LISTEN LIVE: The Supreme Court is considering whether states can ban transgender students from playing sports

WASHINGTON (AP) — Becky Pepper Jackson placed third in the discus at West Virginia last year even though she was only in her first year of high school. Pepper Jackson, now a 15-year-old sophomore, knows her upcoming season could be her last.

The Supreme Court will hear arguments on Tuesday, January 13 at 10 a.m. EST. Watch the live stream in our video player above.

West Virginia has banned transgender girls like Pepper Jackson from competing in female and male sports, and is among more than two dozen states with similar laws. Although the West Virginia law was blocked by lower courts, the outcome may have been different in the conservative-dominated Supreme Court, which allowed multiple restrictions on transgender people to be imposed last year.

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The justices will hear arguments Tuesday in two cases on whether the sports ban violates the Constitution or a landmark federal law known as Title IX that prohibits sex-based discrimination in education. The second case comes from Idaho, where college student Lindsay Hickox challenged that state’s law.

Decisions are expected to be made by early summer.

The Republican administration of President Donald Trump has targeted transgender Americans since the first day of his second term, including expelling transgender people from the military and declaring that sex is unchangeable and assigned at birth.

Pepper Jackson has become the face of the national battle over transgender girls’ participation in athletics that has been fought at the state and federal levels as Republicans have seized on the issue as a fight for sports justice for women and girls.

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“I think this is something that needs to be done,” Pepper Jackson said in an interview with The Associated Press conducted via Zoom. “It’s something I’m here to do because…it’s important to me. I know it’s important to other people. So, I’m here for it.”

She sat next to her mother, Heather Jackson, on a couch in their home outside Bridgeport, a rural West Virginia community about 40 miles southwest of Morgantown, to talk about a legal battle that began when she was a middle schooler and ended near the back of the pack in cross-country races.

Pepper-Jackson grew up to be a competitive discus thrower and shot put thrower. In addition to the bronze medal in the discus, she placed eighth among the shot putters.

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She attributes her success to hard work, playing sports in school and in her backyard, and lifting weights. Bieber-Jackson has been taking puberty-blocking medications and has publicly declared herself a girl since she was in third grade, although a June Supreme Court decision upholding the state’s ban on gender-confirming medical treatment for minors forced her to go out of state to seek care.

Her improvement as an athlete has been cited as a reason for not allowing her to compete against girls.

“There are immutable physical and biological differences between men and women that make men bigger, stronger and faster than women. And if we allow biological males to play sports against biological females, those differences will erode the ability and places available to women in these sports that we have fought so hard for over the last 50 years,” West Virginia Attorney General J.B. McCosky said in an interview with the AP. Makowski said he is not aware of any other transgender athlete in the state who has competed or is trying to compete in women’s or girls’ sports.

Despite the small numbers of transgender athletes, this issue has gained great importance. The NCAA and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committees banned transgender women from women’s sports after Trump signed an executive order aimed at blocking their participation.

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The public generally supports the border. An October 2025 AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll found that about 6 in 10 American adults “strongly” or “somewhat” supported requiring transgender children and teens to compete only on sports teams that match the sex they were assigned at birth, not the gender they identify with, while about 2 in 10 “strongly” or “somewhat” opposed and about a quarter had no 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 United States, according to the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law.

Those aligned with the administration on the issue paint the issue in broader terms than just sports, pointing to state laws, Trump administration policies and court rulings against transgender people.

“I think there are cultural, political and legal headwinds that all support this idea that saying a man can be a woman is just a lie,” said John Burch, an attorney at the conservative Christian law firm Alliance Defending Freedom, which has led the legal push against transgender people. “And if we want a society that respects women and girls, we have to come to terms with that reality. The sooner we do that, the better for women everywhere, whether it’s on high school sports teams, high school locker rooms and bathrooms, abused women’s shelters, and women’s prisons.”

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But Heather Jackson offered different terms to describe the efforts to keep her daughter off West Virginia’s playgrounds.

“Hate. It’s just hate,” she said. “This society is today’s society. We have a long history of alienating marginalized parts of society.”

Pepper Jackson has seen some of the ugly side of the debate on display, including when a competitor wore a T-shirt to a championship meet that read “Men don’t belong in women’s sports.”

“I wish these people would educate themselves. Just so they know I’m just there to have a good time. That’s all. But it hurts sometimes, like it gets to me sometimes, but I try to shake it off,” she said.

One schoolmate, identified in court papers as AC, said Pepper Jackson used graphic language to sexually bully her teammates.

When asked if she said any of the allegations, Pepper-Jackson said: “I did not. The school ruled there was no evidence to prove that was true.”

The legal battle will turn on whether the Constitution’s equal protection clause or Title IX’s anti-discrimination law protects transgender people.

The court ruled in 2020 that workplace discrimination against transgender people is sex discrimination, but declined to extend the reasoning for that decision to include the issue related to health care for transgender minors.

The court has been flooded with competing legal briefs from Republican- and Democratic-led states, members of Congress, athletes, doctors, scientists and scientists.

The outcome could also impact separate legal efforts seeking to ban transgender athletes in states that have continued to allow them to compete.

If Pepper Jackson had to stop competing, she said she would still be able to lift weights and continue playing the trumpet in school concerts and jazz bands.

“It would hurt a lot, and I know it would, but this is what I have to do,” she added.