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By Upholding State Bans on Transgender Athletes, the Supreme Court Bowed to Bigotry
The decision codifies transphobic language and opens the potential for the sex testing of youth athletes.
Jul 03, 2026
In one of its final decisions of the 2025-26 term, the Supreme Court of the United States solidified its place in the onslaught of eradicating trans rights, in a ruling that revolved largely around whether state bans of transgender athletes violated Title IX and the Equal Protection clause of the 14th Amendment.
In response to the question placed before the court of whether states could implement bans on transgender athlete participation in girls’ and women’s sports, 6 of the 9 justices said, “Yes.”
Outside of patchy citations and contradicting interpretations of legal precedents, the rationale behind the majority opinion of the court, written by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, echoed three key premises in the “sports context.” First, female bodies are inherently physiologically different from male bodies, which map onto sex-based athletic advantages for males. Second, regardless of these differences, girls and women should have equal opportunities to boys and men. And third, because of these differences and because of equal guarantees between the sexes, “competitive fairness” and “safety” look different for the female category as compared with the male category. Consequently, the only way to ensure equal sporting opportunities for girls and women is to keep transgender girls and women, or “biological males,” out of the female category.
Anti-transgender advocates in the broader “save women’s sports” movement frequently draw from these rationales, but also ignore the underlying deeply problematic and troubling considerations. On an ethical level, this approach undermines inclusive efforts and further stigmatizes transgender individuals. On a public health level, this reasoning deprives an exceptionally vulnerable population from enjoying the social, mental, and physical benefits from physical activity that should be enjoyed by all. And on a pragmatic level, these declarations overlook the minimal number of out transgender youth, of which even fewer participate in high school level sports.
Notably, of all the documented issues in and across women’s sports, there is no evidence demonstrating that transgender athletes, in any way, contribute to these inequalities.
Beyond parroting this tired transphobic logic, the majority opinion also points to other sports governing bodies, such as the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) and the US Olympic and Paralympic Committee, who have “drawn a biological line” to ensure safe and fair competition by banning transgender athletes. What Justice Kavanaugh omits, however, is that both organizations abruptly changed their policies following President Donald Trump’s Executive Order No. 14201, rather than in response to any scientific evidence or domination of transgender athletes (in response to a Senate hearing question about how many transgender athletes compete in the NCAA, NCAA President Charlie Baker infamously responded that of the more than 500,000 athletes competing, he knew of “only 10”).
While this ruling itself does not necessarily come as a surprise to those who have followed along with the US’ steady rollback of transgender rights, perhaps the most shocking element of the SCOTUS’ majority opinion is the brazen use of transphobic and misogynistic language in their ruling. “Biological males” and “biological females,” which are used 64 and 31 times respectively in Justice Kavanaugh’s 29-page majority opinion, are not rooted in medical terminology. Instead, these are terms that have become popularized and mobilized by anti-transgender advocates to reinforce a binary model of sex difference. This type of sex segregation is premised on patriarchal beliefs of male athletic superiority and female athletic inferiority, and has historically led to harmful body policing, racial discrimination, and erasure of intersex persons.
There is also reference to an “ongoing medical and scientific debate” surrounding whether transgender athletes maintain athletic and performative advantages after transitioning. What is absent from this brief discussion of science, however, is the concrete evidence that has shown the abundant health disparities experienced by the transgender community, particularly transgender youth. In 2024, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that, compared with their cisgender counterparts, transgender youth are more likely to report violence, victimization, unstable housing, and suicidal thoughts and behaviors. Similarly, a 2024 study in Nature Human Behavior found that anti-transgender state laws, including transgender sport participation bans, directly increased incidents of suicide attempts among transgender and nonbinary youth by as much as 72%.
The (mis)direction of attention to abstract ideas of “competitive fairness” and unsettled science also disregards the rampant incompliance of institutions with Title IX. In 2023, Florida State University (FSU) agreed to add women’s lacrosse as a varsity sport after threats of a sexual discrimination lawsuit from its women’s club lacrosse team. The threat came on the heels of an 18-month USA TODAY investigation, which revealed that the university was egregiously out of Title IX compliance. FSU was far from the exception, however, as the investigation exposed how hundreds of colleges and universities manipulated their roster numbers for women’s sports to create a mirage of compliance. These Title IX transgressions emerged under the backdrop of several systemic issues in women’s sports, such as the decline in the number of women coaches for women’s sports, consistent underfunding, disproportionate rates of harassment and abuse experienced by girls and women, and media underrepresentation. Notably, of all the documented issues in and across women’s sports, there is no evidence demonstrating that transgender athletes, in any way, contribute to these inequalities.
Despite these relevant considerations, and as Justice Sonia Sotomayer wrote in her dissent, “to the Court, the facts do not matter, even though the consequences are serious.”
In addition to the immediate impact on transgender athletes, this decision prompts questions around how girls’ and women’s sports will now be policed to “catch” athletes who do not fit within normative assumptions or understandings of female bodies. International sports governing organizations, such as World Athletics and the International Olympic Committee, have recently paired bans on transgender athlete participation with implementations of sex testing via chromosome tests, which has long been established as a fraught, unethical, and discriminatory practice.
The impacts on youth and high school sports are, and will be, more pronounced. Organizations at these levels lack the same resources and financial capacities, meaning that, for high school athletic associations, sex testing would most likely involve some type of genital or physical examination. While these might be conducted by medical personnel (though the Larry Nassar sex abuse scandal is evidence that this does not guarantee safeguarding minors), depending on access or finances, these could also be conducted by coaches, other parents, or officials, which prompts further questions and justified concerns surrounding training, confidentiality, consent, and protections of minors. These practices not only impact transgender athletes, but all athletes, regardless of gender identity or, to borrow from Justice Kavanaugh, “biological sex.”
The ruling closes with a half-hearted remark that “no student-athlete on either side of the issue, whether a biological female or transgender, deserves to be ostracized or vilified.” What the SCOTUS fails to recognize, however, is that their ruling is predicated on the misguided vilification of transgender athletes, with impacts that will continue to ostracize transgender people in sports and broader society.
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Supreme Court Gives Trump 'King-Like' Power to Purge Independent Agencies
“Today’s decision in Trump v. Slaughter takes a wrecking ball to a 90-year pillar of American law," said House Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Jamie Raskin.
Jun 29, 2026
The US Supreme Court on Monday upheld President Donald Trump's firing of Federal Trade Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter, overturning 90 years of precedent and giving the chief executive what dissenting Justice Sonia Sotomayor called "a power unknown even to the English Crown against which the Founders revolted."
Last March, Trump fired Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya, the two Democratic FTC commissioners at the time, without cause in what critics called yet another illegal abuse of power by the twice-impeached convicted felon.
Under the Federal Trade Commission Act (FTCA) of 1914, a president may only fire FTC commissioners "for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office." The Supreme Court's 1935 Humphrey's Executor v. United States ruling interpreted the FTCA to mean that the president could not remove an FTC commissioner for any other reason, such as a policy disagreement.
The justices shredded that precedent with Monday's 6-3 decision in Trump v. Slaughter, which found that "the FTC's for-cause removal provision is contrary to the separation of powers enshrined in the Constitution."
BREAKING: The Supreme Court upholds Trump’s firing of FTC commissioner Rebecca Slaughter without cause.The decision overturns a 90-year-old precedent that protected the heads or board members of independent agencies from arbitrary presidential dismissals. Full story to come.
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— Democracy Docket (@democracydocket.com) June 29, 2026 at 7:20 AM
Chief Justice John Roberts joined fellow conservative Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett—the last three appointed by Trump—in the majority, while liberal Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented.
Delivering the court's opinion, Roberts wrote that the "Humphrey's framework, in short, has not withstood the test of time."
"We long ago abandoned the notion that there are some powers that are only partly executive," the chief justice asserted. "Forty years have now passed, in fact, since we recognized that the FTC exercises executive power—and did so even in 1935, when Humphrey's was decided."
Slaughter and officials at independent executive agencies, Roberts wrote, "exercise the president’s power, not their own, and thus must be responsible to him."
"At this point, all that is left of Humphrey's is its observation that an agency that 'exercises no part of the executive power' need not fall within the rule of presidential removal," he added. "If anything more is left of Humphrey's, we overrule it."
As she did last week with Mullin v. Al Otro Lado, a 6-3 ruling that affirmed Trump's deadly policy of blocking people legally seeking asylum from entering the United States, Sotomayor took the rare step of reading her dissent in Slaughter from the bench.
"Today, this court undoes centuries of political practice and concludes that all three branches of government have been acting in open defiance of the Constitution all this time. Its conclusion is wrong," she asserted. "The text of the Constitution, along with its history, the long-standing practices of the political branches, and the precedents of this court, make clear that Congress may limit the causes for which the heads of commissions like the FTC can be removed by the president."
"In holding otherwise, the court gives the president a power unknown even to the English Crown against which the Founders revolted, elevating him above his once-coequal branches by transforming a duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed into a license to act in defiance of those very laws," she continued.
"If nothing else, the doctrine of stare decisis, which today’s decision cursorily dismisses, should have made this a profoundly easy case under Humphrey’s," Sotomayor added, referring to the Latin legal term for "to stand by things decided," or precedent.
Responding to the ruling, Congressman Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, said that “today’s decision in Trump v. Slaughter takes a wrecking ball to a 90-year pillar of American law and to Congress’ power to create independent expert agencies that serve the will of the American people as expressed in federal law rather than the whimsical political agenda of one president."
“In overturning Congress’ authority to prevent the president from removing the leaders of independent agencies at whim, the court’s right-wing majority has given President Trump sweeping new power to purge Senate-confirmed commissioners at the Federal Trade Commission and other independent agencies for no reason other than personal loyalty, political obedience, or refusal to bend the law to the personal will of the president," Raskin added. "This decision invites presidential domination of the independent agencies Congress created to protect the people against corporate fraud, financial corruption, attacks on workers’ rights, and other abuses of concentrated economic and political power."
Numerous civil society groups and constitutional experts also expressed alarm over Monday's ruling, which follows the high court's previous affirmations of expanded executive power in cases including Trump v. United States. Roberts wrote for the 6-3 majority in that 2024 case that the president enjoys prosecutorial immunity for all "official acts"—which Sotomayor said in her dissent made him "a king above the law."
“Independent agencies are the guardians of American consumers, workers, and investors," Robert Weissman, co-president of the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, said of Trump v. Slaughter. "They have held wealthy corporations that rip off hardworking Americans accountable and forced dangerous products from the market. Having stripped most independent agencies of their independence, President Trump is already politicizing and weaponizing them, including agencies such as the FTC and the Federal Communications Commission, to the detriment of everyday Americans.”
At Issue One, a group dedicated to reducing the influence of money in politics, vice president of advocacy Alix Fraser said that “today, the Supreme Court greenlit further abuses of presidential power and stripped independent commissions of their independence."
"The ruling opens the floodgates for more governing decisions based on the president’s whims and self-interest," he added. "This ruling not only subverts the Constitution’s clear guardrails against executive overreach, it also breaks from the court’s historical precedent to uphold the FTC removal provision."
The Slaughter case, overturning precedent, returns us to a spoils system where a president can “clean house” every four years, destroying our professional, independent civil service.
— Barb McQuade (@barbmcquade.bsky.social) June 29, 2026 at 8:31 AM
Leah Greenberg, co-executive director at the pro-democracy group Indivisible, issued a statement calling the ruling "shocking, but sadly not surprising."
"John Roberts and the MAGA majority are willing to set fire to history, precedent, and any consistent constitutional principle in order to give Trump more power with less oversight," she said. "This brazen, undemocratic partisanship and corruption must be investigated, the justices must be held accountable, and the court must be reformed to disempower the current anti-constitutional majority.”
Brett Edkins, managing director of policy and affairs at the anti-corruption watchdog Stand Up America—which said the ruling "opens the door to king-like powers for Trump to fire independent watchdogs and install loyalists throughout government"—lamented that “the MAGA Supreme Court just overturned a century of law to give more power to Donald Trump."
"Trump couldn’t find a lawful reason to fire a member of an independent agency, so he ignored the law, fired them anyway, and turned to his allies on the Supreme Court to reward his gross abuses of executive power," he continued. "His lackeys on the court obliged."
“Today’s ruling hands Trump sweeping power to purge independent watchdogs and install loyalists throughout the US government who will answer to him alone," Edkins added.
Republicans have long sought a repeal of Humphrey's. Project 2025—the Heritage Foundation-led blueprint for a far-right overhaul of the federal government—calls for the ruling to be overturned.
Trump welcomed Monday's decision with a post on his Truth Social network claiming that he personally "won" the ruling.
Monday's decision means Trump will now be able to fire at will leaders from agencies including the Consumer Product Safety Commission, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, National Labor Relations Board, Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and US Postal Service.
But not the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. That's because in a separate but related ruling released on Monday, the justices rejected Trump's attempt to oust Federal Reserve Gov. Lisa Cook, finding 5-4 in Trump v. Cook that his bid to fire her did not comply with the Federal Reserve Act's for-cause removal protections.
“The court’s decision in Slaughter is all the more peculiar in light of... Trump v. Cook," Raskin said in his statement."There, the court rightly rejected President Trump’s lawless attempt to fire Federal Reserve Gov. Lisa Cook without adequate cause, due process, or judicial review."
While acknowledging that "central bank independence matters immensely to the American economy," Raskin contended that "Congress' constitutional judgments about the necessity of institutional independence should matter just as much at the FTC, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the National Labor Relations Board, the Federal Communications Commission, and the many other important independent agencies Congress has created to serve the interests of the American people."
Humphrey's Executor is dead and the president can fire anyone in the executive branch at will but NOT Federal Reserve governors is really a parody of the difference between the money power and everything else in America
— David Dayen (@ddayen.bsky.social) June 29, 2026 at 7:20 AM
Indivisible's Greenberg said that “the carveout for the Federal Reserve only shows how grossly political" the Slaughter decision is.
"Apparently, independence only matters when financial markets are at stake," she added, "but not when agencies are protecting consumers, workers, or the public from corporate abuse."
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'More People Will Die': Sotomayor Reads Searing Dissent as Supreme Court Lets Trump Block Asylum Seekers
The liberal justice lamented that the majority ruling in Mullin v. Al Otro Lado empowers the Trump administration to slam the door shut on refugees "even if the asylum seeker is certain to be persecuted, or killed."
Jun 25, 2026
The US Supreme Court's right-wing majority on Thursday affirmed the Trump administration's deadly policy of blocking people legally seeking asylum from entering the United States in a ruling that prompted liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor to take the rare step of reading her dissent from the bench.
In Mullin v. Al Otro Lado, the justices reversed lower-court rulings, including a 2024 9th Circuit Court of Appeals panel decision that people approaching authorized border entries are arriving "in" the United States under federal law.
The Trump administration had asked the Supreme Court to rule on the practice of "metering," by which US authorities limit the number of asylum seekers who can present themselves at a port of entry each day to request protection. The policy was first implemented during the Obama administration and expanded during President Donald Trump's first term, with US Solicitor General D. John Sauer calling it “a critical tool for addressing border surges and for preventing overcrowding at ports of entry along the border.”
“In ordinary English, a person ‘arrives in’ a country only when he comes within its borders,” Sauer argued in court filings. “An alien thus does not ‘arrive in’ the United States while he is still in Mexico.”
Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote for the majority—Chief Justice John Roberts, Justice Clarence Thomas, and Trump-appointed Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett—agreed.
“In ordinary speech, no one would say that a person ‘arrives in’ a place—for example, a house, a city, or a country—before the person enters that place," Justice Samuel Alito said.
“We hold that an alien who is standing in Mexico does not ‘arrive in the United States’ by attempting, and failing, to set foot in this country," he added. "An alien ‘arrives in the United States’ only when he crosses the border."
Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson joined a scathing dissent penned by fellow liberal Sonia Sotomayor. Jackson also dissented separately. In a sign of her vigorous objection to the ruling, Sotomayor took the rare step of reading parts of her 35-page dissent—which is nearly twice as long as the majority opinion—from the bench.
"The Court today holds that the Executive Branch may circumvent all these mandatory procedures by having US immigration officers stand at the border and physically block noncitizens from setting a foot onto US soil," Sotomayor began. "They may do so even if the asylum seeker is at the threshold of a port of entry designated to receive all noncitizens who seek entrance into the country. Even if the port of entry has ample capacity to inspect that person, including an available asylum officer trained to process asylum applications. Even if the asylum seeker is certain to be persecuted, or killed, if she is turned away."
Sotomayor noted that metering "created dire humanitarian conditions at the border."
As US Customs and Border Protection "turned back more and more asylum seekers who had traveled treacherous distances to reach that point, makeshift camps sprung up on the Mexican side of the border, with tens of thousands of those turned away waiting days, then weeks and months, for asylum processing that often never took place," she continued.
Sotomayor noted the dangerous conditions in the border camps, asserting that "those turned away under the metering policy also found themselves subject to the very 'persecution and crime' they were fleeing," and citing cases in which people waiting in Mexico were murdered, raped, kidnapped, and assaulted. She detailed instances in which desperate asylum seekers, including children, drowned while attempting to swim across the Rio Grande into the United States.
"Hundreds of others have met a similar fate, and many more died crossing the desert along the southern border, all making 2020 and 2021 some of the 'deadliest years for migrant crossings' in various regions of the southern border," Sotomayor wrote.
"The words of a statute must be read in their context and with a view to their place in the overall statutory scheme."
"The majority’s conclusion focuses almost exclusively on the word 'in' within the phrase 'arrives in the United States,'" Sotomayor stressed. "If that were all this case were about, the majority might have the better of the argument. Statutory interpretation, however, requires much more."
"The words of a statute must be read in their context and with a view to their place in the overall statutory scheme," she continued, pointing to one of the most frequently cited principles in modern US jurisprudence.
"The majority’s interpretation of 'arrives in the United States' makes no sense," Sotomayor argued. "To start, the majority ignores that 'arrival' and 'arriving' in the immigration context have never focused on the precise location of a noncitizen’s feet."
She continued:
Imagine a movie theater policy that states, “Anyone who arrives in the theater may buy a ticket and all moviegoers must have their tickets scanned before entering.” If a person walks up to a ticket booth located just outside the theater, it would be unreasonable to think they could not buy a ticket under the policy because they are not “in” the theater yet. Perhaps the policy could have been clearer by using the preposition “at,” but everyone understands, from context, what the policy means.
Context leads to the same conclusion here. Requiring an asylum seeker to plant a foot across the border to become an “applicant for admission"... might be plausible looking at the words “arrives in” in a vacuum, but it makes a hash of the statutory scheme overall. Instead, construing text in context, an asylum seeker can be fairly said to “arrive in the United States” for purposes of being an applicant for admission and seeking asylum when she walks up to a port of entry and physically presents herself to an immigration officer who is standing on US soil.
Sotomayor further noted that the modern asylum system "developed in response to the international moral reckoning that followed the Holocaust and World War II," when the United States and other indifferent nations turned back shiploads of desperate Jewish refugees and denied asylum to Jews fleeing almost certain death in Nazi-occupied Europe, including the family of famous diarist Anne Frank.
The dissenting justice highlighted the ill-fated voyage of the M.S. St. Louis, which carried over 900 Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution. After being refused docking in Cuba, the United States, and Canada, the ship returned to Europe, where hundreds of its passengers were killed during the Holocaust.
"Congress passed the Refugee Act in 1980 because it did not want this country to repeat the mistakes of its past," Sotomayor said. "Yet if the refugees on the M.S. St. Louis were to walk up to a port of entry on our southern border today, the majority’s interpretation would allow immigration officers to refuse even to consider their asylum applications by physically blocking them from stepping foot onto US soil."
"The majority’s interpretation permits the government to do that even if the refugees complied with all applicable laws and regulations, even if the port had ample capacity to inspect them, and even if turning them back would result in the very persecution from which they narrowly escaped," she added. "The consequences of today’s decision are predictable. More people will die."
In another extraordinary move, Alito followed Sotomayor's reading by defending the metering policy as necessary for maintaining "orderly and humane" conditions at the border. He then moved on to his next opinion, which upheld the Trump administration's cancellation of temporary deportation protections for hundreds of thousands of Haitians and Syrians.
Responding to the Mullin ruling, Al Otro Lado executive director Erika Pinheiro said, "We believe that today’s ruling violates international law, as well as the express intent of Congress, which enshrined the rights and obligations of the Refugee Convention into US federal law over 40 years ago."
"For decades, the United States has allowed individuals and families who are fleeing persecution, torture, and death to ask for protection at US borders and exercise their legal right to seek asylum,” she continued. "This decision has destroyed the United States’ position as a global leader in promoting the rights of refugees and threatens to serve as a dangerous justification for other countries that unlawfully prevent refugees from crossing borders in search of safety."
"In a world of increasing conflict and climate disaster, this hardening of borders to keep out the most vulnerable is sure to result in many more lives lost," Pinheiro added.
Today, the Supreme Court delivered a devastating blow to asylum rights in the United States.In a 6-3 decision in Mullin v. Al Otro Lado, the Court ruled that the Trump administration may turn back asylum seekers at ports of entry along the U.S.-Mexico border.
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— American Immigration Council (@immcouncil.org) June 25, 2026 at 9:32 AM
Vanessa Cárdenas, executive director of America’s Voice, also issued a statement, contending that the two rulings "will devastate women and children who are fleeing unimaginable danger, vetted workers who have been in the US for decades making significant contributions, senior citizens who depend on their healthcare providers for lifesaving care, and business owners who rely on their workers to sustain their businesses, among many others."
Congresswoman Analilia Mejia (D-NJ) said that "whether denying asylum seekers the chance to be heard or ripping Temporary Protected Status away from families who have spent years building their lives in this country, this corrupt court, beholden to an authoritarian-like president, once again chose politics over the Constitution."
"Asylum seekers deserve the opportunity to have their claims heard before the government decides their fate," she continued. "Above all else, this case is simply cruel and denies humanity to our fellow human beings seeking safety."
"These rulings should alarm every American," Mejia added. "When the government can deny one group a hearing or strip away protections they have relied on for years, it is not just immigrants who lose. It sends a dangerous message that constitutional rights can be discarded whenever those in power find it politically useful."
Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) said that by targeting asylum, the justices "are preventing the most vulnerable people from even seeking safety on our shores."
On social media, Rep. Summer Lee (D-Pa.) said, "This extremist Supreme Court just gave Trump the green light to block asylum seekers at the border and end TPS protections for Haitians and Syrians."
"People fleeing danger deserve compassion, not cruelty," Lee added. "We must reform and expand the court immediately."
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