Idaho’s HB 500 and West Virginia’s HB 3293 expressly classify students based on their sex assigned at birth and prohibit all transgender women and girls from joining women’s and girls’ sports teams across all levels of competition at any public educational institution. These statutes also subject cisgender and transgender women and girls—but not any men or boys—to invasive sex-verification procedures to determine their eligibility to join public-school sports teams. Transgender students seeking to join women’s and girls’ sports teams, Lindsay Hecox and B.P.J, a minor using her initials, challenged the laws in separate lawsuits.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit considered whether these laws’ sex-based exclusions of Hecox and B.P.J. satisfied intermediate scrutiny, the doctrinal test required for sex-based classifications to pass constitutional muster. Longstanding Supreme Court precedent underscores that classifications that treat individuals differently based on their sex must “serve important governmental objectives” and “the discriminatory means employed [must be] substantially related to the achievement of those objectives.” In concluding that the challenged statutes fall short of this demanding standard, the Ninth Circuit and the Fourth Circuit both acknowledged a government interest in promoting competitive fairness in athletics but rejected the notion that, as applied to Hecox and B.P.J., categorical bans on the participation of all transgender women and girls on women’s and girls’ sports teams substantially furthered that interest. Instead, such sweeping prohibitions reduce these students to the mere fact of their sex—and deny them the equal opportunity to participate in public-school athletics and contribute to society based on their individual talents and capacities.

In November 2025, CAC filed an amicus brief in support of the student athletes. Our brief makes three principal points.

First, the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees equality under the law, prohibiting states from denying to “any person” the “equal protection of the laws.” As the Amendment’s text and history make clear, the Equal Protection Clause establishes a broad guarantee of equality for all persons, securing the same rights and protection under the law regardless of race, sex, or class. Its framers consciously chose universal language intended to secure equal rights for all people. Under the Amendment’s plain text and original meaning, this sweeping guarantee of equality applies to everyone, and states may not impose invidious class-based discrimination that bans students from public-school activities, including sports, based on their sex.

Second, the Nineteenth Amendment buttressed the Fourteenth Amendment’s promise of equality. Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment imposed a penalty of reduced congressional representation on states that denied or abridged the right to vote to any of the state’s “male inhabitants,” implicitly sanctioning the disenfranchisement of women. Women’s-rights activists celebrated the Fourteenth Amendment’s universal embrace of equality, but rejected the notion that our foundational promises of democracy, freedom, and equality were real when half the population was excluded from voting based on sex. Demanding fundamental constitutional change, women’s-rights activists finally succeeded with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. The Nineteenth Amendment deepened the Fourteenth Amendment’s core promise of equality, guaranteeing equal citizenship to all regardless of sex and rejecting state-sponsored discrimination rooted in sex-based stereotypes about physical bodies and social roles.

Third, consistent with the text and history of the Fourteenth and Nineteenth Amendments, the Supreme Court has long held that “gender-based classifications . . . require ‘an exceedingly persuasive justification’ in order to survive constitutional scrutiny.” Idaho’s and West Virginia’s laws cannot satisfy this standard. To begin, Idaho’s HB 500 and West Virginia’s HB 3293 classify students based on sex. Idaho’s HB 500 bars Lindsay Hecox from competing on the women’s sports teams she attempted to join because the law identifies her as a “student[] of the male sex” based on her sex assigned at birth. And West Virginia’s HB 3293 uses B.P.J.’s sex—“based solely” on her “reproductive biology and genetics at birth”—to determine that she cannot join girls’ athletics teams and sports. Next, these sex-based classifications do not further the state governments’ stated goals of maintaining competitive fairness in women’s sports. Idaho’s law is remarkably overbroad and covers students who have no relevant advantage over cisgender woman athletes, including Hecox, who is barred from women’s sports teams even though she is prescribed hormone therapy that, as the Ninth Circuit noted, has dramatically altered her body and removed physiological traits that would differentiate her from cisgender peers. Similarly, West Virginia’s HB 3293 bars all transgender girls and women from playing on athletic teams for women or girls. But banning B.P.J.—a transgender girl who received puberty blockers and is undergoing gender-affirming hormone therapy that “cause[s] her to experience [the same] physical changes . . . typically experienced by cisgender girls”—does not advance competitive fairness. Overall, the challenged classifications deny Hecox and B.P.J. consideration as individuals, subjecting them to overbroad and inaccurate stereotypes about their physiology and abilities based simply on the fact of their sex. The Idaho and West Virginia laws cannot survive heightened judicial review as applied here and thus violate the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection.