The families of two transgender high school athletes in New Hampshire have added President Donald Trump’s administration to a lawsuit challenging laws that prevent the athletes from competing in girls’ sports.
The teenage plaintiffs, Parker Tirrell and Iris Turmelle, originally filed the lawsuit last year to challenge a current New Hampshire state law prohibiting trans athletes from participating in girls’ sports. On Wednesday, a federal judge granted a request to add the Trump administration to the list of defendants over the president’s recent executive order.
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Trump signed the “No Men in Women’s Sports” executive order on Feb. 5, which prohibited any federal funding for educational institutions that allow biological males to compete on women’s or girls’ sports teams.
New Hampshire was already one of 25 states with a law in place to enforce similar bans on trans inclusion, but Tirrell and Turmelle have been allowed to compete on girls’ teams anyway, thanks to the ruling of a federal judge in their state.
“The systematic targeting of transgender people across American institutions is chilling, but targeting young people in schools, denying them support and essential opportunities during their most vulnerable years, is especially cruel,” Chris Erchull, a GLAD attorney, said.
The lawyers claimed Trump’s executive order, along with parts of a Jan. 20 executive order that forbids federal money from being used to “promote gender ideology,” subjects the teens and all transgender girls to discrimination in violation of federal equal protection guarantees and their rights under Title IX.
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The lawyers also claimed the executive orders unlawfully subject the teens’ schools to the threat of losing federal funding for allowing them to play sports.
The situation involving the two trans athletes has also prompted a second lawsuit after parents wore wristbands that read “XX” in reference to the biological female chromosomes, and were allegedly banned from school grounds for wearing them.
Plaintiffs Kyle Fellers and Anthony Foote sued the Bow School District after being banned from school grounds for wearing the wristbands at their daughters’ soccer game in September.
In the lawsuit filed by Fellers and Foote, they alleged they were told by school officials to remove the armbands or they would have to leave the game.
Both of the fathers say the intention of the armband was not to protest Tirrell, but to support their own daughters in a game that featured a biological male.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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