New Hampshire’s law banning transgender girls from participating in public school-sponsored sports teams, like similar laws around the country, was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday.
The ruling drew quick praise from Governor Kelly Ayotte.
“It is unfair for biological males to compete in women’s sports,” Ayotte said in a statement. “And as the mom of a daughter who competed in varsity sports in high school, I am pleased with the Supreme Court’s decision today that protects women’s sports and paves the way to enforce our law in New Hampshire prohibiting men from competing in women’s sports.”
The court’s six-justice conservative majority ruled that state bans that were challenged in Idaho and West Virginia don’t violate the Constitution. The court unanimously agreed that barring transgender girls and women also doesn’t run afoul of the federal law known as Title IX, which prohibits sex discrimination in education.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote for the court that “states may maintain women’s and girls’ sports for biological females” to address safety and competitive fairness concerns. “The Constitution and Title IX do not require an overhaul of women’s and girls’ sports throughout America.”
More than two dozen other Republican-led states have adopted bans on female transgender athletes, and the decision is expected to extend to them as well.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented, citing evolving science around the issue.
“We just simply do not know scientifically that transgender students pose dangers,” she said, reading from a dissent joined by her liberal colleagues.
Kavanaugh, who has coached girls’ basketball, underlined the importance of women’s sports and athletes’ dedication. “No student-athlete on either side of the issue, whether a biological female or transgender, deserves to be ostracized or vilified,” he wrote.
New Hampshire’s law was signed two years ago by Gov. Chris Sununu.
After it passed, the families of two transgender girls challenged the law in a federal lawsuit. The suit also sought to block President Donald Trump’s executive order that withholds federal funding from schools allowing transgender girls to compete on girls’ sports teams. The Supreme Court decision could affect that lawsuit and others like it in Connecticut and California.
Last year, the family of Iris Turmelle, one of the plaintiffs, sold their Pembroke home and moved to Maine.
In a social media post on Tuesday, Trump applauded the Supreme Court decision, calling it a “BIG WIN.”
NCAA president Charlie Baker told Congress in 2024 that he was aware of only 10 transgender athletes out of more than half a million students on college teams. But despite the small numbers, the issue has taken on outsized importance.
Baker’s NCAA and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committees banned transgender women from women’s sports after Trump’s executive order aimed at barring their participation.
The public is generally supportive of the limits. An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll conducted in October 2025 found that about 6 in 10 U.S. adults “strongly” or “somewhat” favored requiring transgender children and teenagers to compete only on sports teams that match their sex at birth, not the gender they identify with, while about 2 in 10 were “strongly” or “somewhat” opposed and about one-quarter did not have an opinion.
About 2.1 million adults, or 0.8%, and 724,000 people ages 13 to 17, or 3.3%, identify as transgender in the U.S., according to the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law.
Material from the Associated Press was used in this report.