WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld state laws barring transgender girls and women from playing on school athletic teams, in another setback for transgender people.
The court’s six-justice conservative majority, which has repeatedly ruled against transgender Americans in the past year, ruled that state bans in Idaho and West Virginia don’t violate the Constitution. The court unanimously agreed that barring transgender girls and women also doesn't run afoul of the federal law known as Title IX, which prohibits sex discrimination in education.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote for the court that, “states may maintain women's and girls' sports for biological females.”
More than two dozen other Republican-led states have adopted bans on female transgender athletes, and the decision seems certain to extend to them as well.
Left unresolved by the outcome are lawsuits challenging state laws and regulations in Connecticut, California and elsewhere that permit transgender athletes to compete consistent with their gender identity.
Becky Pepper-Jackson, a 16-year-old high school sophomore in Bridgeport, West Virginia, has been taking puberty-blocking medication, has publicly identified as a girl since age 8 and has been issued a West Virginia birth certificate recognizing her as female. She is the only transgender person who has sought to compete in girls sports in West Virginia.
Pepper-Jackson has progressed from a back-of-the-pack cross-country runner in middle school to statewide champion in the shot put. She beat the second-place finisher by two feet in last month's West Virginia championship meet.
In the Idaho case, Lindsay Hecox sued over the state’s first-in-the-nation ban for the chance to try out for the women’s track and cross-country teams at Boise State University in Idaho. She didn’t make either squad because “she was too slow,” her lawyer, Kathleen Hartnett, told the court during arguments in January, but she competed in club-level soccer and running.
Prominent women in sports have weighed in on both sides. Tennis champion Martina Navratilova, swimmers Summer Sanders and Donna de Varona and beach volleyball player Kerri Walsh Jennings are supporting the state bans. Soccer stars Megan Rapinoe and Becky Sauerbrunn and basketball players Sue Bird and Breanna Stewart back the transgender athletes.
In 2020, the Supreme Court ruled LGBTQ people are protected by a landmark federal civil rights law that prohibits sex discrimination in the workplace, finding that “sex plays an unmistakable role” in employers’ decisions to punish transgender people for traits and behavior they otherwise tolerate.
But last year, the six conservative justices on the nine-member court declined to apply the same sort of analysis when they upheld state bans on gender-affirming care for transgender minors.
The states supporting the prohibitions on transgender athletes argued there is no reason to extend the ruling barring workplace discrimination to Title IX.
Idaho’s law, state Solicitor General Alan Hurst said, is “necessary for fair competition because, where sports are concerned, men and women are obviously not the same.”
Lawyers for Pepper-Jackson argued that such distinctions generally make sense but that their client has none of those advantages because of the unique circumstances of her early transition. In Hecox’s case, her lawyers wanted the court to dismiss the case because she had forsworn trying to play on women’s teams.
NCAA president Charlie Baker told Congress in 2024 that he was aware of only 10 transgender athletes out of more than half a million students on college teams. But despite the small numbers, the issue has taken on outsize importance.
Baker’s NCAA and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committees banned transgender women from women’s sports after President Donald Trump, a Republican, 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 compete only 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 ages 13 to 17, or 3.3%, identify as transgender in the U.S., according to the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law.
Follow the AP's coverage of the U.S. Supreme Court at https://apnews.com/hub/us-supreme-court.
The U.S. Supreme Court is seen Monday, June 29, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Mariam Zuhaib)
MONACO (AP) — An explosive went off in an apartment building entrance in Monaco, wounding three people, reportedly including a Ukrainian tycoon with ties to Russia, the chief prosecutor in the exclusive Mediterranean country said Tuesday.
A search was underway for a suspect who fled on foot after the explosion Monday night, Prosecutor Stéphane Thibault said, adding that the motive was unclear.
Media reports identified Ukrainian construction tycoon Vadym Yermolaiev as being among the injured. He was targeted by Ukrainian sanctions in 2023 for ties to Russia. A woman and a child were also hurt.
“It appears that the family was specifically targeted,” said Christophe Mirmand, the minister of state for Monaco. He said the suspect “had walked around the area several times while waiting for the victims,” according to surveillance footage.
The attack shocked the country on the Mediterranean coast, one of the world’s smallest sovereign states known for its high concentration of wealthy residents. Monaco’s Prince Albert II described it as “an odious act” and said all public services were mobilized to ensure security.
Monaco police opened an attempted murder investigation into the attack, but they did not describe it as a terrorism investigation, Thibault told reporters.
The family members are “regular” residents of Monaco, and authorities did not yet know whether they had been threatened in the past, Mirmand said.
The blast occurred around 9 p.m. Monday at the entrance of a residence near the French border.
The woman who was wounded was in life-threatening condition, Thibault said. He did not provide the identities of the people who were hurt.
The woman was being treated at a hospital in Nice, Mirmand told French news broadcaster LCI. Her partner and the 13-year-old child suffered less severe injuries but were still hospitalized Tuesday, he added.
The suspect got away via steps to a small street to the neighboring French town of Beausoleil, according to surveillance footage.
In a picture captured by surveillance cameras and published by French media, the suspect could be seen in a street wearing a black jacket, light-colored pants, white shoes and a black bucket hat that partly concealed his face.
The three people were “apparently returning home peacefully,” Mirmand said, citing surveillance footage. “They were caught in the explosion as they crossed the threshold of their apartment building."
Yermolaiev, a Ukrainian-born businessman originally from the city of Dnipro, built his fortune through the Alef Group, a diversified business that includes commercial real estate, manufacturing and agriculture. He became one of the country’s best-known property developers, leading projects that reshaped parts of Dnipro’s city center. He has regularly appeared in rankings of Ukraine’s wealthiest entrepreneurs.
In an interview with Forbes Ukraine, Yermolaiev said he renounced his Ukrainian citizenship and became a Cypriot citizen in 2017.
In December 2023, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy imposed sanctions on Yermolaiev as part of a broader package targeting individuals and companies Kyiv said had business links to Russia or Russian-occupied territories.
The Cyprus Registrar of Companies lists a man called Vadym Iermolaiev as the director of Vespano Ltd., a company in the Cypriot city of Limassol first registered in January 2019. Cyprus’ Interior Ministry told The Associated Press it could not provide information about the man’s citizenship status due to confidentiality rules.
A coastal playground for the rich and famous, Monaco is renowned as much for its tax-friendly incentives and Formula 1 Grand Prix as its glamorous royal family. The small principality is widely regarded as one of the safest places in the world, in part because of its network of thousands of surveillance cameras covering most public spaces.
Monaco’s population of 38,000 is multinational, with only a fifth of the population actually citizens of the principality.
Associated Press journalists Illia Novikov in Kyiv, Ukraine; Menelaos Hadjicostis in Nicosia, Cyprus; and Barry Hatton in Lisbon, Portugal, contributed to this report.
A view of the entrance to the residential building where an explosive device seriously injured three people in Monaco, Tuesday, June 30, 2026. (AP Photo/Philippe Magoni)
A view of the residential building where an explosive device seriously injured three people in Monaco, Tuesday, June 30, 2026. (AP Photo/Philippe Magoni)
Investigators examine the scene at the residential building where an explosive device seriously injured three people a day earlier in Monaco, Tuesday, June 30, 2026. (AP Photo/Philippe Magoni)
A police officer guards in a street in Monaco, Tuesday, June 30, 2026, a day after an explosive device seriously injured three people at a residential building in Monaco. (AP Photo/Philippe Magoni)
FILE - A luxury car drives along Monaco Harbor, Nov. 19, 2020. (AP Photo/Daniel Cole, File)
