She also posed no physical safety concerns for her teammates.
The court’s majority rejected this argument, saying that the Title IX regulations did not speak to this issue. The court recognized that although the laws might produce unfair results for someone like Pepper-Jackson, this did not make the restrictions improper.
The court added that Pepper-Jackson and other students in her position need to take up their concerns with state legislatures.
The court’s liberal wing – Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson – agreed with the conservative majority that the laws did not violate Title IX.
The role of the equal protection clause
The court also addressed the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution, which says that the government must apply its laws fairly and cannot treat people differently without a valid reason.
The court’s conservative majority ruled that the laws distinguished based on sex, and as a result they scrutinized the laws more carefully. However, the court concluded that the athletic restrictions nevertheless passed constitutional muster.
Here, too, the court’s majority cited the interests of safety and competitive fairness as important justifications for the laws.
The liberal justices disagreed with their colleagues’ analysis. In their view, the laws were too broad to satisfy the Constitution, because they banned transgender girls who had never experienced male puberty from female sports teams.
A side step
The decision is a narrow one. The court went to great lengths to emphasize that it was focused on sports, and that the court was not being asked about transgender people’s rights more broadly.
In the court’s telling, sports are unique because competition depends on the physiology and physical differences between those assigned male and female at birth. That is important, because there are few circumstances in which the physical differences between males and females continue to be relevant.
In the past, many occupations and schools were sex-segregated. Today, bathrooms, school sports teams, changing facilities, some college residence halls, juvenile detention centers and prisons are among the last places that remain segregated by sex.
Moreover, the court avoided ruling on the constitutional standard that should apply when transgender people are discriminated against. Under constitutional doctrine, courts will more closely scrutinize laws that discriminate against historically powerless minority groups, such as people of color and women.
One of the open questions in transgender rights litigation is whether transgender people qualify for that more searching review.
This case did not resolve that issue.
The court’s narrow ruling on transgender athletes ultimately did not resolve other key issues for transgender rights, which the court will likely be asked to address at a later date.
Marie-Amelie George, Associate Professor of Law, Wake Forest University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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9/11 Day Awards $3 Million in Grants to Expand Volunteer Opportunities Nationwide Ahead of 25th Anniversary
9/11 Day announced $3 million in grants to nearly 200 groups across 40 states, expanding service projects for the 25th anniversary observance.
As the United States approaches the 25th anniversary of September 11, 2001, the nonprofit 9/11 Day is putting major resources behind a familiar idea with renewed urgency: remembrance through service. The organization—founded by 9/11 families and leaders and co-led by co-founders David Paine and Jay Winuk—announced $3 million in grants to roughly 200 nonprofits, schools, and community groups across 40 states to expand local volunteer projects tied to this year’s September 11 National Day of Service and Remembrance.
The funding is designed to dramatically increase the number of ways Americans can participate close to home, from food insecurity initiatives to neighborhood cleanups and support programs for veterans and first responders. Together, grant recipients are expected to engage more than 70,000 volunteers nationwide.
A major push toward youth-led service
More than 70% of the grant funding is going to youth organizations and educational institutions, including K–12 schools, universities, and other learning programs. The emphasis reflects a generational reality: millions of students today know 9/11 primarily through textbooks, family stories, and classroom lessons.
“For many students participating in the observance this year, 9/11 is something they’ve only encountered in textbooks or through stories from parents and grandparents,” said Jay Winuk, co-founder and executive vice president of 9/11 Day and a 9/11 family member. “By connecting history with hands-on service, we’re helping young people understand that the legacy of 9/11 isn’t defined only by tragedy. It’s also defined by compassion, resilience and the responsibility we all share to care for one another.”
Youth-focused projects supported by the grants include school-wide days of service, hunger-relief efforts, donation drives, community improvement work, and service-learning initiatives that connect the history of September 11 with practical ways to help others.
UNIITE for Good: turning an anniversary into a nationwide “doing good” moment
The grant program is a cornerstone of 9/11 Day’s nationwide UNIITE for Good campaign, scheduled to officially launch August 24. The campaign aims to transform the 25th anniversary into what organizers describe as America’s largest day of doing good—channeling remembrance into tangible community impact.
The program is administered in collaboration with AmeriCorps, with principal funding provided by AmeriCorps and the Popeyes Foundation. A special emphasis this year is addressing hunger—an issue described in the release as an “ever-growing hunger crisis across the nation.”
Meeting community needs where people live
Grant-funded projects span urban, suburban, and rural communities. Activities include assembling meals for individuals and families facing food insecurity, packing care kits for veterans and first responders, restoring community spaces, and strengthening schools and neighborhoods.
Beyond the service itself, the grants are also intended to help local groups recruit volunteers, purchase supplies, coordinate logistics, and expand the number of service opportunities available in their areas.
“As we mark the 25th anniversary of 9/11, we have a responsibility to preserve not only the memory of that day and those lost and injured, but also the extraordinary way Americans came together in the aftermath of the attacks,” said David Paine, president and co-founder of 9/11 Day. “These community-led projects are helping rekindle that spirit of unity, compassion and service by bringing neighbors together to help solve local challenges.”
AmeriCorps echoed that message, framing service as a way to honor those who responded in the immediate aftermath of the attacks.
“This year, we invite Americans to carry forward that enduring spirit of unity and service by becoming a hero for someone in need,” said Emily Stock, project manager for Volunteer Initiatives at AmeriCorps, noting that AmeriCorps-funded projects will include food drives, home repairs, neighborhood cleanups, and disaster preparedness activities.
The Popeyes Foundation also highlighted its community-focused mission and its role in supporting local projects.
Why this anniversary matters now
Organizers say the 25th anniversary arrives at a pivotal moment: more than 100 million Americans are now too young to have personal memories of September 11. That makes this milestone one of the last major opportunities to connect those who lived through the day with younger generations learning about it as history.
Examples of grant-supported efforts include:
- Marshall University, which plans to build on its existing 9/11 Days of Service tradition, including a Memorial Stair Challenge and volunteer projects supporting veterans, first responders, and families in need.
- Middlebury Elementary School, which will expand hands-on service activities that teach younger students about 9/11 through compassion and community action.
- University of South Dakota, where students will work alongside community partners to address local needs while learning how service can bridge backgrounds and perspectives.
How to get involved
A full list of 2026 9/11 Day Grant Program recipients is available through 9/11 Day. To learn more about the September 11 National Day of Service and Remembrance—and to find ways to participate—visit 911day.org.
STM Daily News will continue tracking community service initiatives and local observances tied to the 25th anniversary as September approaches
STM Daily News
The United States’ human rights practices are taking a nosedive
New human rights data shows the United States’ civil and political rights record deteriorated sharply in 2025, with major declines involving detention, free expression, religious freedom and political participation.
K. Chad Clay, University of Georgia
In the lead-up to the 2026 midterm elections, how is the U.S. government performing in terms of human rights? Listening to politicians, it can be difficult to know.
On one hand, some have pointed to a number of potential human rights abuses committed by the U.S. government inside and outside its borders in the past two years.
On the other hand, while marking the United States’ 250th anniversary this year, President Donald Trump called the country “the home of freedom,” “the land of liberty” and “the most extraordinary, most exceptional, most incredible nation ever to exist on the face of the earth.”
“We’re doing better now than we’ve ever done before,” he said.
So which is it?
According to many of the human rights data sources available, the U.S. lags behind most other high-income democracies – countries that are both members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and classified as high income by the World Bank. The U.S.’s poor performance spans civil and political rights, such as the right to be free from torture and the right to political participation, as well as economic and social rights, including the rights to health and food.
In fact, the U.S. has been a relatively poor performer across many of these rights for quite some time, regardless of the political party in power.
Even accounting for the U.S.’s prior poor practices, however, new data from the Human Rights Measurement Initiative shows that in 2025 the country’s civil and political rights performance deteriorated even further.
As a human rights scholar who has been measuring human rights practices for 20 years – and as one of HRMI’s co-founders – I believe this data raises serious questions about the United States’ commitment to human rights.
How are rights practices measured?
Governments rarely publish accurate information on their own human rights abuses, so the task of measuring them typically falls to advocates and scholars.
Historically, most international measures of civil and political rights have depended on public reports from the U.S. State Department, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch or news organizations.
However, these reports cannot cover every human rights violation that experts know about, especially in countries with low government transparency or high levels of repression.
Thus, data produced using those sources will show fewer abuses than those that have actually occurred and will be more accurate about some places than others. Further, the Trump administration has changed one of the most important sources of human rights information, the U.S. State Department’s Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, to contain more bias in favor of the administration’s foreign allies and less information on human rights abuse overall.
Since 2017, HRMI has used a different approach. Recognizing the problems with public reports, we collect information directly from researchers for human rights organizations, human rights lawyers and others, asking them about governments’ practices across several rights and using a statistical model to assess their information and ensure that the resulting metrics are comparable across countries. The result is a robust dataset that includes information previously missing from public reports.
Today, HRMI’s civil and political rights dataset covers 62 countries, with more added every year.
How does the US compare?
According to the Human Rights Scores dataset, which uses publicly available information to score more than 190 countries on physical integrity rights – such as the rights to be free from torture, killing, forced disappearance and political imprisonment – the U.S. never ranked higher than 81st from 2001 to 2021 or higher than 109th from 2010 to 2021.
Indeed, from 2003 to 2021, the United States’ score was either the worst or the second-worst every year among high-income OECD member states, which include the United Kingdom, Japan and New Zealand.
The Human Rights Scores dataset has not been updated past 2021, but HRMI’s data collected since that time suggests that the pattern has continued.
Among the six high-income OECD countries on which HRMI currently collects data, the U.S. has been the worst performer for physical integrity rights since 2017.
It has also frequently been rated as the worst performer on “empowerment rights,” or the rights to assembly, association, opinion, expression, political participation, religion and belief.
What changed in 2025?
Even starting from this poor position, the U.S.’s civil and political rights practices dramatically worsened in 2025. HRMI measures nine civil and political rights, and the U.S. significantly worsened on eight of them.
These were not small changes. Measured against every significant change HRMI has recorded since 2017, the U.S. showed the largest decline ever observed for the right to be free from forced disappearance and for the right to freedom of religion and belief.
The U.S. showed the second-largest decline ever observed for the right to be free from arbitrary or political arrest and for the right to opinion and expression.
The U.S. also showed major declines in the rights to be free from torture and extrajudicial killing, and the right to political participation – that is, the right to participate in one’s government via free and fair elections, to take part in public affairs and to have access to public service. U.S. scores likewise fell in the right to assembly and association, which are, respectively, the rights to peacefully gather in public or private and to form or join groups and organizations.
What caused the scores to fall?
Human rights experts raised several issues that led to these declines. For instance, the U.S.’s worsened scores for the rights to be free from arbitrary detention, disappearance and torture were tied to the expanded use of practices such as incommunicado detention and warrantless arrest by ICE and other immigration-related agencies.
While several killings occurred during ICE operations in 2025, the worsened extrajudicial killing score was also tied to the country’s use of airstrikes against boats in the Pacific and Caribbean, which caused the deaths of at least 123 people in 2025 alone.
Other changes enacted in 2025 contributed to large declines in the U.S.’s rights scores, including crackdowns on anti-ICE demonstrations and government pressure on universities, including limits on free speech and class subjects.
Last year also saw threats to television networks over political expression, restrictions on mail-in voting, state measures targeting American Islamic organizations by labeling them “foreign terrorist organizations” and an executive order focused on eradicating “anti-Christian bias.”
While current HRMI data does not yet cover 2026, early indicators are not promising, with continued abuses by ICE, further killings in international waters and allegations of attempts to use government powers to punish critics.
K. Chad Clay, Director, Center for the Study of Global Issues (GLOBIS); Associate Professor of International Affairs, University of Georgia
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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U.S. News Releases 2026-2027 Best High Schools Rankings, Highlighting Charter and STEM Standouts
U.S. News & World Report has released its 2026-2027 Best High Schools rankings, giving families a fresh, data-driven snapshot of top-performing public, charter, and STEM high schools across the country. The new edition evaluated about 27,000 eligible public high schools, with nearly 18,000 schools ultimately ranked at national, state, and local levels.
At the state level, Massachusetts again led the nation, with 47% of its high schools landing in the top quarter nationally. New Jersey followed at 44%, with Maryland close behind at 43%. Metro-area results also highlighted standout regions with high concentrations of top-ranked schools, including San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, California (60%), McAllen-Edinburg-Mission, Texas (59%), and Milwaukee-Waukesha, Wisconsin (56%)—each with the highest shares of ranked schools placing in the top 25% nationwide.
Charter and STEM schools were a major storyline in the 2026-2027 release. While California (96) and New Jersey (50) led the nation in the number of ranked STEM schools, charter schools claimed 23% of the national top 100. U.S. News pointed to Arizona’s BASIS charter network as a key example of that performance, noting it secured three of the country’s top five STEM schools and placed 12 campuses in the overall national top 100.
U.S. News said the rankings are based on six performance indicators, including state assessment achievement, graduation rates, and college readiness measures such as AP and IB participation and performance. The methodology was implemented with RTI International using data from the 2023-2024 school year.
Source: U.S. News & World Report
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