Federal Judge Blocks Indiana Ban on Trans Athletes, Citing Supreme Court’s 2020 Bostock Ruling

A federal judge in Indiana today temporarily blocked a state law on Tuesday, ruling that a 10-year-old transgender girl must be allowed to rejoin her school’s girls’ softball team, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Indiana announced.

“We are pleased that Judge Magnus-Stinson has recognized this and required that A.M. be allowed to play on her school’s softball team,” legal director Ken Falk said in a Tuesday statement, using the initials of the student in question.

“If other students are being denied the right to join a sports team at their school due to their transgender status, we encourage them to contact the ACLU of Indiana immediately,” he added.

“When misinformation about biology and gender is used to bar transgender girls from school sports, it amounts to the same form of sex discrimination that has long been prohibited under Title IX, a law that protects all students - including trans people - on the basis of sex,” Falk said.

In the ruling, Judge Jane Magnus-Stinson of the US District Court for the Southern District of Indiana found that the law violated the Supreme Court’s interpretation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as articulated in the 2020 ruling in Bostock vs. Clayton. In that case, the high court found that the language banning sex-based discrimination also protected against discrimination based on sexuality and on gender identity, arguing that both ideas are also based on sex discrimination.

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According to Magnus-Stinson, Indiana’s law “does not prohibit all transgender athletes from playing with the team of the sex with which they identify – it only prohibits transgender females from doing so. The singling out of transgender females is unequivocally discrimination on the basis of sex, regardless of the policy argument as to why that choice was made. The Court finds that AM has established a strong likelihood that she will succeed on the merits of her Title IX claim.”

The Indiana legislature passed the bill in May, banning transgender girls from competing on all-girls’ sports teams at their schools, and overrode a veto by Governor Eric Holcomb, who is notably a Republican. The ACLU immediately sued, arguing the law was discriminatory.

The Hoosier State is just one of 17 US states where such legislation has been introduced in recent years, hinging on claims that transgender girls and women have an innate biological advantage over cisgender girls and women and that this presumed advantage violates Title IX protections for women to have equal access to educational institutions as men do.

The Biden administration has interpreted Title IX along the lines laid out by the Bostock ruling, finding that its sex-based protections also protect along the lines of sexuality and gender identity, meaning that denying trans girls and women the right to women's-only sports teams is a violation of the law.

Opponents of such bills have pushed back, noting that biology and physical performance are far more complex than gender assignment at birth, meaning the claim that trans girls - who were assigned male at birth - are inherently stronger than cisgender girls - who were assigned female at birth - cannot be assumed. They also point to the many social and psychological dangers of banning trans girls from girls’ sports teams, including increasing the social ostracism of trans girls and denying them the opportunity to participate in athletic and team-based activities that foster social development.

Legal and social attacks on trans people, in particular trans girls and women, have dramatically increased in recent years, expanding to include attempts to block access to transition-related medical care for trans youth and, increasingly, trans adults. In Texas, the state attorney general decreed that parents who support their trans child’s gender identity could be charged with child abuse and their child taken from them - a policy denounced by activists and journalists as a violation of the United Nations 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Ideologues testified in the US Senate that trans women pose a threat to women in women’s-only spaces like restrooms, helping to block passage of the Equality Act, which would ban discrimination against LGBTQ people in much of public life.

The attacks have seen a disturbing parallel in a spike in murders of transgender women, which hit new heights in the US in 2021 when 57 people were killed, many of them in extremely brutal ways. In 2022, there have been at least 21 known murders of trans people, according to a count by the Human Rights Campaign, a nationwide LGBTQ rights group. In addition, several Republican politicians have called for public executions or lynchings of trans people, with little rebuke from their fellow party members.