JayCee Cooper, a transgender female athlete, has asked the Minnesota Supreme Court to let her compete in women’s powerlifting events after she was forbidden from doing so by the sport’s governing body.

The organization USA Powerlifting (USAPL) denied Cooper the right to compete in women’s events in 2019, alleging that — as a trans woman who went through male biological puberty — Cooper had unfair physical advantages over cisgender female competitors.

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Cooper sued USAPL in January 2021, alleging that its policies violated the Minnesota Human Rights Act (MHRA), a law which forbids discrimination on the basis of sex and gender identity. In 2023, a Ramsey County District Court agreed with Cooper.

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However, the Minnesota Court of Appeals sent the case back to the trial court last March, stating that there were “genuine issues of fact” about whether USAPL excluded Cooper just because she’s trans or whether the organization had a “legitimate business reason” for doing so, the Associated Press reported.

In the state Supreme Court, Cooper’s attorney Christy Hall said USAPL’s exclusion of Cooper for being trans clearly violates the state’s anti-discrimination law. But USAPL’s lawyer Ansis Viksnins argued that USAPL’s decision “had nothing to do with [Cooper’s] present gender identity,” adding, “The reason for differentiation was her male physiology.”

“This is not a mixed motive case,” Viksnins told the Supreme Court justices, according to the Star Tribune. “The motive here was to separate biological males into a category where they are competing against other people who were born biologically male.”

Part of the lawyer’s arguments in the high court centered around a 2001 state Supreme Court decision in the case of Goins v. West Group. The ruling decided that an employer requiring a trans female employee to use an employee restroom based on their biological sex is not a form of discrimination that violates the MHRA.

Hall urged the court to rule in favor of Cooper and overturn its 2001 decision, stating, “In reality, treating transgender women different from other women is at the heart of gender discrimination.”

However, Viksnins said that USAPL’s position rests on the same legal reasoning used to decide that 2001 case and argued that ruling in favor of Cooper or overturning the 2001 decision would undermine other legal decisions based on that precedent.

Cooper legally changed her name at age 28 and began powerlifting in 2017. She purchased a USAPL membership in 2018 and began competing in USAPL events in 2019. However that same year, USAPL said she could no longer compete and later developed an official policy requiring all competitors to compete in gender categories matching the biological sex athletes were assigned at birth.

That same year, Outsports published an in-depth examination of USAPL’s decision and the reactions of Cooper’s allies.

In 2021, USA Powerlifting launched an MX category, providing a separate division for athletes of all gender identities. However, trans athletes say that such mixed-gender categories don’t resolve the larger issues of discrimination and exclusion based on gender identity.

After the court hearing, USAPL President Larry Maile said he regrets that debates over trans inclusion in sports has gotten mixed up with other contemporary debates on trans rights.

“The real tragedy for us is that [this] isn’t restricted to a sensible common-sense discussion about performance and what makes sense in terms of categories,” Maile said. “It’s painted as a lot of other things and it’s co-opted by other people in terms of things we have no interest in — rights in general, use of restrooms, medical care. We are not interested in those. We are only interested in what occurs on the platform and how to pick it fair.”

It’s unclear when the Minnesota Supreme Court will issue its ruling on the issue.

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