Maureen Groppe

So it was noteworthy that two of the three liberal justices said that at least the way Colorado's law is now, it's problematic.

Thanks for having me on.

So the previous case was about state bans on gender-affirming care for transgender minors.

In other words, whether states could prevent minors from getting puberty blockers and hormone therapy.

And in that decision, the court said that the bans are constitutional because they turn on someone's age and type of medical treatment.

Then they were not discriminating on the basis of their sex on whether someone is transgender.

The case, though, was decided what we call narrowly.

So it was just on that particular issue of gender affirming care.

They could have written the case more broadly in ways that would have decided other types of situations, such as these transgender athlete bans, but they didn't.

They just kept a narrow focus on that.

And then now they turned to this specific case, whether another area of law is affecting people who are transgender.

So there were two issues that the court was asked to decide about whether these state bans are legal.

One is whether they violate the Constitution's Equal Protection Clause, and that's the same issue that was at the heart of the gender-affirming care case from Tennessee last year.

The other issue is whether they also violate Title IX, and that's the section of a civil rights law that bars sex discrimination in educational programs.

Lawyers for the students argue that the bans discriminated against them on the basis of both sex and transgender status and that that can't be justified in their cases because the laws don't take into account whether someone was blocked.

Typical male puberty, for example, still has a physical advantage.

The lawyers for Idaho and West Virginia who were defending their laws, they argued that transgender women retain advantages even after they've had hormonal treatments such as puberty blockers and receiving estrogen so that they can be treated differently under the law.

So Lindsay Haycock, she's a college student in Idaho.

She never played competitive sports at school because she failed to make the cut for her college's cross-country and track teams.

Instead, she played what her lawyers called no-cut team sports in soccer and track.