Gay Ex-Scout Sues-After Letter After Supreme Court Loss

New Jersey activist James Dale, 56, who once fought the Boy Scouts of America all the way to the Supreme Court in a gay membership case, has written an open letter to 16-year-old Becky Pepper-Jackson after the Court ruled against her challenge to West Virginia

On the same week the Supreme Court dealt Becky Pepper-Jackson a loss in her fight to play women’s sports, a man who has already lived through a different kind of defeat reached back across years and courtrooms.

James Dale. a 56-year-old New Jersey activist and former scout who was at the center of the Supreme Court’s 2000 decision allowing the Boy Scouts of America to exclude gay scoutmasters. shared an open letter to Pepper-Jackson on Tuesday. The letter—published on Medium—begins with a memory that still feels immediate: a brief encounter with the 16-year-old transgender student at Lambda Legal’s 2026 Liberty Awards in New York last month.

“I told you I was proud of you and that I believed in you. I meant it then. I mean it more today,” Dale writes. He adds that he doesn’t claim to know what it’s like to be transgender or to be young and fighting “something this big in front of the whole country.” But he says he does know “what it feels like to lose at the Supreme Court. ” because he lived through it.

Pepper-Jackson had brought a case after West Virginia’s law barred transgender women from participating on female teams in school sports. Her challenge—West Virginia v. B.P.J.—was argued alongside a similar school-sports dispute involving 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.

This week, the Supreme Court ruled that West Virginia’s and Idaho’s laws did not violate Title IX, the federal civil rights law that bars sex discrimination in sports. The decision has been widely treated as a devastating blow to LGBTQ+ rights.

Dale’s letter meets that blow with something he calls hard-earned reassurance. He urges Pepper-Jackson to “step away and breathe,” even as he insists that losing doesn’t mean quitting.

“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.”

His words turn personal in the way only lived experience can. He writes that change is slow—“It’s slow, and it’s messy. And it usually takes way longer than it should. And then, eventually, it happens anyway.”

For Dale, the Supreme Court loss wasn’t theoretical. He sued the Boy Scouts of America in 1990 after they revoked his adult membership once they learned he was gay. He was 19 years old at the time. and before that he had been both an Eagle Scout and an assistant scoutmaster in New Jersey. The case eventually reached the Supreme Court as Boy Scouts of America v. Dale, and in 2000, the Court ruled 5-4 for the Boy Scouts. The majority argument was that the group’s opposition to same-sex relationships was part of its “expressive message. ” and that allowing queer men as adult leaders would interfere with that message.

That 2000 ruling is the one Dale says he carries back into Pepper-Jackson’s moment right now: “What I do know is what it feels like to lose at the Supreme Court, because I lived it.”

Still, Dale points to a different ending than the one the Court’s decisions seemed to promise. The Boy Scouts struck down its ban on gay youth participants in 2013. Two years later, the organization updated its membership policy again to allow queer adults to serve as both scoutmasters and on staff.

In his letter, Dale doesn’t pretend the shift was perfect. He acknowledges the Boy Scouts’ efforts to be more inclusive of LGBTQ+ people have been “not perfectly” executed. But he says he takes pride in the fact that “the door opened. ” and he frames that opening as something that came from people refusing to accept exclusion as normal.

“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 writes. “That understanding built slowly, over the years, because people like you refused to disappear.”

By the end, Dale asks Pepper-Jackson to look forward—to treat her Supreme Court loss not as the finish line, but as a chapter that can be read differently later.

“Someday, I believe, America will understand with the same clarity why excluding transgender kids is wrong,” he adds. “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.”

The letter lands with particular weight because Dale’s own story runs alongside Pepper-Jackson’s: a challenge against exclusion, a Supreme Court decision that did not go the way he wanted, and then—after years—change that arrived anyway.

United States politics Supreme Court Title IX West Virginia v. B.P.J. LGBTQ rights transgender athletes Becky Pepper-Jackson James Dale Boy Scouts of America v. Dale Lambda Legal Medium letter