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Irish activists in the The Countess Foundation has welcomed this week’s ruling by the Supreme Court of the United States upholding the right of states to reserve girls’ and women’s school sports for biological females, and called on the Irish Government to take serious note of this the second of two recent landmark apex court decisions handed down within the past fifteen months in the common law jurisdictions closest to our own.
In West Virginia v. B.P.J. and Little v. Hecox, decided 30 June 2026, a majority of the US Supreme Court held that laws in West Virginia and Idaho restricting eligibility for girls’ and women’s school sports teams to biological females do not violate either Title IX or the Fourteenth Amendment.
Writing for the majority, Justice Brett Kavanaugh grounded the decision in the plain, observable physical differences between the sexes and their relevance to athletic competition, concluding that the Constitution and Title IX do not require an overhaul of women’s and girls’ sports throughout America.
“This is a welcome and long-overdue affirmation of basic biological truth: males are stronger than women and that is why the category of sex exists in sport” said Laoise de Brún BL, for The Countess Foundation. “Two of the world’s most influential apex courts — the UK Supreme Court in For Women Scotland, and now the US Supreme Court — have in the space of little more than a year reached the same conclusion from first principles: that biological sex is a material, legally relevant fact, and that women and girls are entitled to spaces, services and competitive categories reserved on that basis.
“The Irish government cannot continue to ignore the international consensus no matter how much the NGOs and the EU tell them to,” she says.
The Countess Foundation notes that the UK Supreme Court’s unanimous ruling in For Women Scotland Ltd v The Scottish Ministers (April 2025), which held that “sex” under the Equality Act 2010 refers to biological sex, has already prompted the Equality and Human Rights Commission to update its statutory guidance for service providers across Britain. No equivalent process of review has been undertaken in this jurisdiction.
“We are now looking at two apex courts, in two jurisdictions with which Ireland shares the closest possible legal, cultural and sporting ties, reaching clear and considered judgments on the same underlying question,” de Brún continued. “The Government, Sport Ireland, and the national governing bodies that fund and regulate school and underage sport in this country have a duty to examine both rulings carefully rather than continue to defer difficult policy questions indefinitely. Irish girls and women deserve the same clarity, and the same fair competitive space, that their counterparts in Britain and America are now guaranteed.”
“The Countess Foundation is calling on the Minister for Sport and Sport Ireland to conduct and publish a formal policy review of eligibility criteria for female categories in Irish school and underage sport, having regard to both the For Women Scotland and B.P.J./Hecox judgments,” she said.
Ms de Brún noted that B.P.J./Hecox is not merely a foreign policy statement but an apex decision — the reasoned judgment of a state’s court of final appeal — and, as such, carries real legal weight beyond its own jurisdiction.
“Irish courts have a long and well-established practice of looking to the reasoned judgments of apex courts in other common law jurisdictions, particularly the United Kingdom and the United States, for persuasive authority where a comparable point of principle arises here,” she said.
“Neither ruling binds an Irish court. But if this question were ever tested here — whether in the context of school sport, or any analogous question of single-sex provision — an Irish court would be entitled to, and in practice likely would, give real weight to the fact that two of the common law world’s most senior courts have now independently reasoned their way to the same conclusion on the same underlying facts about sex and athletic performance. That convergence matters. It is precisely the kind of persuasive comparative reasoning our courts take seriously.”
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