ACLU-Backed Transgender Athlete Wins Girls State Title

A self-proclaimed transgender West Virginia athlete has won the race to claim a state championship before potentially facing a ban for being a male competing in female sports.

Becky Pepper-Jackson, 15, a sophomore at Bridgeport High School, won the state Class AAA shot put competition, according to the Charleston Gazette-Mail.

His winning throw was more than two feet beyond that of the second-place finisher.

Pepper-Jackson has spent the last five years fighting to compete against females, helped by the ACLU of West Virginia, which filed a lawsuit on his behalf in 2021. The U.S. Supreme Court has allowed him to compete against females, pending a final ruling.

“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 has said. “Trans kids deserve better.”

When the case to enforce a West Virginia law that bans males from female teams was argued before the U.S. Supreme Court in January, Michael Williams, West Virginia’s solicitor general, said “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 said. “Instead, schools must place students on sports teams based on their self-identified gender.”

Criticizing that as “backwards logic,” Williams said it makes Title IX “into a law that actually denies those opportunities for girls.”

“The law is indifferent to gender identity because sports are indifferent to gender identity,” Williams said.

West Virginia Republican Gov. Patrick Morrisey said “it’s just plain wrong to allow a boy to participate and win a girls’ sporting event.”

“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,” he added.

Republican state Sen. Brian Helton, chair of the state Senate Health and Human Resources Committee, said that “common sense with adults needs to prevail so that we don’t pretend a person is a biological sex that they’re not.”

“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,” he said.

The state’s athletic association insisted it’s following the rules.

“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,” the group said in a statement, according to WDTV.

However, the Alliance Defending Freedom said that Pepper-Jackson’s weekend win shows male athletes have an advantage.

“The developments from the state meet from this past weekend just underscore the fact that no amount of testosterone suppression or intervention can undo the very real differences that males have over women,” ADF attorney Suzanne Beecher said, according to Fox News.

“It really cuts against the ACLU’s argument,” she continued.

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