Marxist Anura Kumara Dissanayake sworn in as Sri Lanka's president

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka (AP) — Marxist politician Anura Kumara Dissanayake was sworn in as Sri Lanka's president on Monday after an election that saw voters reject an old guard accused of leading the country into economic crisis.

Dissanayake, 55, who ran as head of the Marxist-leaning National People's Power coalition, defeated President Ranil Wickremesinghe, opposition leader Sajith Premadasa and 35 other candidates in Saturday's election.

The election came as the country seeks to recover from a severe economic crisis that led to shortages of essentials such as foods, medicines, cooking gas and fuel in 2022, triggering massive protests that forced then-President Gotabaya Rajapaksa to flee the country and resign.

In a brief speech after the swearing-in, Dissanayake pledged to work with others to take on the country's challenges.

“We have deeply understood that we are going to get a challenging country," Dissanayake said. “We don’t believe that a government, a single party or an individual would be able to resolve this deep crisis.

He’s the ninth person to hold Sri Lanka’s powerful executive presidency, created in 1978 when a new constitution expanded the office’s powers.

However, Dayan Jayatilleka, a former diplomat and political analyst said Dissanayake could face challenges as the first president to enter office without a majority of the vote.

“It’s not an insurmountable obstacle,” said Jayatilleke, but said he will have to “engage as much as possible in politics of consensus.”

Dissanayake's coalition is led by the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna, or People’s Liberation Front, a Marxist party that waged two unsuccessful armed insurrections in the 1970s and 1980s to capture power through socialist revolution. After its defeat, the JVP entered democratic politics in 1994 and has been mostly in opposition since then. However, they have supported several previous presidents and been part of governments briefly.

The NPP also includes groups representing academics, civil society movements, artists, lawyers and students.

Just before the swearing in, Prime Minister Dinesh Gunawardena resigned, clearing the way for the new president to appoint a prime minister and a cabinet.

Chinese president Xi Jinping congratulated Dissanayake on his victory, saying on Monday that China looks forward to working together “to jointly carry forward our traditional friendship.” The U.S. and India previously congratulated Dissanayake.

Dissanayake was first elected to Parliament in 2000 and briefly held the portfolio of agriculture and irrigation minister under President Chandrika Kumaratunga. He ran for president for the first time in 2019 and lost to Rajapaksa.

Dissanayake's first major challenge will be to act on his campaign promise to ease the crushing austerity measures imposed by his predecessor Wickremesinghe under a relief agreement with the International Monetary Fund.

Wickremesinghe has warned that any move to alter the basics of the agreement could delay the release of a fourth tranche of nearly $3 billion.

That economic crisis resulted from excessive borrowing to fund projects that did not generate revenue, the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the government’s insistence on using scarce foreign reserves to prop up its currency, the rupee.

Dissanayake has also vowed to dissolve parliament, where his party holds only three of 225 seats.

Marxist leader Anura Kumara Dissanayake, right, is sworn in as Sri Lanka's tenth president by Chief Justice Jayantha Jayasuriya, left at the Sri Lankan President's Office in Colombo, Sri Lanka, Monday, Sept.23, 2024. President's secretary Saman Ekanayake is in center. (Sri Lankan President's Office via AP)

Commanders of the security forces stand behind as Sri Lanka's new president Anura Kumara Dissanayake, addresses a gathering after he was sworn in at the Sri Lankan President's Office in Colombo, Sri Lanka, Monday, Sept.23, 2024. (Sri Lankan President's Office via AP)

Supporters of Marxist lawmaker Anura Kumara Dissanayake cheer outside the president's office as he arrives to be sworn in as Sri Lanka’s tenth president in Colombo, Sri Lanka, Monday, Sept. 23, 2024. (AP Photo/Eranga Jayawardena)

A supporter waves Sri Lankan flag as he waits for the swearing in ceremony of president elect Marxist lawmaker Anura Kumara Dissanayake out side president's office in Colombo, Sri Lanka, Monday, Sept. 23, 2024. (AP Photo/Eranga Jayawardena)

Newspapers with headlines about Sri Lanka's new president elect Marxist lawmaker Anura Kumara Dissanayake are on display in Colombo, Sri Lanka, Monday, Sept. 23, 2024. (AP Photo/Eranga Jayawardena)

A supporter tucks a portrait of president elect Marxist lawmaker Anura Kumara Dissanayake on to his trousers as he waits for the swearing in ceremony outside president's office in Colombo, Sri Lanka, Monday, Sept. 23, 2024. (AP Photo/Eranga Jayawardena)

Newspapers with headlines about the new president elect Marxist lawmaker Anura Kumara Dissanayake are on display in Colombo, Sri Lanka, Monday, Sept. 23, 2024. (AP Photo/Eranga Jayawardena)

Supporters of Marxist lawmaker Anura Kumara Dissanayake cheer outside the president's office as he arrives to be sworn in as Sri Lanka’s tenth president in Colombo, Sri Lanka, Monday, Sept. 23, 2024. (AP Photo/Eranga Jayawardena)

Marxist lawmaker Anura Kumara Dissanayake waves as he departs the election commission office after winning the presidential election in Colombo, Sri Lanka, Sunday, Sept. 22, 2024. (AP Photo/Eranga Jayawardena)

WASHINGTON (AP) — Becky Pepper-Jackson finished third in the discus throw in West Virginia last year though she was in just her first year of high school. Now a 15-year-old sophomore, Pepper-Jackson is aware that her upcoming season could be her last.

West Virginia has banned transgender girls like Pepper-Jackson from competing in girls and women's sports, and is among the more than two dozen states with similar laws. Though the West Virginia law has been blocked by lower courts, the outcome could be different at the conservative-dominated Supreme Court, which has allowed multiple restrictions on transgender people to be enforced in the past year.

The justices are hearing arguments Tuesday in two cases over whether the sports bans violate the Constitution or the landmark federal law known as Title IX that prohibits sex discrimination in education. The second case comes from Idaho, where college student Lindsay Hecox challenged that state's law.

Decisions are expected by early summer.

President Donald Trump's Republican administration has targeted transgender Americans from the first day of his second term, including ousting transgender people from the military and declaring that gender is immutable and determined at birth.

Pepper-Jackson has become the face of the nationwide battle over the participation of transgender girls in athletics that has played out at both the state and federal levels as Republicans have leveraged the issue as a fight for athletic fairness for women and girls.

“I think it’s something that needs to be done,” Pepper-Jackson said in an interview with The Associated Press that was conducted over Zoom. “It’s something I’m here to do because ... this is important to me. I know it’s important to other people. So, like, I’m here for it.”

She sat alongside her mother, Heather Jackson, on a sofa in their home just outside Bridgeport, a rural West Virginia community about 40 miles southwest of Morgantown, to talk about a legal fight that began when she was a middle schooler who finished near the back of the pack in cross-country races.

Pepper-Jackson has grown into a competitive discus and shot put thrower. In addition to the bronze medal in the discus, she finished eighth among shot putters.

She attributes her success to hard work, practicing at school and in her backyard, and lifting weights. Pepper-Jackson has been taking puberty-blocking medication and has publicly identified as a girl since she was in the third grade, though the Supreme Court's decision in June upholding state bans on gender-affirming medical treatment for minors has forced her to go out of state for care.

Her very improvement as an athlete has been cited as a reason she should not be allowed to compete against girls.

“There are immutable physical and biological characteristic differences between men and women that make men bigger, stronger, and faster than women. And if we allow biological males to play sports against biological females, those differences will erode the ability and the places for women in these sports which we have fought so hard for over the last 50 years,” West Virginia's attorney general, JB McCuskey, said in an AP interview. McCuskey said he is not aware of any other transgender athlete in the state who has competed or is trying to compete in girls or women’s sports.

Despite the small numbers of transgender athletes, the issue has taken on outsize importance. The NCAA and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committees banned transgender women from women's sports after Trump signed an executive order aimed at barring their participation.

The public generally is supportive of the limits. An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll conducted in October 2025 found that about 6 in 10 U.S. adults “strongly” or “somewhat” favored requiring transgender children and teenagers to only compete on sports teams that match the sex they were assigned at birth, not the gender they identify with, while about 2 in 10 were “strongly” or “somewhat” opposed and about one-quarter did not have an opinion.

About 2.1 million adults, or 0.8%, and 724,000 people age 13 to 17, or 3.3%, identify as transgender in the U.S., according to the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law.

Those allied with the administration on the issue paint it in broader terms than just sports, pointing to state laws, Trump administration policies and court rulings against transgender people.

"I think there are cultural, political, legal headwinds all supporting this notion that it’s just a lie that a man can be a woman," said John Bursch, a lawyer with the conservative Christian law firm Alliance Defending Freedom that has led the legal campaign against transgender people. “And if we want a society that respects women and girls, then we need to come to terms with that truth. And the sooner that we do that, the better it will be for women everywhere, whether that be in high school sports teams, high school locker rooms and showers, abused women’s shelters, women’s prisons.”

But Heather Jackson offered different terms to describe the effort to keep her daughter off West Virginia's playing fields.

“Hatred. It’s nothing but hatred,” she said. "This community is the community du jour. We have a long history of isolating marginalized parts of the community.”

Pepper-Jackson has seen some of the uglier side of the debate on display, including when a competitor wore a T-shirt at the championship meet that said, “Men Don't Belong in Women's Sports.”

“I wish these people would educate themselves. Just so they would know that I’m just there to have a good time. That’s it. But it just, it hurts sometimes, like, it gets to me sometimes, but I try to brush it off,” she said.

One schoolmate, identified as A.C. in court papers, said Pepper-Jackson has herself used graphic language in sexually bullying her teammates.

Asked whether she said any of what is alleged, Pepper-Jackson said, “I did not. And the school ruled that there was no evidence to prove that it was true.”

The legal fight will turn on whether the Constitution's equal protection clause or the Title IX anti-discrimination law protects transgender people.

The court ruled in 2020 that workplace discrimination against transgender people is sex discrimination, but refused to extend the logic of that decision to the case over health care for transgender minors.

The court has been deluged by dueling legal briefs from Republican- and Democratic-led states, members of Congress, athletes, doctors, scientists and scholars.

The outcome also could influence separate legal efforts seeking to bar transgender athletes in states that have continued to allow them to compete.

If Pepper-Jackson is forced to stop competing, she said she will still be able to lift weights and continue playing trumpet in the school concert and jazz bands.

“It will hurt a lot, and I know it will, but that’s what I’ll have to do,” she said.

Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

Becky Pepper-Jackson poses for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

The Supreme Court stands is Washington, Friday, Jan. 9, 2026. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

FILE - Protestors hold signs during a rally at the state capitol in Charleston, W.Va., on March 9, 2023. (AP Photo/Chris Jackson, file)