The U.S. Supreme Court refused Thursday to intervene in an ongoing case involving West Virginia's law banning transgender girls from participating in girls' sports teams at school. Conservative Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented.
The court's action came on its emergency docket, sometimes dubbed the shadow docket because decisions are made without full briefing or argument, and decided with little or no explanation.
While the court's conservative supermajority has come under considerable criticism for its aggressive use of the emergency docket to deal with controversial issues without full briefing and oral argument, this time the court stayed its hand.
Some 19 states have enacted laws like West Virginia's in the last three years, according to the ACLU. But no appeals court has yet ruled on the question.
In this case, West Virginia's law was challenged by a 12-year-old middle school transgender girl named Becky Pepper-Jackson, who has lived as a girl since fourth grade, according to court papers. Briefs in her case say she is now receiving "puberty-delaying treatment and estrogen hormone therapy," so she "has not experienced and will not experience endogenous puberty." That means she will not experience any of the physiological characteristics of puberty experienced by typical boys, and will instead develop "physiological characteristics consistent with hormonal puberty of typical girls."
According to her lawyers, she has been on the girls' track and field...
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