A Supreme Court ruling Tuesday upholding state laws barring transgender girls and women from playing on school athletic teams is drawing sharp pushback from politicians and advocates in Massachusetts.
Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell stressed in a statement that, here in the commonwealth, students can still play on teams that line up with their gender identity.
Campbell also criticized the court’s decision, saying it “does not ensure fairness or create inclusive school environments; it instead marginalizes and harms vulnerable students.”
After an unrelated press conference Tuesday morning, Gov. Maura Healey said she hadn’t yet read the full decision, but added: “We want all people who are playing sports to be safe, to play sports in a way that’s done safely. I also think this whole case came about because of [President] Donald Trump’s continued effort to politicize transgender people. And transgender people in Massachusetts will continue to see the full protections of antidiscrimination law.
The court’s conservative majority, which has repeatedly ruled against transgender Americans in the past year, ruled that state bans in Idaho and West Virginia don’t violate the Constitution or the federal law known as Title IX, which prohibits sex discrimination in education.
Pro-LGBTQ+ advocates condemned the court’s decision. Jennifer Levi, who leads transgender rights issues at Boston’s GLAD Law, called it “devastating.”
She also said she doubts the decision is a harbinger of an outright national ban on the participation of trans girls and women in school sports.
“I hope that’s not the case,” Levi said. “The court very expressly says that this decision does not change anything about ... inclusive policies in other states.”
Tanya Neslusan, the executive director of MassEquality, decried Tuesday’s ruling as well.
“Our hearts go out to the athletes who will now be denied the opportunity to play sports with their friends and classmates and to experience the many benefits that come from being part of a team,” Neslusan said in a statement. “Sports teach leadership, resilience, teamwork, confidence, and belonging. Every young person deserves the chance to develop those skills in an environment where they are welcomed and supported.”
As of early last year, Massachusetts residents narrowly supported Trump’s executive order restricting federal funding for schools that allow transgender participation in sports, according to the UMass Poll, with 44% supporting the executive order and 42% opposing it. Nationally, the idea of restricting trans girls’ and women’s participation in school sports is far more popular.
The court’s ruling also seems poised to reignite an issue in the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate that pits incumbent Ed Markey against challenger U.S. Rep. Seth Moulton.
After Kamala Harris lost the presidential election to Donald Trump, Moulton suggested that the Democratic Party’s rigidity on transgender girls’ and women’s participation in sports helped cost them the presidency, telling the New York Times: “I have two little girls, I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.“
In a statement Tuesday, Moulton struck a different note, saying Trump is ”on a crusade to erase trans kids from public life and keep Americans divided.
“These blanket bans go way too far, targeting recreational athletes who just want to play with their friends, invading their privacy, and letting the government micromanage local schools,” Moulton added. “To the trans community feeling the weight of this decision today: you belong, you are valued, and I will always fight for your right to exist safely.”
In his own statement, Markey called the court’s ruling “inhumane and unjust,” adding: “The Supreme Court has become Trump and MAGA Republicans’ tool to persecute and dehumanize the trans community. Kids deserve so much more than to be debated on cable news and in the courts by hateful politicians scapegoating them as talking points or using them to deflect from current failed economic policies.”
Markey also cited Moulton’s two-year-old comments to the New York Times, and accused him of “being part of the movement that is ripping these kids away from the sports they love and the dignity they deserve as human beings.”
More than two dozen Republican-led states have adopted bans on female transgender athletes. Left unresolved by the outcome are lawsuits challenging state laws and regulations in Connecticut, California and elsewhere that permit transgender athletes to compete consistent with their gender identity.
Becky Pepper-Jackson, a 16-year-old high school sophomore in Bridgeport, West Virginia, has been taking puberty-blocking medication, has publicly identified as a girl since age 8 and has been issued a West Virginia birth certificate recognizing her as female. She is the only transgender person who has sought to compete in girls sports in West Virginia.
Pepper-Jackson has progressed from a back-of-the-pack cross-country runner in middle school to statewide champion in the shot put. She beat the second-place finisher by two feet in last month’s West Virginia championship meet.
In the Idaho case, Lindsay Hecox sued over the state’s first-in-the-nation ban for the chance to try out for the women’s track and cross-country teams at Boise State University in Idaho. She didn’t make either squad because “she was too slow,” her lawyer, Kathleen Hartnett, told the court during arguments in January, but she competed in club-level soccer and running.
Prominent women in sports have weighed in on both sides. Tennis champion Martina Navratilova, swimmers Summer Sanders and Donna de Varona and beach volleyball player Kerri Walsh Jennings are supporting the state bans. Soccer stars Megan Rapinoe and Becky Sauerbrunn and basketball players Sue Bird and Breanna Stewart back the transgender athletes.
In 2020, the Supreme Court ruled LGBTQ people are protected by a landmark federal civil rights law that prohibits sex discrimination in the workplace, finding that “sex plays an unmistakable role” in employers’ decisions to punish transgender people for traits and behavior they otherwise tolerate.
But last year, the six conservative justices on the nine-member court declined to apply the same sort of analysis when they upheld state bans on gender-affirming care for transgender minors.
NCAA president and former Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker told Congress in 2024 that he was aware of only 10 transgender athletes out of more than half a million students on college teams. But despite the small numbers, the issue has taken on outsize importance.
Baker’s NCAA and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committees banned transgender women from women’s sports after Trump, a Republican, signed an executive order aimed at barring their participation.
Nationwide, the public generally is supportive of the limits. An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll conducted in October 2025 found that about 6 in 10 U.S. adults “strongly” or “somewhat” favored requiring transgender children and teenagers to compete only on sports teams that match the sex they were assigned at birth, not the gender they identify with, while about 2 in 10 were “strongly” or “somewhat” opposed and about one-quarter did not have an opinion.
About 2.1 million adults, or 0.8%, and 724,000 people ages 13 to 17, or 3.3%, identify as transgender in the U.S., according to the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law.
