The Supreme Court Settled Trans Athletes in June. Five Harder Cases Are Already Stacked Behind It.
On June 30, 2026, the Supreme Court settled one transgender-rights fight, ruling that states may bar transgender athletes from girls’ and women’s sports. The ink was barely dry. The day before, the Court had already granted certiorari in a second case testing something far more foundational: whether parents can even get into federal court when a state law cuts them out of their own child’s gender-related medical decisions. That case, International Partners for Ethical Care, Inc. v. Ferguson, No. 25-840, is not the only one waiting.
A federal appeals court just found a Trump-administration ban on transgender military service likely unconstitutional — and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth answered with two words: “See you at SCOTUS.” A Maryland public-school teacher has asked the justices to decide whether being forced to use a student’s preferred pronouns violates the First Amendment. A new Idaho bathroom law carrying a five-year felony sits under a federal injunction on appeal. And in Ohio, the state supreme court is weighing a challenge to a gender-affirming-care ban on state-constitutional grounds the Court’s 2025 Skrmetti ruling never touched.
The Washington Examiner flagged the pattern first: the sports ruling didn’t close the docket, it opened it. This site already covered House Democrats’ non-answer to that ruling and the West Virginia state-champion shot-putter whose case was folded into it. Here is what comes next, case by case, with both sides’ arguments on the record.
- No. 25-840 — the SCOTUS docket number for International Partners for Ethical Care v. Ferguson — cert granted June 29, 2026, on whether parents can even sue · Source: SCOTUSblog
- 2-1 — the divided D.C. Circuit ruling, June 1, 2026, finding the Pentagon's transgender-service ban likely unconstitutional for troops already serving — Defense Secretary Hegseth: "See you at SCOTUS" · Source: NPR, The Hill
- 5 years — the maximum felony sentence under Idaho's HB 752 bathroom-access law, now partly blocked by a federal injunction on appeal · Source: Idaho Capital Sun
- June 26, 2026 — the date a Maryland public-school teacher, backed by Alliance Defending Freedom, filed her own cert petition asking the Court to rule mandatory-pronoun policies violate the First Amendment · Source: Legal Insurrection
- 3 — parental-rights cases the Court has ruled on or accepted in roughly 13 months — Mahmoud v. Taylor, Mirabelli v. Bonta, and now the standing question in Ferguson · Source: SCOTUSblog
In 2023, then-Governor Jay Inslee (D-Wash.) signed SB 5599, a law letting licensed youth shelters notify Washington’s Department of Children, Youth, and Families — instead of a runaway minor’s own parents — when that minor seeks “protected health care services,” a category that includes gender-affirming treatment. A separate provision lets minors as young as 13 receive outpatient mental-health treatment without parental consent, and shelters can hold a runaway for up to 90 days under that framework. A coalition of parents, joined by the advocacy groups International Partners for Ethical Care and Advocates Protecting Children, sued to challenge all three provisions — naming Bob Ferguson (D-Wash.), who was attorney general when the suit was filed and is now governor, along with current AG Nick Brown (D-Wash.) and DCYF Secretary Ross Hunter.
Both a federal district court and a Ninth Circuit panel dismissed the case — not on the merits, but on standing. The courts held the parents’ injury was “self-imposed” and too speculative, since none of their own children had actually run away yet. On June 29, 2026, the Supreme Court agreed to review exactly that threshold question: can parents sue before the harm happens, or must they wait for a child to disappear into the system first?
The first opinions are in the transgender athlete cases. In B.P.J., the court holds Title IX allows schools to provide separate women's and men's teams defined by biological sex, and WV has permissibly maintained female sports for biological females.
Nick Barry, senior counsel at America First Legal, which represents the petitioners, put the practical stakes bluntly: “Washington State built a legal regime that targets fit parents, encourages their children to run away, and then keeps mom and dad in the dark while the state takes over.” His broader argument is about timing — that requiring proof of harm before a parent can sue makes the injury unreviewable by design. “The Constitution does not require parents to stand helplessly by until their child is gone or harmed before they can go to court,” he said.
That argument already has a foothold inside the Ninth Circuit itself. When the full court declined to rehear the case, Judge Eric Tung — a 2025 Trump appointee and former clerk to Justices Gorsuch and Scalia — dissented, joined by Judges Bumatay and VanDyke. Tung wrote that the panel majority’s standing analysis ran “afoul of Supreme Court and Ninth Circuit jurisprudence,” framing the majority’s underlying premise in stark terms: “In the legislature’s view, a child suffering from gender dysphoria must be ‘protected’ from parents who do not seek ‘gender-affirming treatment.’”
“In the legislature's view, a child suffering from gender dysphoria must be 'protected' from parents who do not seek 'gender-affirming treatment.'”
Judge Eric Tung (9th Cir.), dissenting from denial of rehearing en banc
State Sen. Marko Liias (D-Edmonds), SB 5599’s sponsor: “Every child – including our trans youth – deserves to be safe at home. In a perfect world, that is the case, but unfortunately, that is not the reality.”
State Sen. John Braun (R), Washington Senate Republican Leader, opposing the law: it drives a “wedge” between vulnerable adolescents and their parents.
Ferguson does not arrive at the Court in a vacuum. In 2025, the justices ruled in Mahmoud v. Taylor that Maryland parents have a religious-liberty right to opt their children out of LGBTQ-inclusive school curricula. On March 2, 2026, on the Court’s emergency docket, a 6-3 majority in Mirabelli v. Bonta found California parents likely to succeed on their claim that a policy directing teachers to withhold a student’s in-school gender transition from parents violated the Free Exercise and Due Process Clauses. Alliance Defending Freedom senior counsel John Bursch, who argued the case, told the Washington Examiner that “secret social transitions at public schools” are “the most critical issue” he hopes the Court addresses next — policies that, he said, “can cause incredible harm to those young people, and parents have a right to know when that’s happening.”
BREAKING: The Supreme Court just handed a historic victory to parents over California's secret gender transition policies today, ruling in our case Mirabelli v. Bonta. California required schools to secretly facilitate gender transitions and hide it from parents.
Mirabelli was an emergency-docket order, not a final merits ruling — it does not bind lower courts the way a full opinion would. But three parental-rights cases in roughly thirteen months is a signal, not a coincidence, and it is the backdrop against which the justices will hear Ferguson.
The June 30 ruling in B.P.J. and Hecox upheld state bans on transgender athletes in women’s sports — it did not end sports-related litigation. In Minnesota, a group called Female Athletes United sued to block a state policy allowing athletes to compete consistent with their gender identity; after a district judge denied a preliminary injunction, the Eighth Circuit sided with the state, keeping the policy in place for now. Alliance Defending Freedom, which represents the athletes, has signaled the fight is not over.
A different kind of sports case is also moving through federal court. In Puyallup, Washington, a 15-year-old wrestler named Kallie Keeler sued the Washington Interscholastic Activities Association, state education officials, and her own school district, alleging she was sexually assaulted during a December 2025 tournament match by a transgender opponent — and that officials failed to report or investigate it within the timeline state law requires. Prosecutors declined to file charges for insufficient evidence; the federal Title IX suit, filed by Alliance Defending Freedom, is a separate track. ADF senior counsel Kate Anderson, who directs the organization’s Center for Parental Rights, did not mince words: “A 15-year-old girl was sexually assaulted because of political cowardice.”
Today, the Supreme Court solidified what Americans knew to be true—biological men have no place in women's sports. This decision marks a victory for the sanctity of Title IX, for commonsense, and for every young girl who deserves the right to play the sport she loves.
The Court already let a Pentagon policy barring transgender military service take effect once, on the shadow docket, in May 2025. That did not resolve the underlying case. On June 1, 2026, a divided three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit — Judges Cornelia Pillard, Gregory Katsas, and Neomi Rao sat on the appeal — ruled 2-1 in Talbott v. United States that the policy, as applied to troops already serving, was likely unconstitutional and motivated at least in part by animus toward transgender people; the court left the recruiting ban in place. A federal judge certified a class of affected service members on July 2. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s public reaction left no doubt where this goes next.
See you at SCOTUS.
A different kind of case reached the Court from a Maryland classroom. Kimberly Polk, a substitute teacher, argued that Montgomery County Public Schools violated her First Amendment rights by requiring her to use students’ preferred pronouns as a condition of her job. A divided Fourth Circuit panel ruled against her on January 28, 2026, holding the policy was neutral, generally applicable, and that the compelled speech fell within her official duties; Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III dissented, calling the ruling a “dangerous precipice” for compelled speech. On June 26, 2026, Polk, represented by Alliance Defending Freedom, filed her own cert petition. ADF’s brief argues “the First Amendment does not allow a public school to compel its teachers to endorse one side of a noncurricular, controversial issue simply by labeling the compelled speech a job duty.”
And then there is the bathroom fight the Court has ducked before. On April 2, 2026, Idaho Gov. Brad Little (R) signed HB 752, which makes a transgender person’s first use of a sex-designated public restroom a misdemeanor and a second offense a felony carrying up to five years in prison. Six transgender Idahoans, represented by the ACLU and Lambda Legal, sued; on June 16, a federal judge partially blocked enforcement. Idaho Attorney General Raúl Labrador (R) said he would appeal, calling the ruling a “results-driven decision that misapplies the law.”
“Biological sex is not vague, and neither is this law. The good news is that this ruling is narrow.”
Idaho AG Raúl Labrador (R), on the federal injunction against HB 752 · June 16, 2026
Idaho’s law lands squarely in a circuit split the Supreme Court has repeatedly declined to resolve: the Fourth and Seventh Circuits have held that barring transgender students from sex-matched bathrooms violates Title IX, while the Eleventh Circuit, in Adams v. St. Johns County, held the opposite. Every time that split has reached the Court’s conference, the justices have passed. A felony-backed statewide law, rather than a single school-district policy, is a different kind of vehicle — and one more reason court-watchers expect the bathroom question back on the docket before long.
Not every pending case is bound for the U.S. Supreme Court at all — and that is its own kind of significance. In 2024, Ohio’s Republican-controlled legislature overrode a veto from Gov. Mike DeWine (R) to enact House Bill 68, banning puberty blockers and hormone therapy for transgender minors. When the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a similar Tennessee law in United States v. Skrmetti in June 2025, it decided only a federal equal-protection question. Ohio’s plaintiffs, two transgender teenagers and their parents, are pressing a different claim entirely: that HB 68 violates the Ohio Constitution’s health-care-freedom amendment and parents’ state-law right to direct their children’s medical care. An intermediate appeals court agreed and struck the law down; Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost (R) appealed, and the state supreme court heard oral argument on March 24, 2026. A ruling is still pending.
The Supreme Court’s 2025 ruling in Skrmetti resolved a federal constitutional question — it left state constitutions untouched. Ohio, Kansas, Montana, and North Dakota all have gender-affirming-care bans facing challenges built on state, not federal, constitutional grounds. Those cases can reach a final answer without ever touching the U.S. Supreme Court’s docket — which is exactly why Ohio’s fight looks different from Washington’s, Idaho’s, or Maryland’s.
Line the pending cases up and the common thread is not transgender rights in the abstract — it is a set of much drier legal questions the Court has been building toward for two years: Who has standing to sue before a harm fully materializes (Ferguson)? How much deference does a court owe the military’s judgment about who may serve (Talbott)? Does a job description erase a public employee’s First Amendment rights (Polk)? Can a state criminalize conduct tied to gender identity without violating due process (Idaho’s HB 752)? And does a federal equal-protection ruling preempt a state constitution’s own health-care-freedom guarantee (Moe v. Yost)? The sports ruling answered one narrow question. These cases test the legal infrastructure everything else sits on.
Parents, not bureaucrats, raise America's children. Every one of these rulings — sports, schools, the military — is about the same thing: common sense and the Constitution winning.
Paraphrased commentary · not a verbatim post
Paraphrase reflecting President Trump's consistent documented position across EO 14201 (Feb. 5, 2025) and his public statements on the June 30, 2026 sports ruling — not a single verbatim post.
This fight isn't over. We believe in the military's judgment about who can serve, and we're taking it all the way to the Supreme Court.
Paraphrased commentary · not a verbatim post
Paraphrase reflecting Secretary Hegseth's public 'See you at SCOTUS' response (quoted verbatim above from his X post) — not a verbatim Truth Social post.
None of these cases are decided. Ferguson will not be argued until the term that starts in October 2026, with a ruling not expected before mid-2027. Talbott and Polk have not yet been granted cert. Idaho’s injunction and Ohio’s state-constitutional fight are both still working through the system. Nothing here should be read as a prediction of outcome — only as a map of exactly where the next arguments will be made, by whom, and over what.
The June 30 sports ruling was one case, decided. Behind it sit at least five more that test different legal questions entirely — parental standing, military deference, compelled speech, criminal bathroom law, and state constitutional health-care rights.
Both sides are on the record by name: parents’ groups and their attorneys, state officials defending the laws, and the advocacy organizations litigating against them. This page tracks the docket, not the outcome.
