That group also has played a role in shaping Idaho’s policy. Barbara Ehardt, a Idaho Republican legislator and former NCAA women’s basketball player and coach who authored HB 500, worked with the ADF to craft the language of the law, she said in an interview. She said her own experience in sports, coupled with her dismay over the case in Connecticut, led her to pursue the bill.

“No matter how you look at it, we cannot compete against the inherent physiological advantages those biological males possess,” she said, later adding: “This has been 100 percent because of my personal experiences and the blessings I received from having had the opportunity to compete and play in not just high school but collegiate sports. I want to protect those opportunities … for girls and women who will follow after me. This for me is not political but personal. It’s about opportunities.”

The science over who is viewed as a woman in athletic competition remains inconclusive and contentious. It is reflected in the inconsistency of rules across different levels of competition; while the NCAA allows women to compete after a year of hormone therapy, it doesn’t regulate a transgender athlete’s testosterone levels. The International Olympic Committee allows transgender women to compete so long as they maintain certain blood testosterone levels for at least a year.

Researchers are searching for more data and more answers. One of those scientists, Joanna Harper, said no data on trans athletes existed in 2004; that year, she was a well-known distance runner who was beginning hormone therapy in transitioning to female. Her research, part of which was published in 2015, found that a small group of transgender women runners were no more competitive after hormone therapy in the female division than they had been in the male division and were running at least 10 percent slower after treatment.

But the study was small in scope, said Harper, a former adviser to the IOC who has continued her research at Loughborough University in the United Kingdom.

“How all of these things play out is certainly complicated, and of course we know very, very little about it yet,” Harper said. “But the assumption that trans women will have an unassailable, overall advantage over cisgender women hasn’t proven to be true.”

The fight over who can compete will continue to be waged in courthouses across the country, and how the cases in Idaho and Connecticut are resolved carry significant implications, according to Erin Buzuvis, a Western New England Law School professor who researches and writes about gender and discrimination in education and athletics.

“So far, this fight for inclusion in high school sports, it has been conducted in the political arena on a state-by-state basis. So if there is a victory in [the Hecox case], that will help ensure that the negative political efforts are curtailed,” Buzuvis said. “If there’s not a victory, the status quo remains and what we’ve been doing all along, which is to convince states one by one to adopt more inclusive policies, that would still be allowed to continue.”

Hecox and her legal team are first aiming to win an injunction by August so she can try out for the school’s team. She continues to train every day, running trails in Boise, often imagining herself wearing the school’s blue and orange colors.

“I definitely feel honored to be a potential trailblazer for my community. If I win the case, it legitimizes the ultimate fact that I’m no different than a cisgender girl,” she said. “I should still be able to compete on the team. It would make me feel that society is valuing me as a member.”