Virginia’s attorney general has joined 25 other Republican state attorneys general in an effort to prevent a 13-year-old West Virginia track athlete from competing on her middle school team.
The Republican AGs filed an amicus brief urging the United States Supreme Court to hear West Virginia’s appeal of an appeals court verdict that overturned the state’s law, which the Republicans say is intended to protect girls’ sports.
A 2021 state rule prohibiting trans women and girls from participating in athletics prompted Becky Pepper-Jackson, a 13-year-old trans middle-school student, to file a lawsuit.
In April, Judge Toby Heytens of the Fourth District Court of Appeals wrote that the state “cannot expect that B.P.J. will countermand her social transition, her medical treatment, and all the work she has done with her schools, teachers, and coaches for nearly half her life by introducing herself to teammates, coaches, and even opponents as a boy.”
“By participating on boy teams, B.P.J. would be sharing the field with boys who are larger, stronger, and faster than her because of the elevated levels of circulating testosterone she lacks,” says Heytens. By effectively ‘excluding’ B.P.J. from all non-coed sports, the Act exposes her to the very harms Title IX aims to prevent.
However, Virginia’s attorney general, Jason Miyares, said in a statement that the rejected state law, known as the Save Women’s Sports Act, “is about fairness and protecting the integrity of women’s sports.”
“Allowing biological males to compete with biological females undoes decades of progress and is plain unfair to women and girls. “I’m committed to ensuring that female athletes can compete on a level playing field,” Miyares stated.
That’s not what he’s actually doing here.
“As the Fourth Circuit made clear in this ruling, West Virginia’s effort to ban one 13-year-old transgender girl from joining her teammates on the middle school cross country and track team was singling out Becky for disparate treatment because of her sex,” said Sruti Swaminathan, a staff attorney at Lamb
“That’s discrimination, pure and simple,” Swaminathan remarked.