A federal judge has ruled that adults attending school sports games cannot protest the presence of transgender athletes.
The case involved Kyle Fellers and Anthony Foote, two adult men who sued Bow High School in New Hampshire last year after school officials banned them from campus for protesting a trans 16-year-old player on the Plymouth Regional High School’s soccer team during a September 17 game.
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Fellers and Foote had worn pink wristbands with two X’s on them — a symbol used by anti-trans activists to denote cisgender female chromosomes — and refused to remove them when asked. Foote had also displayed a poster that read, “Protect Women’s Sports for Female Athletes” on his Jeep. After the game ended, he held up the sign in the parking lot for departing spectators to see, The Hill reported.
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Before the game, Fellers and Foote had talked with other Bow parents about “wearing dresses to the game, buying anti-trans gear, making signs, and generally heckling and intimidating” the trans player.
Marcy Kelley, superintendent of the Bow school district, said she and other school officials believed any protest targeting a single player, violated the school’s athletic handbook and school board policies regarding public conduct on school property. So, school officials asked the men to leave and banned them from returning to campus. In response, the men sued.
The men’s attorney argued that their protest wasn’t intended to harass an individual student but rather to express “passive statement of support for women’s athletics.” However, on Monday, U.S. District Court Judge Steven McAuliffe, an appointee of former President George W. Bush, ruled that their statement couldn’t be separated from the “broader context” of the opposing team’s trans athlete.
McAuliffe also said that adults at school sports games don’t have a First Amendment right to demean students. He said school officials were “duty bound” to protect trans students from “the harassment, intimidation, and anxiety likely to follow” the men’s protest.
“The message generally ascribed to the XX symbol, in a context such as that presented here, can reasonably be understood as directly assaulting those who identify as transgender women,” McAuliffe wrote in his ruling. “Beyond ‘I oppose your participation,’ the message can reasonably be understood to include assertions that there are ‘only two genders,’ and those who identify as something other than male or female are wrong and their gender identities are false, inauthentic, nonexistent, and not entitled to respect.”
The men’s attorneys disagreed with the ruling and said they’re considering next steps.
Last July, New Hampshire banned trans female students from competing on girls and women’s sports teams. However, a federal judge has allowed the aforementioned soccer athlete and another 15-year-old trans girl to continue playing on their sports teams while legal challenges against the ban proceed through courts.
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