A Washington state high school wrestler and her mother have asked the Supreme Court to issue an order that would block transgender girls from competing against her this upcoming season. The justices could act anytime in the contentious dispute.

But how they do so could be complicated by the recent passage of a Washington ballot measure that bars transgender girls from playing girls’ sports in the state’s schools. It could be further complicated by a new lawsuit that seeks to stop that measure from taking effect.

How the high court handles the litigation could have nationwide implications beyond this one case. That’s because the conservative Christian legal group representing the family has asked the justices to use the matter to resolve the next frontier of legal issues in this area. The court has approved bans on transgender women and girls competing in their chosen sports, while leaving open the question of whether schools can allow such competition.

In the pending application to the justices in the Washington case, lawyers with the Alliance Defending Freedom said the court could use it to decide whether “gender-identity participation policies” violate federal law against “treating females worse than males in sports,” as well as whether a parent’s “fundamental right to direct her child’s care entitles her to notice and opt-out before her daughter is forced to compete against male athletes in contact or competitive-skill sports.”

ADF represents Stephanie Lynne Brown and her daughter, Kallie Keeler, who is identified in court papers by her initials, K.M.K., and is named in ADF’s promotional materials on the case. They applied for an injunction at the Supreme Court in early October, after a federal appeals court panel declined to grant one. The litigation has been fully briefed for weeks, but the justices have not yet acted — possibly because they have been waiting for the results of the ballot measure from last week’s election, though their silence thus far leaves it to speculation.

In a letter to the justices on Monday, state officials cited the measure’s passage as a reason not to intervene but rather to let the state’s process “run its course.” They said the measure’s impending certification and implementation “is likely to alter, and may resolve, the policy that is the subject of the application, and could materially affect whether any interim relief is needed, as well as the scope of any live controversy.”

The letter said the measure, called Initiative 638, is set to take effect Dec. 3 and will make schools “prohibit biologically male students from competing with and against female students in athletic activities that have separate classifications for male and female students.” It also said the measure requires “verification of a student’s sex by the student’s health care provider.”

Ahead of the election, ADF lawyers argued that the court shouldn’t wait for the results because even if the measure passed, it wouldn’t take effect until after wrestling season starts on Nov. 16. That warning was not enough to get the court to act before the election.

Another potentially complicating factor in the wake of the election is that the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit this week in Washington state court seeking to halt the ban from taking effect. If that suit succeeds, it could create more of an opening for the Supreme Court to intervene in Keeler’s case. ADF lawyers cited the new suit in its own letter to the justices on Tuesday as one of the reasons that it said intervention was still needed.

It’s unclear what the justices will do or when they will do it. Even if they choose to step in, they could opt to issue an order that attempts to resolve the application narrowly as it applies to Keeler, without taking up the case on full review and using it to set a nationwide precedent.

The appellate panel that ruled against Keeler and her mother noted that the case stemmed from their claim that a transgender wrestler sexually assaulted Keeler during a match last year. But the panel said the remedy the plaintiffs sought went “well beyond what is reasonably necessary to protect K.M.K. from that student,” because they demanded notice of all transgender athletes who might compete against her. The panel rejected what it called an attempt to “extrapolate from harm caused by one student, contending that prospective relief is needed as to an entire class of students without showing why a narrower remedy would not suffice.”

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