On June 30, the Supreme Court upheld state laws barring transgender girls from girls' and women's school sports. Ruling on cases out of Idaho and West Virginia, the conservative majority held that the bans violate neither the Constitution nor Title IX, the federal law against sex discrimination in schools. More than two dozen Republican-led states have such a ban on the books. Ohio is one of them.
The decision was narrow in a way that matters. As NPR and PBS both noted, the Court did not touch grammar-school or recreational play, and it left standing the separate lawsuits challenging states like Connecticut and California that let transgender athletes compete. It answered the varsity question in the ban states and little else. For the Ohio families living under House Bill 68, the takeaway was blunter than any of that legal detail. The federal courts are not coming to help.
What the ruling settled and what it left open
Advocates had reason to hope otherwise. In 2020, in Bostock v. Clayton County, Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote for the Court that firing someone for being transgender is a form of sex discrimination. Many read that logic as a door into schools, workplaces, and sports. Over the next few years the door closed. The Fulcrum, in a July 7 analysis, counted seven Supreme Court rulings curbing transgender rights in the fourteen months from May 2025 to July 2026, spanning military service, gender-affirming care, and now athletics. The sports ruling left Bostock in place but refused to extend its logic, which for people planning their lives amounts to the same thing.
State courts have become the better bet
While the federal ceiling drops, the more protective action has moved to the states. The Fulcrum's analysis draws on a review by researcher Morgan Munroe of state-court cases from 2022 through 2024. Of those cases, Munroe found 55% had a positive impact on transgender people's lives, 30% a negative one, and 15% mixed or unclear. The reason is structural. State constitutions carry protections federal law increasingly withholds: explicit privacy clauses, parental-rights provisions, health-freedom language. Montana's Supreme Court used its state privacy clause to block a gender-affirming-care ban in Cross v. State in December 2024, on grounds no federal court has been willing to reach.
Ohio's own courts cut both ways
This is where the good news gets complicated. State courts are not automatically friendlier, and Ohio is a case in point. The same Fulcrum analysis flags an Ohio ruling that denied a transgender woman's request to correct her birth certificate, with justices reasoning in a way that could foreclose future appeals of the same kind. And Ohio's ban did not come from a court at all; it came from the legislature, HB 68's "Save Women's Sports Act," enacted in 2024 when lawmakers overrode Governor DeWine's veto. So "state courts step up" is a national pattern Ohio does not simply inherit. Here, the ballot decides who writes the laws and who sits on the bench that reviews them.
A closet in Medina County
That gap is what mutual aid is rushing to fill. In Medina County, a new organization called the Rainbow Society runs MoE's Closet, which gives away free gender-affirming clothing by appointment, up to ten items a month. Founder and executive director Carrie Cochran named it for her transgender brother, whose nickname was MoE. The closet opened in January 2025 and, per The Buckeye Flame's June report, has been buried in donations ever since, already outgrowing its space. Cochran wants to build the group into a full county resource center on the model of the LGBT Center of Greater Cleveland. She describes clients the closet has already served, including a transgender woman who had survived domestic abuse and trafficking. A shirt that fits is not a civil right restored. It is a community keeping its own people clothed while the rights fight grinds on.
Where the fight lives now
The federal path has narrowed to a corridor, and what is left runs through the states: the constitutions that still protect people, the courts that interpret them, and the legislatures that pass or override the bans. All of those seats are filled by Ohio voters. So is the governor's office that appoints and vetoes. No one running the closet in Medina County pretends it substitutes for those protections. It is what a community builds while it waits, and this one has stopped waiting on the Supreme Court to start organizing for the election in front of it.