Two cases are working their way to the end of the Supreme Court's current session, and the decisions could arrive any day now. Little v. Hecox and West Virginia v. BPJ both concern state laws that ban trans students from participating in school sports according to their gender. But the Salon piece covering them makes a point that deserves to be heard much more widely: these are not simply trans stories. They are a test of what the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause actually means, and who it actually protects.

Who is at the heart of these cases?

Behind the legal arguments are two young people. The first is a trans woman who underwent hormone therapy and wanted to join Boise State University's cross-country team, only to find Idaho's 2020 "Fairness in Women's Sports Act" standing between her and that ordinary student ambition. That law does not just bar trans women from female sports teams; it allows any person to challenge a student athlete's gender and subject her to a medical verification process. Think about what that means in practice. Any student, any parent, any coach can point at a girl and demand her body be examined. That is not a protection, but an instrument of surveillance and humiliation.

The second case centres on a trans girl in West Virginia who took puberty blockers to treat gender dysphoria at the onset of puberty and wanted to continue playing on girls' teams in her school. West Virginia's 2021 "Save Women's Sports Act" said no. Her case asks whether Title IX or the 14th Amendment bars a state from assigning students to sports teams based on the sex marked on their birth certificate. She was not asking for special treatment. She was asking to play sport with her peers.

What the 14th Amendment actually says

The equal protection clause, adopted in 1868, says that no state shall deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. Any person. Not any person except trans people. Not any person once we have decided which groups we like this week. Any person.

The concern that runs through the Salon analysis, and that I share, is this: if the Supreme Court narrows its interpretation of who the Constitution protects in order to uphold these bans, it builds the legal architecture for narrowing it further. Rights are not a zero-sum game, and stripping legal recognition from one group does not leave everyone else's protections untouched. It demonstrates that protections can be stripped. That is a different and far more dangerous thing.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor put it plainly during oral argument in Little v. Hecox when she pushed back on arguments about the size of the affected population: "The numbers don't talk about the human beings." That sentence should be printed on the wall of every court in the country. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson pressed the same point, asking why it should matter that a law is constitutional for 99.9 percent of people if you are the one person for whom it demonstrably is not. These are the right questions, asked by the right people, at the right moment. I hope the rest of the court was listening.

The broader pattern is not subtle

These cases do not arrive in isolation. Last summer the court ruled narrowly in favour of Tennessee's ban on gender-affirming care in U.S. v. Skrmetti. The court has also allowed executive orders banning trans people from military service and requiring passports to display the sex assigned at birth to take effect while litigation continues. The direction of travel from this court is not encouraging.

The Salon piece also raises something the sports-ban debate consistently obscures: these laws do not protect women. They put all women under suspicion. The controversy over Algerian Olympic boxer Imane Khelif's eligibility in 2024 showed exactly what happens when gender policing is normalised: any woman whose body does not conform to whoever is doing the policing becomes a target. The baseless claims made about Michelle Obama and Brigitte Macron are part of the same logic. Once you decide that certain women need to prove they are really women, you have not protected womanhood. You have made it conditional.

A broader ruling in West Virginia v. BPJ on assigning school activities by sex would extend these risks well beyond sport. More bathroom restrictions, more verification demands, more situations like the recently viral video of a father taking his daughters to a women's restroom and having police called on him by another customer who decided his girls did not look female enough. That is the world these laws build. It affects everyone.

What is actually at stake

I think often about the two young people at the centre of these cases, and the countless others whose lives will be shaped by how nine justices rule. One wanted to run cross-country. One wanted to play sport with her classmates. These are not radical demands. They are the ordinary things teenagers want, and trans teenagers deserve them just as much as anyone else.

When a government demonstrates that it can strip legal recognition from a group of people it has decided are politically inconvenient, the question every other group should be asking is not "well, it is not us." It is "who is next, and what stops them?" The 14th Amendment was written precisely to prevent the government from answering that question by pointing at the vulnerable and saying "them."

The rulings could land at any point between now and early July. I will be watching, and I hope you will be too.