By the end of June, the US Supreme Court is expected to rule in two cases, West Virginia v. BPJ and Little v. Hecox, that will decide whether trans people can be excluded from sport based on their gender identity. Most observers expect a 6-3 decision upholding those bans. But the cases carry a weight far beyond athletics, and I want to talk about what that actually means for the trans people and families living inside all of this right now.
Think about what it is to be the parent of a trans child, and to know that whether your child gets to play sport, use a bathroom without fear, or access healthcare may ultimately come down to which judges happen to be sitting on which court. That is not a constitutional system offering protection. That is a lottery. And for many trans people and their families, it has been a lottery for years, a grinding, exhausting uncertainty that sits underneath every ordinary decision of daily life.
Dame Magazine's analysis traces how we arrived here, and the picture it draws is important. This is not, as some would have it, a backlash against trans people going too far or too fast. The article makes a compelling case that what we are watching is the outcome of a deliberate, decades-long project to reshape the federal judiciary in a conservative ideological direction. From the 1971 Powell memo to the founding of the Federalist Society in 1982, to over a billion dollars spent by Leonard Leo's network on judicial appointments, to three Supreme Court seats filled by a single administration, the current 6-3 conservative supermajority did not arrive by accident. It was built. And it was built with exactly this kind of case in mind.
Last year's ruling in US v. Skrmetti, which applied the lowest level of constitutional scrutiny to state bans on gender-affirming care for trans youth, already told us something sobering about where the Court's instincts lie. The forthcoming BPJ decision is likely to consolidate that direction, potentially providing a legal roadmap for upholding almost any discriminatory policy against trans people as long as it invokes "biological sex" as justification. The article's warning that a particularly sweeping decision could effectively endorse bathroom bans and strict sex-segregation across federally funded educational settings is not alarmism. It is a reasonable reading of the trajectory.
What I keep coming back to, though, is the human cost of all of this, not as an abstract concept but as something lived. A trans teenager who wants to run with her teammates. A young boy who just wants to get changed after football without it being a political event. A family who spent years fighting for their child's right to simply exist in school. These are the people behind the case names, and they deserve to be at the centre of this conversation, not footnotes in a constitutional argument.
The article argues, and I think rightly, that the path forward runs through structural court reform: expanding the Supreme Court to 13 justices to reflect the current number of circuit courts, introducing 18-year term limits so that no single president can shape the judiciary for a generation, and banning federal judges from membership in ideological organisations. These are not radical ideas. The historical link between the number of justices and the number of circuit courts existed until the Civil War. The Brennan Center for Justice has endorsed the term limit model. The Judicial Conference itself nearly passed a ban on membership in ideological groups in 2020 before the affected members blocked it. That last detail alone tells you something about the problem.
These reforms are not easy or fast. They are not. But the article makes the point I think matters most: human rights do not flow from better constitutional arguments in a rigged forum. They flow from political power, and right now that means fighting to restore the democratic accountability of institutions that have been systematically captured.
For trans people and those who love them, the courts have moved from being a last resort to being, in some ways, the most contested front. That is a strange and painful place to find yourself. The hope is real, though, because the argument for reform is gaining serious ground, people are paying attention, and the case for change has never been made more clearly than it is right now by the lives of the trans children and families at the heart of these rulings.
If there is a news story you would like me to cover then just let Sammy know.
Dr Helen Webberley is a Gender Specialist, Medical Educator, and advocate for trans rights and gender diversity.
