Case Particulars

Tribunal

U.S. Supreme Court

Date Filed

September 19, 2025

Docket No.

24-43

Case Status

Amicus brief filed supporting Petitioner

Case Overview

On September 19, 2025, the Equal Protection Project (EPP), filed filed an amicus curiae, or “friend-of-the-court,” brief in the United States Supreme Court in West Virginia v. BPJ.

This case asks whether West Virginia may, consistent with the Fourteenth Amendment and Title IX, protect women’s athletics by requiring that participation on female sports teams be limited to biological females.

Like the other forty-nine states, West Virginia schools offer separate sports teams based on biological sex. In the Save Women’s Sports Act, the state went a step further by making clear that female sport’s teams based on competitive skill or involving contact sports, should  be open only to biological women. The West Virginia Legislature rightly concluded that biological boys should compete on boys’ and co-ed teams but not girls’ teams because of the inherent physical differences between biological males and biological females.

Title IX’s entire purpose was to give women an equal playing field.

Congress recognized—and the Court’s jurisprudence and the Department of Education’s Title IX regulations confirm—that equality requires laws to account for real differences, not pretend they do not exist. Acknowledging biological differences does not demean women. On the contrary, it is the condition of their legal equality. By creating female-only teams, Congress ensured that women would have a meaningful chance to compete and excel in sports.

To treat sex as a matter of self-identification is to untether law from fact. It replaces a workable standard with a fluid one that varies from person to person, day to day, and case to case. The result is not equality but uncertainty.

EPP’s brief offers the Court three additional reasons it should protect the First Amendment rights of anonymous donors to those offered by the Petitioner:

First, an alternative subjective and fluid standard for defining sex, rather than biology, is unworkable. If sex is redefined as subjective identity based on shifting psychology, rather than biological fact, equal protection doctrine in the context of sex classifications
loses all coherence.

Second, and as a result, Courts would no longer be equipped to assess whether a classification was “based on sex,” because the category itself would be meaningless. Laws and policies could be evaded by intentional redefinition, rendering judicial scrutiny toothless.

Last, and worse, by ignoring biological differences in athletics, courts would invite the very inequality Title IX was meant to cure. Biological women will be excluded from opportunities because they cannot fairly compete against biological men.

The Court should protect women’s right to equal opportunities in sports.