US Supreme Court to consider ban on trans athletes on women's teams

The United States Supreme Court agreed, this Thursday (3), to address the issue of the participation of transgender athletes in women's sports.

The court announced that in the next session it will hear a case challenging laws in Idaho and West Virginia that prohibit transgender athletes from competing in female competitions.

In recent years, more than twenty states in the United States have passed laws prohibiting athletes who were assigned male at birth from participating on women's sports teams.

The conservative-dominated Supreme Court's decision to hear the case comes two weeks after the court upheld a Tennessee law that bars minors from accessing gender-transition treatment.

The court also recently backed a move by President Donald Trump to discharge transgender troops from the military.

In February, Trump issued an executive order banning transgender athletes from participating on women’s sports teams. “From now on, women’s sports will be for women only,” the president declared.

The decree allows federal agencies to deny funding to educational centers that allow transgender athletes to compete on women's teams.

This week, the University of Pennsylvania agreed to no longer accept transgender athletes on its women's teams following the controversy surrounding swimmer Lia Thomas.

The first transgender swimmer to win a college competition in the United States in March 2022, Thomas has represented the burning issue of transgender athletes participating in women's events. She competed in women's events in 2021 and 2022, but her results sparked a heated debate in which critics argued that having competed as a man in the past gave her an unfair physiological advantage.

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