Let Them Play — and Let Them Live

The “trans sports cases” before SCOTUS are really about stripping protections from transgender adults.

January 13, 2026 — Today the Supreme Court of the United States is hearing two cases about the right of girls to play girls' sports and to be free of intrusive privacy violations by the state: Little v Hecox and West Virginia v BJP. Two District Courts and two Circuit Courts found that laws in Idaho and West Virginia that ban transgender girls and women from playing on the team aligned with their gender violate the Constitution and Title IX. 

Despite these decisions, after months of vitriol and hateful rhetoric from the highest levels of the Trump Administration, the Supreme Court agreed to Idaho and West Virginia’s requests to hear these cases. 

The plaintiffs – a transgender girl, a young transgender woman, and a cisgender girl — have been forced to go through this protracted legal battle merely to be allowed to play — to run, to kick balls, and to practice with friends. That is the overarching goal of K-12 sports, isn’t it? To be part of a team, to push yourself to improve, to learn how to handle both losing and winning with grace?

But in the past few years, right-wing zealots have weaponized youth sports as part of their anti-trans political agenda, using a fabricated issue to attack discrimination protections for all trans people. 

Rainbow Families Action has been fighting since our inception to preserve the ability of trans kids to play as full, equal participants on sports teams that align with their gender. We see the joy, confidence, and belonging that our kids and their peers experience through playing team sports. More than 25 million kids ages 6-17 play some type of youth sports in the U.S. Only a minuscule fraction of those players go on to get a college athletic scholarship or compete at an elite level. These discriminatory new laws, with their creepy insistence on genital inspections and scientifically dubious hormone-level monitoring, impact all kids playing youth sports: from the youngest kids joining Little League teams to middle-school runners to high-school volleyball players. Exclusionary laws harm the tens of thousands of trans kids and the millions of cis kids who love sports and want to play free from fear, harassment, and invasions of their privacy.

The transphobic politicians who have brought these cases to the Supreme Court pretend that they are concerned with protecting “the weaker sex,” as illustrated by their own language, but these laws are misogynistic, racist, transphobic, and actually harm girls and women. Decades of programs fostering girls’ athletics have shown that girls thrive when they are unafraid to show up as themselves, whatever that looks like, without being forced to conform to narrow gender stereotypes … or endure harassment if they do not (or cannot). Girls of color are more likely to be the targets of gender-related accusations and will be most hurt by laws allowing parents or officials to “dispute” an athlete’s gender. Inclusive sports benefit all girls and women — both cisgender and trans.

Trans girls belong on girls’ teams because they are girls, and trans boys belong on boys’ teams because they are boys. The idea that their participation in an aspect of childhood that is universally acknowledged to benefit all kids could harm anyone is ludicrous. It was manufactured and backed by politicians deliberately building up a false threat in order to continue discriminating against trans people in every area of life. 

We will not allow that to happen. Let them play! 

With these SCOTUS cases, much more is at stake than youth sports. These legal challenges have been deliberately set up to give SCOTUS an opportunity to issue a decision as to whether the Equal Protections Clause of the Constitution applies to trans people, which “would open the door for nearly any law targeting transgender people to be deemed constitutionally permissible. That could include adult bathroom bans, restrictions on birth certificates, housing discrimination, and more,” as reported by Erin in the Morning. Such a legal reversal could also lead to a reduction of protections for other marginalized groups. 

Rainbow Families Action is working ceaselessly to protect trans youth and to make the world safer for the adults they will become. Join us: Speak out, fight back!