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OAN Staff Brooke Mallory
2:55 PM – Monday, January 12, 2026
A coalition of Republican attorneys general (AGs) and prominent American female athletes gathered at the nation’s capital on Monday, issuing a formal call for the U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS) to intervene in the growing legal battle over gender identity and school athletics.
Among the coalition of advocates, former collegiate swimmer and prominent Title IX activist Riley Gaines hailed SCOTUS’ upcoming review of two major transgender-athlete cases as a critical step toward protecting fairness and integrity in women’s sports.
The Monday event in D.C. was organized primarily by groups like Concerned Women for America (CWA) and Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF).
Supreme Court justices are scheduled to hear oral arguments on Tuesday in the consolidated appeals brought by the states of Idaho and West Virginia. Both cases challenge federal policies that require schools to allow biological males who identify as transgender females to compete in female athletic categories.
The group is seeking a definitive ruling that would grant states the clear authority to maintain sex-based eligibility requirements for sports, establishing that biological distinctions are essential to ensuring fair competition and safety for female athletes.
Joining Gaines were figures such as Penny Nance, CEO of Concerned Women for America, and collegiate volleyball player Macy Petty, both of whom have been instrumental in organizing the “Stand for Women’s Sports” movement.
“USA Volleyball does not even acknowledge that sex exists, opting for the Orwellian ‘sex assigned at birth’ narrative. Their ‘gender competition policy’ treats a foundational component of humanity as if it is as arbitrary as your favorite color. To them, ‘gender’ is just an F or M blindly assigned on a document. The policy even says athletes can ‘change their Profile gender at any time,’ though that will not necessarily change their eligibility status. Additionally, their website is still plastered with anti-woman propaganda including a documentary trailer featuring a young child who altered their birth certificate (the very loophole we are discussing in the new USAV policy), and links to left-wing political advocacy groups…” Petty wrote in an August 2025 opinion piece for Fox News.
The Monday event also featured Jennifer Sey, the former Levi’s executive and founder of XX-XY Athletics, and detransitioner-turned-activist Chloe Cole, who each spoke to the broader cultural and physical implications of gender identity policies in protected female spaces.
Leading the political and legal charge were several Republican Attorneys General (AGs), including Idaho’s Raúl Labrador and West Virginia’s Patrick Morrisey (R-W.Va.), who were already in town to represent their states in Tuesday’s landmark Supreme Court oral arguments.
Together, these speakers emphasized a unified message: maintaining biological sex as the standard for sports is the only way to ensure safety, fairness, and the continued integrity of Title IX.
Conservative advocates maintain that the physical advantages males typically hold over females in athletic performance — greater muscle mass, bone density, lung capacity and testosterone levels — have long been widely accepted as biological reality. For most of human history, this understanding went unquestioned. Only in recent years, amid strong cultural pushes for absolute “equality” between the sexes and the influence of LGBTQ+ movements, has this basic fact become a subject of serious debate. While modern society may try to prioritize fairness and inclusion, in theory, biology does not bend to social ideals: in the realm of physical competition, the inherent differences between male and female bodies create measurable and often decisive athletic advantages that cannot simply be wished away.
The event comes amid a wave of litigation surrounding the former Biden administration’s interpretations of Title IX, the federal civil rights law prohibiting sex-based discrimination in education. While the Democrat administration had moved to expand protections to include “gender identity,” those present on Monday argued that such changes undermine the original intent of the law, especially in light of President Donald Trump’s second term executive orders (EOs) uplifting women and girls in athletics.
Trump has made the “protection of women’s sports” a cornerstone of his executive and legislative agenda. On February 5, 2025, President Trump signed Executive Order 14201, titled “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports,” which directed federal agencies to interpret Title IX as applying only to biological sex.
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West Virginia v. B.P.J.: The case originated when Becky Pepper-Jackson, referred to as “B.P.J.” in court records, a transgender-identifying middle school athlete from West Virginia, mounted a legal challenge against the state’s 2021 “Save Women’s Sports Act.” The parents of Pepper-Jackson, a biological male who identifies as female, began “socially transitioning” him in third grade. With medical help, he received puberty blockers and hormone therapy allegedly “before the onset of male puberty,” which his legal team has cited to argue that he “lacks the physical advantages” associated with biological males and should thus be eligible to compete on girls’ teams.
The lawsuit, filed shortly after the law’s passage — which mandates that public school athletes compete based on their biological sex at birth — alleges violations of Title IX, the federal statute barring sex discrimination in education, as well as the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.
Complicating the narrative, a former middle school teammate, identified in filings as “A.C.” or “Adaleia Cross,” submitted a sworn affidavit maintaining that during the 2022–2023 school year, Pepper-Jackson directed sexually explicit comments and graphic language toward her and other female teammates in the girls’ locker room. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which represents Pepper-Jackson, has firmly rejected these allegations, and both Pepper-Jackson and his mother have categorically denied the claims as well.
Little v. Hecox – Idaho: Lindsay Hecox, a Boise State University student and biological male who identifies as a transgender female, filed a lawsuit in April 2020 shortly after the passage of Idaho’s Fairness in Women’s Sports Act (H.B. 500). Hecox, who had begun hormone therapy and sought to try out for the women’s track and cross-country teams, argues that the ban discriminates based on sex and transgender status, violating the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. A federal district court issued a preliminary injunction preventing enforcement of the ban against Hecox, allowing him to participate in club sports, although he did not make the varsity cross-country team. In 2023, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit largely upheld the injunction, concluding that the categorical ban likely failed heightened scrutiny under equal protection principles because it was overly broad and lacked sufficient evidence linking it to the state’s interests for athletes like Hecox.
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The legal landscape is currently a patchwork of conflicting lower court rulings. Several states have already passed laws restricting participation in school sports to an individual’s biological sex assigned at birth, many of which are currently tied up in appellate courts.
A ruling from SCOTUS would establish a nationwide legal standard for how schools and athletic associations may regulate participation in sports. Such a decision could provide much-needed clarity for school districts, state athletic bodies, and policymakers, who currently face a patchwork of conflicting state laws and regulations that leave them uncertain about what rules are legally permissible.
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