As the Supreme Court weighs the future of state laws barring transgender girls from school sports, two UMass Amherst scholars are among key academic voices urging the justices to interpret Title IX as a statute of inclusion, not exclusion.

Elizabeth (Libby) Sharrow, professor of public policy and history and director of faculty research at the Institute for Social Science Research, and Patricia Griffin, professor emerita of social justice education, joined 11 other scholars in signing an amicus brief supporting a transgender student in West Virginia v. B.P.J. The case challenges a West Virginia law that restricts participation on school-sponsored girls’ sports teams to students assigned female at birth.

Justices heard oral arguments earlier this month on the West Virginia law and similar legislation in Idaho. Together, the cases could affect at least 25 other states with similar restrictions.

Sharrow worked with outside legal counsel to help shape the brief’s argument, which submits that Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 does not permit categorical bans on transgender girls in school athletics. Instead, the brief argues, the law allows schools to make sport-specific, reasonable distinctions while preserving equal educational opportunity.

“Segregation in sports was never meant to be the sort of cudgel to deny opportunities to groups,” Sharrow explains. “It was meant to create a set of structures to expand the opportunity structure.”

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The brief asserts that Congress deliberately rejected blanket exclusions when it enacted Title IX and later policy interpretations. It argues that the law’s athletics provisions permit sex-separate teams but do not authorize across-the-board bans based solely on sex assigned at birth.

Sharrow says the brief was designed to ground the debate in the statute’s original intent and legal framework, rather than contemporary political battles, which have seen some state lawmakers increasingly target Title IX itself as a pathway to restrict transgender participation.

“State legislatures that passed laws to exclude trans youth from school-sponsored activities violate the fundamental purpose of Title IX, which has always been to combat exclusion, not to enact it,” Sharrow notes.

The court’s ruling, expected later this year, would mark its first direct decision on transgender athletes. Sharrow says the outcome could shape the future of federal sex-discrimination law far beyond athletics.