The Fairness Question: What Transgender Athletes Reveal About How We Define Equality.

As the Supreme Court prepares to rule on transgender athlete bans, America confronts a collision between competing visions of justice.

On January 13, 2026, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in two cases that distill one of the most contentious questions in contemporary American law: What does fairness mean when fundamental rights collide? The cases involve two transgender athletes Lindsay Hecox, a 24-year-old seeking to compete on Boise State's women's track team, and B.P.J., a 15-year-old high school student who has identified as female since third grade and takes hormone therapy. Both challenge state laws that ban transgender women from competing in women's sports. The stakes extend far beyond athletics. The Court's decision will shape how America reconciles inclusion with fairness, identity with biology, and individual rights with collective interests.

The issue has escalated rapidly. In February 2025, President Trump signed an executive order directing the federal government to revoke funding from schools allowing transgender women to compete in women's sports, calling such participation "demeaning, unfair, and dangerous." The NCAA responded within days, announcing a new policy that restricts women's sports competition to athletes assigned female at birth, a reversal of its previous gender identity based approach. Idaho's "Fairness in Women's Sports Act" (2020) and West Virginia's "Save Women's Sports Act" (2021) are the first of their kind, imposing categorical bans on transgender women's participation in women's sports at all educational levels.

Lower courts have split. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Idaho's law likely violates the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection guarantee and Title IX, the federal civil rights law prohibiting sex discrimination in education. The 4th Circuit reached a similar conclusion about West Virginia's law. But the Supreme Court's recent decision in United States v. Skrmetti (2025), upholding Tennessee's ban on gender affirming medical care for transgender minors, suggests the current majority may take a narrower view of transgender rights. The Court declined to recognize transgender people as a suspect class deserving heightened legal protection, instead applying minimal scrutiny to the Tennessee law.

Analysis

The case exposes a genuine tension that neither side adequately addresses. Advocates for transgender inclusion argue that categorical bans are both discriminatory and scientifically crude. B.P.J., for instance, has never undergone male puberty and has received hormone therapy that has altered her physiology. Excluding her from women's sports based solely on sex assigned at birth, they contend, treats her identity as irrelevant and her presence as inherently threatening, a form of discrimination that echoes historical exclusions of women and minorities from public life.

States defending the bans argue that biological differences in athletic performance are real and measurable. Male athletes, on average, develop greater muscle mass, bone density, and cardiovascular capacity before and after puberty. Even with hormone therapy, some advantages may persist. From this perspective, women's sports exist precisely to create a space where female athletes can compete fairly against one another, a hard won achievement of Title IX. Allowing transgender women to compete, they argue, undermines that protection.

Yet both positions contain internal contradictions. Those defending blanket bans struggle to explain why they exclude all transgender women categorically, including those like B.P.J. who have never experienced male puberty and whose hormone levels match cisgender women's. If fairness is the concern, why not individualized assessments? Conversely, those advocating for inclusion often minimize the legitimate scientific questions about athletic advantage, as though acknowledging any biological difference would undermine transgender rights. It need not.

The deeper issue is that "fairness" itself is contested. Is it fair to exclude someone based on a characteristic they cannot change? Or is it fair to potentially disadvantage cisgender women athletes? These are not rhetorical questions with obvious answers. They reflect different moral frameworks, one emphasizing individual dignity and non discrimination, the other emphasizing equal opportunity within a defined group.

Reflection

What makes this case philosophically significant is that it cannot be resolved by appealing to science alone. Science can tell us about average physiological differences, but it cannot tell us what fairness requires. That is a question of values, law, and social imagination.

The Supreme Court's decision will likely hinge on whether it views transgender status as a classification deserving heightened scrutiny, suggesting laws targeting it are presumptively unconstitutional, or merely a policy choice for legislatures to make. But the real question Americans must grapple with is whether we can imagine a framework that honors both inclusion and fairness, one that neither erases transgender people's identities nor dismisses the legitimate interests of cisgender women athletes.

Some possibilities exist. Individualized assessments based on hormone levels and athletic history, separate competitive categories, or different rules for different age groups and levels of competition. These are not perfect solutions. They require ongoing adjustment and honest conversation about what we are trying to protect and why.

What the transgender athlete debate ultimately reveals is that equality is not a fixed concept. It is something we construct together, through law and culture, by asking hard questions about who belongs, what we owe one another, and how we balance competing goods. The Supreme Court will issue a ruling. But the real work, of building a society that can hold multiple truths at once, will fall to the rest of us.

In the end, fairness is not something we discover. It is something we decide to create.