competing

WASHINGTON  — The Supreme Court justices sounded ready on Tuesday to uphold state laws that forbid transgender athletes from competing on school sports teams for girls.

Idaho, West Virginia and 25 other Republican-led states say a student’s biological sex at birth should determine who can play on the girls’ or boys’ teams.

They say it is unfair to girls to permit biological males to compete against them in sports like track and field or swimming. “Biological males are, on average, bigger, stronger and faster than biological females,” West Virginia’s state lawyers said.

While the court’s conservative majority court is likely to rule for these states, the justices said they prefer a narrow decision limited to these laws.

If so, such a ruling for the red states will not directly change the law in California and the more than a dozen other Democratic-led states that forbid discrimination based on gender identity. Those laws protect rights of transgender girls to compete on a girls’ team.

A similar dispute came before the court last year.

Then, the conservative justices ruled Tennessee and other red states may prohibit gender-affirming drugs and medical treatments for teenagers who suffer from gender dysphoria.

The 6-3 majority said this was not unconstitutional discrimination based on the teenagers’ transgender status. But that ruling did not strike down the conflicting law in California.

In recent months, the Trump administration joined the transgender sports cases on the side of West Virginia and Idaho.

But its lawyers argued only that the Constitution permits states to exclude transgender girls from girls’ teams. It does not require that they do so, their lawyers said.

Even a West Virginia lawyer agreed. “There is enough room for California to make a different interpretation,” state solicitor Michael R. Williams told the court.

Deputy Solicitor Gen. Hashim Mooppan said these Democratic states “are violating Title IX,” the education law that allows separate sports teams for girls and boys. But he said the court should not rule on that question now.

Last year, in response to the court’s ruling on gender-affirming care, President Trump cut off federal funds to hospitals and medical facilities that provided such care.

A ruling upholding restrictions on transgender athletes could spur the Trump administration to threaten Democratic states with a loss of federal education funds.

Becky Pepper-Jackson, now 15, has carried on a lonely legal fight to compete on her school’s track team in Bridgeport, W.Va.

Designated male at birth, she says she is the only transgender girl competing in her state and has been the target of complaints and protests.

In middle school, Becky participated in cross-country as a sixth-grader and described herself as slow. She “routinely placed near the back of the pack,” her attorneys told the court.

But upon reaching high school, she has been winning.

In 2024, she “placed in the top three in every track event in which B.P.J. competed, winning most,” the state’s attorneys said. Last spring “focusing on strength events, B.P.J. bumped female competitors out of the state tournament, then placed third in the state in discus and eighth in shot put while competing against much older female athletes,” they told the court.

Her attorney, Joshua Block of the American Civil Liberties Union, said she has been winning in the shot put and discus “through hard work and practice.”

He said she “received puberty-delaying medication and gender-affirming estrogen that allowed her to undergo a hormonal puberty typical of a girl.”

He urged the court to rule for Becky because she does not have a physical advantage due to her biology.

But the justices did not sound inclined to rule on the issue of puberty blockers.

WASHINGTON — After weeks of meandering through snowy fields of the North and Midwest, the campaign for the presidency now turns South, to a vast region that paradoxically mixes relatively low unemployment with high dissatisfaction.

In Blanco County, Tex., for example, the unemployment rate of 3.5%–down one-third over the last three years–compares favorably with the days when local favorite son Lyndon B. Johnson reigned in Washington in the ‘60s. But that fact does not console Ava Johnson Cox, the late President’s 87-year-old cousin.

“At one time, America contained the inspiration and the purifying principles of the world,” Miss Ava told a visiting reporter recently. “But no more.”

Clear across Dixie, in Atlanta, Jackie Rogers, owner of a downtown ladies’ boutique, struck a similar note.

“I’m very upset about this economy,” she said. “This is the first time America is not rewarding their well-educated people.

“They are the ones who went to school and studied so hard to make America No. 1,” she added. Now, “they are the ones on the unemployment lines.”

But while Southerners may agree with citizens of, for example, New Hampshire, about the problems the country faces, they have had much less exposure to politicians’ proposed solutions.

Unlike New Hampshirites, who lived for two months under a steady barrage of campaigning before they voted last week, citizens of the South have only just begun to hear from the candidates. When they vote–March 3 in Georgia and Maryland, March 7 in South Carolina and March 10 in Florida, Texas and several other Southern and border states–they will do so after an intense, but short, campaign.

As a result, for many potential Southern voters, the sense of discontent they share with the rest of the nation remains somewhat separated from the political process, and their feelings about candidates remain largely unformed.

“It’s strange to be so far into the process and not feel more committed to someone,” said Margaret Yoder, a 44-year-old real estate broker in Miami. “I’m feeling confused.”

Southern voters know President Bush, and many in the South still like him despite disapproval of his handling of the economy.

“I’m going to vote Republican,” said Henry Dryer Jr. of Carollton, Ga. “I think, personally, and most of the people in my circle feel, like Bush has done as good a job as any President in his circumstances could have done.

“The poor man can’t do it by himself,” Dryer said. On the other hand, he added: “People in this part of the country are just very disappointed that Bush hasn’t done something to pull us out of the recession.”

On the Democratic side, the name of Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton registers with many, but primarily for the controversies surrounding him–unsubstantiated allegations of marital infidelity and questions about his Vietnam-era draft status.

And as for former Massachusetts Sen. Paul E. Tsongas, some voters say they like what they have heard of him. Tsongas is “not a showman,” said James Smith, a retiree in Atlanta. But more typically, Southerners interviewed for this story said that despite his victory in New Hampshire, they simply remain unsure who Tsongas is.

“People still have trouble pronouncing his name,” said Beth Carper, a graduate student at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, who said she supports Tsongas but doubts he can win when her state votes March 10.

In Johnson City, Tex., the Blanco County seat in the hill country west of Austin, Ralph Moss, 48, said he has made only one decision about the election. He voted for Bush once and will not do it again. Beyond that, Moss said, he cannot decide what to do.

“There’s not a real good choice to make,” said Moss, who is the mayor, a nonpartisan position. “I may not vote in the primary.”

DeeDee McKennis, a cashier at Johnson City’s Dixie Fried Chicken and Quick Stop, would like to see the country make a change.

Even though she and her husband have had “the best year we’ve had in years” economically, she remains worried. McKennis, 46, and her husband both hold two jobs, she said, but they cannot afford to send any of their four children to college. Nor can they afford health insurance.

Still, McKennis has not found a candidate she feels confident would bring about the changes she would like to see.

Down the street, Duke Rumpf, 68, the manager of the Charles’ Motel, gave Clinton a tepid endorsement and, in the process, summed up what many Southern voters seem to feel.

Clinton, he said, had “got the state of Arkansas in pretty good shape.” But, he added: “I ain’t seen anybody I’m real enthused about. I know I ain’t enthused about the one (President) we got.”

Special correspondents Edith Stanley in Atlanta, Karen Brandon in Johnson City, Tex., Michael Clary in Miami and Patrick Thomas in Nashville contributed to this story.

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