Eighth Circuit Hands Trans Athletes a Win in Minnesota — and Says Trump's Executive Orders 'Aren't Law'

The Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals this month upheld Minnesota’s policy allowing transgender student athletes to compete on teams matching their gender identity, rejecting a challenge brought by an anti-trans advocacy group and adding a sentence in its opinion that is now being passed around in legal-Twitter screenshots: that President Donald Trump’s executive orders are not “settled law.”

It is a narrow ruling — narrower than its political reception suggests — but it is also a meaningful one. For now, Minnesota’s roughly 800 trans student athletes can keep playing. And the court has made the procedural point, in writing, that an executive order does not by itself rewrite Title IX or supersede a state’s anti-discrimination law.

What the court actually decided

The case began in March, when the Trump administration sued the state of Minnesota over its inclusive sports policy. The administration argued that allowing trans girls to compete in girls’ sports violates Title IX as the executive branch is now interpreting it, and threatened to withhold federal education funding if the state did not change course. A separate lawsuit, filed by an advocacy group challenging the same Minnesota State High School League bylaw, was already in the federal courts.

The Eighth Circuit’s opinion this month dealt with that second case. The judges ruled that the plaintiffs lacked a private right of action — meaning, in plain English, that they could not show they had been concretely harmed in a way the courts can fix. To sue under Title IX, the court reaffirmed, you have to show intentional discrimination. The plaintiffs had not shown that.

The court then went a step further. It noted, in addressing the plaintiffs’ reliance on Trump’s February 2025 executive order purporting to redefine sex under federal law, that an executive order is not statute. The judges wrote that the order “does not represent settled law” and could not be cited to displace either Title IX or Minnesota’s own anti-discrimination protections. That language is what’s getting the attention, because it is one of the first appellate rulings to address the binding force of the second-term Trump executive orders aimed at trans Americans.

What it doesn’t decide

It is worth being precise about the limits of the ruling. The Eighth Circuit did not strike down Trump’s executive order. It did not foreclose the Trump administration’s separate, ongoing lawsuit against the state of Minnesota. It did not rule that Title IX requires inclusive policies — only that Title IX does not, on this record, forbid them. And it applies only in the Eighth Circuit (Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska, Arkansas, North Dakota, South Dakota). Other circuits could reach different conclusions. The Eleventh Circuit, in particular, has been moving in the opposite direction.

The case also does not address the federal funding threat. The Trump administration’s separate suit alleges that Minnesota’s policy disqualifies its schools from federal Title IX funding, and that fight is still live in district court. If the administration prevails there, schools across Minnesota could face budget consequences regardless of what the Eighth Circuit said about who had standing.

Why the “settled law” line still matters

The reason civil rights lawyers are circulating that one phrase from the opinion is that it gives lower courts a citable answer to a question that’s come up over and over again in the past 15 months: when a school district, a state agency, or a hospital is presented with a Trump executive order that conflicts with existing federal or state law, what binds them?

The Eighth Circuit’s answer, in the context of this case, is that the underlying statute and the existing state law win. The executive order is presidential policy guidance. It can direct federal agencies. It cannot, by itself, override Congress or a state legislature. Several federal district courts have made similar findings in scattered preliminary injunctions over the past year — on military service, on passport gender markers, on the federal employee health plan — but having an appellate ruling that uses those words gives the next plaintiff’s brief a much easier paragraph to write.

The Minnesota political picture

Governor Tim Walz, who has made trans-inclusive sports a vocal priority, called the ruling “a win for kids who just want to play on their school’s team.” Attorney General Keith Ellison’s office, which has defended the policy in both the federal lawsuit and the private suit, said it would continue to defend the state’s inclusion bylaw “in any forum the federal government chooses.”

The Trump administration has not yet said whether it will seek en banc review by the full Eighth Circuit, or whether it will continue pressing its parallel lawsuit. Either is possible. A petition to the Supreme Court is also possible, though long-shot — the Court already declined to take a similar trans-athletes case from West Virginia in its last term, suggesting at least some justices want the issue to develop further in the lower courts before they weigh in.

What this means for the broader fight

For the roughly 1.6 million trans Americans living under state-level protections that the federal executive branch is now actively trying to dismantle, this ruling does not change the daily picture much. The federal funding fights are still coming. The patchwork of state laws is still ugly. A trans teenager whose family lives in Tennessee or Texas does not get to use Minnesota’s bylaw.

But the legal architecture matters. The Trump administration’s strategy on trans rights has leaned heavily on executive orders, on the theory that whatever the orders direct, schools and hospitals and federal contractors will simply comply. The Eighth Circuit’s opinion is the highest court to date to say, in writing, that compliance is not legally required where the order conflicts with existing law. That is the kind of slow, procedural foundation civil rights movements get built on.

A panel of three Eighth Circuit judges said an executive order is not the law. They are right. The work now is making sure other courts say it too.