NEW YORK (AP) — When country star Maren Morris would voice support for the LBGTQ community, including publicly clashing with Jason Aldean’s wife over gender-affirming care for transgender youth, she thought she was doing it as an ally. She didn’t realize it at the time, but she was also speaking up for herself, too.
“I just maybe, internally, hadn’t had the bravery to go there in myself, and say the words out loud,” said Morris, who recently came out as bisexual. “When you spend the majority of your life in straight relationships and you haven’t explored that part of yourself … is now the right time for me to tell everyone while I’m married that like, ’Hi, I’m also attracted to women?’”
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Maren Morris arrives at Variety's Power of Women on Thursday, May 1, 2025, in Nashville, Tenn. (AP Photo/George Walker IV)
Maren Morris poses for a portrait on Wednesday, May 7, 2025, in New York. (AP Photo/Gary Gerard Hamilton)
Maren Morris poses for a portrait on Wednesday, May 7, 2025, in New York. (AP Photo/Gary Gerard Hamilton)
Maren Morris poses for a portrait on Wednesday, May 7, 2025, in New York. (AP Photo/Gary Gerard Hamilton)
The Grammy winner, who's also stood in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter social justice movement and immigrants, has experienced drastic life changes throughout the past year, including a divorce with fellow singer-songwriter Ryan Hurd. These learning curves shaped “Dreamsicle,” her fourth studio album, out now.
“There’s a freedom that I’ve found in this album that’s a new version of what I thought I had,” Morris explained. “It’s just more wise and lived-in. And maybe part of that’s just like being in your 30s — you just don’t care as much.”
Following 2022’s “Humble Quest,” the 35-year-old singer-songwriter crafted 14 tracks filled with an eclectic, yet cohesive mix of traditional country, pop, soft-rock and dreamy bluegrass vibes. It continues the free-flowing, unconfined mix of sounds the “The Bones” singer is known for. Production includes superstar pop producer Jack Antonoff, John Ryan, Laura Veltz and The Monsters & Strangerz production team, with Morris credited as a writer on every song.
“I was writing all through all of those personal losses and evolutions. … I was really just avoiding going home, and I would stay in my sessions late, and also write on days that I probably should have just taken a nap or gone to see my therapist,” Morris said. “There were moments where I’m singing on some of these songs where I don’t even remember doing the vocal because I was just in such a state of loss and grief.”
Standout moments include the beautiful Americana-esque “grand bouquet” where Morris sings, “been so busy praying for my grand bouquet/not noticing you gave me a new flower every day.” There are also her staple poppy songs like “cry in the car” that attempt to mask the pain and frustration of heartbreak behind upbeat tempos.
But it’s not all doom and gloom; “The Middle” vocalist explores new themes, like on the previously released singles “bed no breakfast,” and “push me over” which she wrote with the electro-pop band MUNA.
“I went on a date with a woman for the first time, and I was just like I want to write about this,” she said, noting she felt safe exploring the topic with the queer-identifying band.
While she says each song represents some facet of this new era, the title track provides the fullest picture.
“It was the first song for one of my albums that I wrote alone and I don’t often do that," said Morris, who added “Dreamsicle” came to her at one night as a 3 a.m. realization that change was necessary. "Everything that I thought was going to be permanent in my life, like in some form or fashion, either ended or evolved into something completely different.”
Morris is currently prepping for her global tour in July, with more than 40 dates mixing headlining shows and festival appearances.
Since coming out, she emphasizes she’s received an abundance of love throughout Nashville, and has been overwhelmed by the support in the country music space that some have criticized as intolerant.
More importantly, she hopes fans understand “Dreamsicle” is not a “divorce record,” but a celebratory album of healing.
“It deals with grief. It deals with the friends that helped patch you back together,” Morris said. “It’s important to show and to prove to myself that I can process and heal from this. … If I can do it, ... someone will hear it and feel like they can get through that day that they’re in.”
Follow Associated Press entertainment journalist Gary Gerard Hamilton at @GaryGHamilton on all his social media platforms.
Maren Morris arrives at Variety's Power of Women on Thursday, May 1, 2025, in Nashville, Tenn. (AP Photo/George Walker IV)
Maren Morris poses for a portrait on Wednesday, May 7, 2025, in New York. (AP Photo/Gary Gerard Hamilton)
Maren Morris poses for a portrait on Wednesday, May 7, 2025, in New York. (AP Photo/Gary Gerard Hamilton)
Maren Morris poses for a portrait on Wednesday, May 7, 2025, in New York. (AP Photo/Gary Gerard Hamilton)
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)
