When the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in June that states may bar transgender girls from female athletics, it made clear it was not deciding the flip side of that issue—whether Title IX and the Constitution allow states and schools to permit transgender girls to play on female teams.
“That question is currently the subject of litigation in some lower courts,” Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh wrote in a footnote in his majority opinion in West Virginia v. B.P.J. “Nothing in this opinion is intended to decide that question.”
That additional litigation has continued, with one older case trudging through the legal system for years, as well newer lawsuits by President Donald Trump’s administration seeking to impose its view that Title IX—the 1972 law barring sex discrimination at federally funded schools—does not allow the participation of transgender girls. One of those Trump administration suits faced a major setback recently.
And now, the issue has made it back to the Supreme Court, perhaps sooner than anyone anticipated.
In a filing this month on the court’s emergency docket, a cisgender female wrestler in Washington state has asked the justices for an injunction that would allow her to compete without facing transgender female competitors. The wrestler, identified as K.M.K., says she lost a match last December to a “stronger and more powerful” transgender girl.
Lawyers for the cisgender wrestler, who refer to transgender girls in sports as “male” or “biological males,” say the need for the injunction is urgent because wrestling season begins next month. But they also suggest the Supreme Court might want to pluck the case from its emergency docket and hear full arguments on the issue.
“K.M.K. is not the only victim of gender-identity participation policies that violate Title IX,” lawyers from Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative legal organization that has long sought to restrict transgender rights in education, said in its emergency filing in K.M.K. v. Washington Interscholastic Activities Association. “Other female athletes have also lost or forfeited games to male athletes in Washington State. And 22 other states have the same or similar policies.”
The Supreme Court has asked the WIAA and other defendants in the case, which include the state and the Puyallup school district, to respond to the emergency application by Oct. 13.
Trump admin.'s Title IX interpretation is moving quickly to the Supreme Court
Suzanne Goldberg, a Columbia University law professor and a veteran advocate for LGBTQ+ rights, said in an interview that “those who are hostile to transgender rights have aggressively sought to move their agenda forward.”
She said the Supreme Court’s June 30 decision in B.P.J., which upheld Idaho and West Virginia laws restricting transgender girls’ and women’s sports participation (and by extension those of some 25 other states), “answered only half the question.”
“It is not surprising that the other half of the question, on whether schools may allow transgender students to participate with their peers, is moving quickly toward the Supreme Court,” Goldberg said.
Leading the agenda more recently has been the Trump administration, which has followed up the president’s February 2025 executive order on “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports” with investigations, threats of funding cutoffs, and lawsuits against school districts, state education departments, and athletic associations.
In its 2025 suit against the California Interscholastic Federation and the California education department, the U.S. Department of Justice asserted that the state violated Title IX with its policies that permitted transgender girls to compete in female sports.
“These discriminatory policies and practices ignore undeniable biological differences between boys and girls, in favor of an amorphous ‘gender identity,’” the suit said. “The results of these illegal policies are stark: girls are displaced from podiums, denied awards, and miss out on critical visibility for college scholarships and recognition.”
On Aug. 31, a federal district judge in Los Angeles granted the defendants’ motion to dismiss the Trump administration suit. Judge Cynthia Valenzuela framed the central issue as whether Title IX and its implementing regulations clearly required California to exclude transgender girls from girls’ teams and sex-separated facilities.
They did not, she concluded. Title IX and its athletics-related regulations (which date back to the 1970s), “permit biological-sex separation and require equal treatment” in school sports, Valenzuela said in United States v. California Interscholastic Federation. “They do not clearly communicate [the federal government’s] further condition that biological sex must control every eligibility and facilities decision regardless of gender identity.”
The Justice Department has not yet appealed that decision.
The Trump administration has also sued Minnesota and its state high school league on similar grounds as well as Maine’s department of education. Those cases are pending.
In Connecticut, a long-running legal battle over the participation of transgender female athletes in track and field in the 2017, 2018, and 2019 seasons continues, with a federal district court in 2024 allowing some claims by a group of cisgender female athletes to proceed to trial. The suit is still pending.
The Supreme Court increasingly uses its emergency docket to decide major issues
The Washington state case revolves around a girls-only classification in wrestling, which began in the state in 2007, though court papers suggest there are some schools with co-ed teams that compete in the boys’ classification.
The cisgender wrestler’s suit challenges the state athletic association’s rule allowing students to compete in all sports consistent with their gender identity. While a junior last December, K.M.K. lost to a wrestler whom she did not realize was a transgender girl.
K.M.K. decided in January not to return for the season, but her mother pressed school district officials for support, such as a guarantee that her daughter not face transgender female opponents but still be allowed to compete. Officials said K.M.K. was free to sit out any such matches, but they could not schedule around the possibility of her facing a transgender opponent.
The family sued under Title IX and a 14th Amendment parental-rights claims. They were denied a preliminary injunction by both a federal district court and a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, in San Francisco.
The appellate panel said it was not clear that an emergency existed around the Sept. 25 date sought for the injunction, since wrestling season starts in mid-November. And it agreed with the district court that the factual record was not clear enough to grant an injunction. The panel also agreed that it would be difficult for school and athletics officials to organize matches and tournaments that guaranteed K.M.K. would not face a transgender competitor.
“To ensure that K.M.K. will not face competition against any transgender student, Defendants would have to collect new, invasive information from an unknown number of students,” the 9th Circuit panel said.
With an emergency application such as K.M.K.’s—a single student’s plea for high court intervention at an early stage in a factually messy case—it wouldn’t be unusual for the Supreme Court to quickly reject the request. But here, the court has asked the defendants to respond.
And just last term, the court used another emergency application from the 9th Circuit to issue a relatively important decision on a related hot-button issue—whether schools were helping students transition to a new gender identity without consulting their parents.
In Mirabelli v. Bonta, the court ruled 6-3 on March 2 to reinstate a federal district court ruling that said parents have federal constitutional rights to be informed when their children socially transition or express gender nonconformity at school.
The underlying case was procedurally messy, and the court had pending, fully briefed cases on its regular docket raising the same issues, but it decided to act on the emergency docket matter.
The Mirabelli majority ruled that parents have a 14th Amendment parental-rights claim because California’s policies were likely concealing mental health information about their children’s gender dysphoria and transitioning at school.
“These policies likely violate parents’ rights to direct the upbringing and education of their children,” the majority said in Mirabelli.
The lawyers for K.M.K. seized on Mirabelli in their emergency application.
“In rejecting [K.M.K.’s mother’s] parental-rights claim, the 9th Circuit’s analysis runs headlong into Mirabelli because it refused [the mother] the right to decide a question regarding her daughter’s physical health: whether K.M.K. wrestles males,” the filing states.
