By Matthew Young
For HDMedia
If the U.S. Supreme Court’s forthcoming decision makes 2026 the last year of competition for Bridgeport High School sophomore Becky Pepper-Jackson, then the 15-year-old transgender athlete made the most of her final season of interscholastic sports in West Virginia.
With a personal shot put best of 38 feet, 11¾ inches, Pepper-Jackson edged out runner-up Paislee Babiczuk of John Marshall High School by just over 2 feet in the sixth and final round to claim the WVSSAC Class AAA girls state championship. Babiczuk’s first throw was longer than Pepper-Jackson’s before two consecutive Babiczuk fouls. Pepper-Jackson’s sixth and final throw added more than 4 feet to her mark in an eighth-place finish the year prior.
Although placing fourth in the discus throw competition, Pepper-Jackson’s 112-foot toss was nearly 10 feet short of her 2025 third-place finish. Babiczuk, however, added more than 17 feet to her second-place finish a year ago. Her 139 feet, 6 inches was more than enough to win the state title in dominant fashion, besting the second-place finisher, Grace Yeager of Winfield High School, by some 25 feet.
HB 3293: The ‘Save Women’s Sports Act’
In April 2021, then-Gov. Jim Justice signed House Bill 3293 into law. Introduced by former Delegate Caleb Hanna, R-Nicholas, the bill designated “athletic teams or sports sponsored by any public secondary school or state institution of higher education according to biological sex.”
As stated in the text of the bill, HB 3293 prohibits “biological males from participating on athletic teams or sports designated for biological females.” However, the bill also notes that the “eligibility of any student to participate on athletic teams or sports designated for biological males is not restricted.”
“Everyone we’re talking about here are children,” Sen. Brian Helton, R-Fayette, chair of the West Virginia Senate’s Health and Human Resources Committee, told the Gazette-Mail on Wednesday. “They’re students, and we need to be respectful of that.”
According to Helton, there are “two parts to the issue”: protecting girls’ sports from “those of the opposite sex” and providing Pepper-Jackson with compassion and support.
“We can’t find ourselves in the position of bullying children going through gender dysphoria,” Helton said. “They really need to be protected from becoming a public spectacle.”
The ACLU and its 11-year-old plaintiff
Pepper-Jackson did not comment to the media following her state shot-put win, but in the spring of 2021, 11-year-old Pepper-Jackson was finishing her fifth-grade year and said she was looking forward to competing with her friends in Harrison County on the middle school cross-country team.
“I just want to run,” Pepper-Jackson said in a statement released at the time by the ACLU. “I come from a family of runners.”
Pepper-Jackson ran cross country for her middle school team.
On May 24 of that year, less than two months after Justice signed the new law, the ACLU of West Virginia challenged it and filed a lawsuit on Pepper-Jackson’s behalf.
“I know how hurtful a law like this is to all kids like me who just want to play sports with their classmates, and I’m doing this for them,” Pepper-Jackson said of the lawsuit. “Trans kids deserve better.”
Research released in 2017 by the UCLA Law School’s Williams Institute detailed that West Virginia was estimated to have the highest percentage of transgender children between the ages of 13 and 17 anywhere in the nation. The state’s 1.04% represented about 1,150 transgender teens. However, the Williams Institute’s 2025 research shows as many as 3,800 West Virginia children have been impacted by recent legislation to prohibit the practice of gender-affirming care within the Mountain State, in the form of 2025’s Senate Bill 299.
According to the American Association of Medical Colleges, gender affirming care is “designed to support and affirm an individual’s gender identity when it conflicts with the gender they were assigned at birth,” a condition commonly referred to as gender dysphoria.
The lawsuit prompted a years-long court battle, eventually leading to the April 2023 U.S. Supreme Court decision to allow Pepper-Jackson to continue competing while the legal process unfolded.
“That’s all I want to do, be with my friends and be the girl that I am,” Pepper-Jackson said in another ACLU news release announcing the decision.
Litigating how games are played
When lawmakers passed HB 3293 in April 2021, they made West Virginia the first state in the nation to enact a law prohibiting transgender girls from participating in girls’ sports at the middle, high school or collegiate level. By Jan. 13 of this year — the day the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the Save Women’s Sports Act lawsuit — some 26 other states had created similar laws.
Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 states that, “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.” The premise of Pepper-Jackson’s lawsuit is that the Save Women’s Sports Act violates Title IX because it prevents her from joining the athletic team whose gender she identifies with because of the biological sex recorded at the time of her birth.
“Title IX permits sex-separated teams,” Michael R. Williams, West Virginia’s solicitor general, said during Supreme Court oral arguments on Jan. 13. “It does so because biological sex matters in athletics in ways both obvious and undeniable.”
“[Pepper-Jackson] says that West Virginia schools can no longer designate teams by looking to biological sex,” Williams continued. “Instead, schools must place students on sports teams based on their self-identified gender.”
Referring to it as “backwards logic,” Williams argued that interpreting Title IX in such a way turns it “into a law that actually denies those opportunities for girls.”
“[Pepper-Jackson] attacks the law by searching for a transgender classification that simply isn’t there,” Williams added. “The law is indifferent to gender identity because sports are indifferent to gender identity.”
The court of political opinion
While the U.S. Supreme Court is expected to issue a ruling regarding the Save Women’s Sports Act in the coming weeks, West Virginia’s court of public opinion wasted little time making itself heard.
Taking to Facebook shortly after Pepper-Jackson was crowned state shot put champion, Gov. Patrick Morrisey said, “The state track and field championship confirms the fundamental unfairness of letting boys compete in girls’ sports.”
“It’s just plain wrong to allow a boy to participate and win a girls’ sporting event,” Morrisey continued. “I’ve continued the fight for girls’ sports and have made clear that under my watch West Virginia will celebrate the true winners of these championships.”
The WVSSAC responded to the situation Tuesday afternoon by releasing the following statement: “[Becky Pepper-Jackson] participates in WVSSAC competition under a federal court order, which the WVSSAC fully complies with. The underlying legal matter was argued before the U.S. Supreme Court on Jan. 13, 2026. The WVSSAC will have no further comment until the Court issues a ruling and the organization has had the opportunity to review it.”
While the WVSSAC chose to remain neutral until the matter is settled in court, Helton did not.
“Common sense with adults needs to prevail so that we don’t pretend a person is a biological sex that they’re not,” Helton said. “We have a responsibility to teach children, and to help them understand that it is a mental illness to have gender dysphoria. We need to have compassion, teach the children and coach them, and get them the counseling that they need, as opposed to pretending like it’s perfectly OK for them to go and compete against girls.”
What’s next?
The current term of the U.S. Supreme Court is scheduled to end on Oct. 4; however, the Court itself has indicated that all verdicts and opinions will be issued by the end of June.
“It’s always the right time to stand up for women’s and girls’ sports,” Helton said. “Every time something like this comes up, we are obligated to stand up to protect our girls and to make sure that their sports and their locker rooms are always safe.”
Read more from HDMedia, here