Virginia AG joins suit trying to block West Virginia girl from spot on track team

Virginia’s attorney general is joining 25 other Republican state AGs trying to block a West Virginia 13-year-old track athlete from competing on her middle-school team.

The Republican AGs filed an amicus brief calling on the United States Supreme Court to take up West Virginia’s appeal of an appeals-court ruling that struck down the state’s law that the Republicans there is meant to protect girls’ sports.

The ruling was handed down in a case brought on behalf of Becky Pepper-Jackson, a 13-year-old trans middle-school student who faced being barred from participating on her school’s track team under a 2021 state law prohibiting trans women and girls in the state from participating in sports.

In April, Judge Toby Heytens wrote for the Fourth District Court of Appeals that the state “cannot expect that B.P.J. will countermand her social transition, her medical treatment, and all the work she has done with her schools, teachers, and coaches for nearly half her life by introducing herself to teammates, coaches, and even opponents as a boy.”

“By participating on boys teams, B.P.J. would be sharing the field with boys who are larger, stronger, and faster than her because of the elevated levels of circulating testosterone she lacks,” Heytens wrote. “The Act thus exposes B.P.J. to the very harms Title IX is meant to prevent by effectively ‘exclud[ing]’ her from ‘participation in’ all non-coed sports entirely.”

But Jason Miyares, the attorney general of Virginia, said in a statement that the overturned state law, styled the Save Women’s Sports Act, “is about fairness and protecting the integrity of women’s sports.”

“Allowing biological males to compete against biological females undermines decades of progress and is simply unfair to women and girls. I’m committed to ensuring that female athletes have the opportunity to compete on a level playing field,” Miyares said.

That’s not what he’s really doing here.

“As the Fourth Circuit made clear in this ruling, West Virginia’s effort to ban one 13-year-old transgender girl from joining her teammates on the middle school cross country and track team was singling out Becky for disparate treatment because of her sex,” Lambda Legal Staff Attorney for Youth Sruti Swaminathan said.

“That’s discrimination pure and simple,” Swaminathan said.