By Andrew Chung and John Kruzel
WASHINGTON, Jan 13 (Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court will consider on Tuesday the legality of laws banning transgender athletes from participating on female sports teams amid escalating efforts by dozens of states and Republican President Donald Trump's administration to restrict the rights of transgender people.
The justices are due to hear arguments in appeals by Idaho and West Virginia of decisions by lower courts siding with transgender students who challenged the bans in the two states as violating the U.S. Constitution and a federal anti-discrimination law. Twenty-five other states have similar laws on the books.
Trump's administration is backing the states in the arguments.
The case could have wider repercussions for transgender people and affect whether other measures targeting them in the public sphere - including military service, bathroom access, treatment in classrooms and designations in official documents such as passports - can be enforced.
The Idaho and West Virginia laws designate sports teams at public schools including universities according to "biological sex" and bar "students of the male sex" from female athletic teams. The states said the laws preserve fair and safe competition for women and girls.
The challengers claimed that these measures discriminate based on an individual's sex or status as a transgender person in violation of the Constitution's 14th Amendment guarantee of equal protection under the law, as well as the Title IX civil rights statute that bars discrimination in education "on the basis of sex."
The court in 2020 delivered a landmark ruling protecting transgender people from workplace discrimination under a different law, called Title VII, that contains wording similar to Title IX.
The Supreme Court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, backed other restrictions on transgender people in rulings issued last year. It let Trump ban transgender people from the military and bar passport applicants from selecting the sex reflecting their gender identities for the document. The Republican president has taken a hard line since returning to office last year, casting the gender identity of transgender people as a lie and issuing multiple executive orders to limit their rights including one involving sports participation.
The court last June in a case from Tennessee let states ban medical treatments such as puberty blockers and hormones for people under age 18 experiencing gender dysphoria, the clinical diagnosis for significant distress that can result from an incongruence between a person's gender identity and sex at birth.
Unlike in the Tennessee case, the Supreme Court in the Idaho and West Virginia litigation may need to determine whether the state laws classify people based on sex or transgender status, and whether that then triggers tougher judicial review, making the measures harder to defend in court.
Similarly, the court may need to determine whether its rationale from its 2020 ruling protecting transgender workers extends to the education sphere under Title IX.
The challenge to West Virginia's law was brought by Becky Pepper-Jackson and her mother Heather Jackson. Pepper-Jackson, now 15 years old and in 10th grade, attends high school in Bridgeport, West Virginia and participates in shot put and discus.
The Idaho challenge was brought by Lindsay Hecox, a transgender Boise State University student who previously participated in soccer and running clubs at the public university.
Hecox, 25, recently decided to quit playing sports and sought to dismiss the case in part due to a fear of harassment and growing intolerance toward transgender people. The court has said it will decide after hearing the arguments whether Hecox's challenge is moot.
(Reporting by Andrew Chung; Editing by Will Dunham)
