James Dale, the New Jersey activist at the center of the Supreme Court's 2000 ruling that allowed the Boy Scouts of America to exclude gay scoutmasters, shared a poignant and personal reaction to the court's decision this week on transgender athletes.
On Tuesday, Dale published an open letter to Becky Pepper-Jackson, the 16-year-old transgender student who unsuccessfully challenged West Virginia's law banning transgender women from participating on female teams in school sports. The letter, posted on Medium, begins with Dale recalling his brief encounter with Pepper-Jackson at Lambda Legal's 2026 Liberty Awards in New York last month.
Dale's Message of Solidarity
"I told you I was proud of you and that I believed in you. I meant it then. I mean it more today," the 56-year-old writes. "I don't know what it's like to be transgender. I don't know what it's like to be as young as you are right now, fighting something this big in front of the whole country. What I do know is what it feels like to lose at the Supreme Court, because I lived it."
Dale was 19 when he sued the Boy Scouts in 1990 after they revoked his adult membership upon learning he was gay. He had been an Eagle Scout and assistant scoutmaster in New Jersey. His case reached the Supreme Court as Boy Scouts of America v. Dale, and in 2000, the court ruled 5-4 in favor of the Boy Scouts, arguing that the group's opposition to same-sex relationships was part of its "expressive message" and that allowing gay men as adult leaders would interfere with that message.
Pepper-Jackson's Case and Supreme Court Ruling
Pepper-Jackson's case, West Virginia v. B.P.J., was argued alongside that of Lindsay Hecox, a student at Idaho's Boise State University who sued for the right to try out for her school's women's track and cross-country teams. On Tuesday, the Supreme Court ruled that West Virginia and Idaho's laws did not violate Title IX, the federal civil rights law that bars sex discrimination in sports. The decision has been deemed a devastating blow to LGBTQ+ rights.
In his letter, Dale urged Pepper-Jackson to take a moment to "step away and breathe" as "standing up to bigotry in the first place was winning."
Advice and Hope for the Future
"I want to tell you what I heard when you said this from that stage three weeks ago: you don't quit. You show up. You trust the process, and you come back stronger," he wrote. "You were talking about sports. But you were also describing exactly how change actually happens in this country."
He continued: "It's slow, and it's messy. And it usually takes way longer than it should. And then, eventually, it happens anyway."
Though the Supreme Court's 2000 ruling wasn't in Dale's favor, the Boy Scouts struck down its ban on gay youth participants in 2013. Two years later, it updated its membership policy to allow gay adults to serve as scoutmasters and on staff. Dale acknowledges in his letter that the Boy Scouts' efforts to be more inclusive of LGBTQ+ people have been "not perfectly" executed, but he takes pride in knowing that "the door opened" and believes Pepper-Jackson will eventually look back on her experience similarly.
"The Boy Scouts changed, not because any court told them to, but because people came to understand how wrong it was to exclude a kid for who he was," he wrote. "That understanding built slowly, over the years, because people like you refused to disappear."
"Someday, I believe, America will understand with the same clarity why excluding transgender kids is wrong," he added. "When that day comes, it will be because of what you built. The record you made. The five years you actually competed and showed everyone watching that the sky did not fall."
