The Supreme Court says its ruling protects women’s and girls’ sports. That’s not the history I lived—or the law that put my generation on the field.
In 1991, I stood on a pitch in Cardiff, Wales, with my teammates at the first Women’s Rugby World Cup. I want to be honest about how I got there. I was not the most talented player on that team—not close. I wasn’t a starter for the final match. Most of my teammates were extraordinary multi-sport athletes who could have excelled at anything. I mostly worked hard, and I had the good luck of coming along at a particular moment in the development of women’s sports: Opportunities for girls had been so scarce for so long that it was still possible to arrive at elite competition without having spent a childhood committed to it. I landed in a sweet spot, and it gave me an experience I never stopped being grateful for.
My playing career lasted until, felled by a serious knee injury, it didn’t. When it ended, I pivoted to civil rights law, which has been its own extraordinary ride. But I carried the lessons of sports with me—about strategy, discipline, sportsmanship, teamwork, losing well and winning better—and they’ve shaped everything since.
That’s how I know, in my bones, how much it matters to give every young person at least the chance at those lessons.
So when the Supreme Court says, as it did earlier this month in West Virginia v. B.P.J., that banning transgender girls from school sports is about protecting the safety and fairness of women’s and girls’ sports, I hear that claim against everything I actually lived.
The loudest voices for “protecting” women from rough sports were never in the scrum with me. They were the ones telling us (and there were many) that rugby was no place for women at all. What actually threatened women’s sports was never a girl who wanted to run cross-country with her friends. It was the belief—dressed up, then as now, in the language of “protection“—that girls don’t belong on the field at all.
What These Bans Actually Do
The case was brought by a West Virginia teenager, Becky Pepper-Jackson, who wanted to run track and cross-country like other family members before her. She is, as far as the record shows, the only transgender student in the state who has publicly sought to play school sports—and when West Virginia passed its categorical ban in 2021, there was no record of a single transgender athlete playing school sports anywhere in the state.
I’m 61. When I was her age, I didn’t have the cultural or social support to even want what she wanted. That’s how new all of this is.
True story: I tried out for Little League baseball in Easton, Pa., in the early 1970s. Exactly two girls did that year, me and Peggy Goulet, and we got placed on a team that was literally called the Rejects. And, still, we were just happy to play. That’s what it looked like, within living memory, when the people in charge decided in advance which kids belonged and where.
And here’s what far too few people know about West Virginia school sports policy: The state already had a solution. For five years before the ban, it used a case-by-case approach, taking into account factors like age, experience, competition level and the sport itself. Transgender students could play if their school determined fair competition wouldn’t be affected.
This is what workable policy could look like: It puts the details in the hands of the people closest to kids and closest to the games, athletic directors, coaches, educators, athletic associations, who can make nuanced judgments.
The 2021 law erased all of that and replaced it with a single rule: no transgender girl, ever, anywhere, in any girls’ sport, at any level, and regardless of whether or not she had ever gone through a male puberty.
A word about safety, because the Court leaned on it and because rugby players have some grounding to talk about it. Rugby takes safety enormously seriously: the laws of the game, tackle-height rules, front-row crouch-and-engage cadence that changes with the level of competition, return-to-play protocols and more. Not one of those protections works by banning a group of people. They work by governing conduct, assessing readiness and looking at actual players. Rules can protect safety and fairness without declaring in advance that an entire category of girls can never play, no matter the facts. That’s the difference between a rule and a wall.
Workable policy … puts the details in the hands of the people closest to kids and closest to the games, athletic directors, coaches, educators, athletic associations, who can make nuanced judgments.
What This Ruling Does to the Law That Put a Generation of Us on That Pitch
To uphold these bans, the Court had to damage something much bigger than sports policy: the legal principle that protects every woman in this country from being judged as a category instead of as a person.
Thirty years ago, in United States v. Virginia, the Supreme Court ordered the Virginia Military Institute to admit women. Virginia’s defense was that most women wouldn’t want VMI’s brutal training and couldn’t handle it.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg—who had spent the 1970s building this principle case by case, long before she wore a robe—answered for the Court with the clearest statement of it the law has ever produced: Generalizations about “the way women are” cannot justify “denying opportunity to women whose talent and capacity place them outside the average description.” A rule can be true about most people, even most women, and still be unconstitutional as to the person it wrongly sweeps in. You judge the individual.
That principle didn’t just build my generation of athletes. It built a generation of women: the litigators and judges, the surgeons, the CEOs and entrepreneurs, the senators and governors, the police officers and firefighters and fighter pilots, the women who were the first of everything. Every one of those doors was held shut by the same argument Virginia made: Most women wouldn’t want this, most women couldn’t do it. VMI is the reason “most women wouldn’t” and “most women couldn’t” stopped being legal answers—in admissions offices, in boardrooms, in legislatures, in the military and, yes, on the playing field or pitch.
Everything my teammates and I got to do, and everything the women leading today in every one of those arenas can take blessedly for granted, rests on courts refusing to accept the assumed average as a verdict on the individual. Players like us were the exceptions to somebody’s generalization. So was every woman who ever broke a barrier. The law’s promise to see us anyway is a large part of why there was a Women’s Rugby World Cup for me to play in at all.
I got to see that promise up close, in a small way, in my time at law school after I came home from Cardiff. While at the University of Chicago Law School, I sat in one of the first classes a young professor named Elena Kagan ever taught. I never played softball with her, but I wish I had. Nobody made her choose between being taken seriously and being on the field. The same world that let a law professor play softball with her students let her become a justice of the United States Supreme Court—where, last week, she was one of the three dissenters in B.P.J.
That is what it looks like when the doors are open: A woman gets to be and do all of it. And that is exactly what’s at stake for the kids in these cases.
The athletes in these cases made a VMI argument. They said: Whatever is generally true about average athletic advantage is not true of us; the state’s own justifications don’t apply here.
And the Court answered, in essence: Even if you’re right, it doesn’t matter. States don’t have to look at individuals. A law is fine if it addresses “the overall problem,” and the plaintiffs hadn’t identified “an especially large subclass” of people like them. (Mic drop—in the worst way.)
That’s how civil rights works, though; or at least how I’ve always been taught (and how I’ve taught and argued) it is supposed to. Most civil rights cases in U.S. history were brought by someone the government considered too unusual, too few, too inconvenient to take into account. Constitutional equality jurisprudence exists precisely to address the hard problem of majoritarianism.
The Constitution strikes a balance: Politics and policy get to govern most things, most of the time. But there is a floor of protection beneath it all, so that the power of the majority doesn’t slide into overreach, scapegoating or bias. Majorities largely don’t need courts. The floor exists for the people standing on it.
A Constitution that protects only large groups isn’t protecting individuals at all. And a Court willing to reason this way has loosened a bolt in the machinery that protects all of us. Women of my generation didn’t fight to be seen as individuals, as athletes, as leaders, as whatever they had it in them to be, rather than as “the way women are,” only to watch that principle eroded now, in their name and over their objection.
If that sounds abstract, consider how the Court once approached exactly this question. In 1992, in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, Pennsylvania required married women to notify their husbands before an abortion, and defended the law by saying it barely affected anyone; most women tell their husbands anyway. The Court rejected that in words worth remembering: The analysis “does not end with the one percent of women upon whom the statute operates; it begins there.” The proper focus is “the group for whom the law is a restriction, not the group for whom the law is irrelevant.” The women with abusive husbands were few. They were also the whole point.
Last week, the Court inverted that. The people transgender sports bans operate on were dismissed as too few to count. In 1992, constitutional analysis began with the people a law burdens. In 2026, the people didn’t matter.
The Limits Worth Defending
This ruling, though, comes with limits, and limits hold only when people treat them as real and defend them.
My close friend and colleague, Shannon Minter, legal director for the National Center for LGBT Rights, has laid out how narrow the BPJ decision actually is, and his analysis is worth reading in full. The short version: The Court said states may ban, not that they must—so inclusive policies in the states without bans remain fully lawful today. The Court’s own first footnote preserves as an open question whether schools that want to include transgender athletes may do so, a question being litigated in the lower courts right now, and one we intend to win. The ruling is expressly confined to sports; the majority itself contrasted sports with ordinary school and workplace settings, and Bostock‘s protections against LGBTQ discrimination stand untouched.
The Court, importantly, also left open the level of constitutional scrutiny transgender people receive, which means a future case, on a fuller record, can still establish real protection.
The Court also told us where this question should be decided, if we can take it seriously, which is by the people, their elected representatives, and the democratic process. Fine. That is an arena we know well. These bans were passed by legislatures, and legislatures can repeal them. School boards and athletic associations in the states without bans can adopt and defend inclusive policies starting now. Many (maybe most) of us live in a school district and have the right to vote (though it’s not lost on me the efforts by this same court to tear that right down).
Rugby taught me that you play for the person next to you, that you get up after being knocked down, that you bind tight or the scrum collapses, and that the score partway through is just that. More than half a century ago, this country decided that girls who had been told they didn’t belong on the field belonged there after all. I got to live the proof of that promise, from a team called the Rejects to a World Cup storied stadium in Cardiff, Wales. The work now is to keep that promise for every kid who wants to play.
All of them.
