BOSTON — Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey pledged Tuesday to keep fighting to put transgender athletes back on girls' and women's sports teams, hours after the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a 6-3 decision upholding state laws that restrict girls' team eligibility to athletes born female.
The Court's opinion in West Virginia v. B.P.J., authored by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, held that neither Title IX nor the Equal Protection Clause prohibits states from offering sex-separated school athletics. A companion case from Idaho, Little v. Hecox, was decided on the same grounds.
Markey, the senior senator from Massachusetts, posted his response to X just before 11 a.m. Eastern, addressed to "the trans community."
— Ed Markey (@EdMarkey) June 30, 2026To the trans community in the wake of this SCOTUS decision:
This is not the end of the fight. It is only the beginning.
This ruling will tear kids away from their teams and the sports they love. But it cannot tear us from each other.
Together, we will fight and we will win.
"This is not the end of the fight," Markey wrote. "It is only the beginning." He framed the decision as one that "will tear kids away from their teams and the sports they love," and ended with the line: "Together, we will fight and we will win."
What the Court actually ruled
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The Title IX portion of the opinion was unanimous. All nine justices agreed that the federal anti-sex-discrimination statute does not require schools to allow biological boys to compete on girls' teams.
The split was on the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Six justices — the Court's conservative majority — held that state laws restricting transgender athletes from girls' teams do not violate equal protection because the laws are based on biological sex, not on a suspect classification like gender identity, and survive heightened scrutiny on the state's interest in maintaining fair competition and safety in women's athletics. The three liberal justices dissented from that portion of the ruling.
The practical effect: state-level "Save Women's Sports" laws — currently on the books in roughly half of U.S. states — now have firm Supreme Court backing.
The Massachusetts position
Massachusetts has not passed a "Save Women's Sports" law, and the Healey administration has explicitly opposed such legislation. The Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association continues to allow student-athletes to compete on teams that align with their gender identity.
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Today's Supreme Court ruling does not require Massachusetts to change that policy. It does, however, remove the federal-court roadblock that would have stopped a future Beacon Hill majority from passing a West Virginia-style restriction.
Markey's posture suggests that fight is now Congress's, not the federal judiciary's.
What's next
Markey did not detail the legislative or political path he expects to take. The senator is the lead Senate sponsor on the Trans Bill of Rights, a 2025 resolution that called for federal civil-rights protections for transgender and nonbinary Americans across employment, housing, and education. The resolution has not advanced.
The trans-athletes ruling is the second major Supreme Court decision affecting Massachusetts Democrats in two weeks. The Court's June 25 ruling in Mullin v. Doe ended judicial review of TPS terminations, prompting Rep. Seth Moulton to introduce the TPS Relief Act to override the decision. Today's B.P.J. ruling now lands the same dynamic in Markey's lane.
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