Federal judge rules against parents seeking to protest transgender athletes with wristband
A federal judge in New Hampshire is siding with a local school district in preventing parents from wearing armbands on school property in support of biological girls-only sports.
In September, the parents wore pink-colored "XX" wristbands during a high school soccer game where transgender athlete Parker Tirrell, now 16, was playing on an opposing team. The wristbands referenced the sex chromosomes associated with biological females.
The protest led to Bow and Dunbarton School Districts Superintendent Marcy Kelley issuing a notice of trespass against parents Anthony and Nicole Foote, along with Kyle Fellers and Eldon Rash, according to the New Hampshire Journal.
The parents then sued the school district, claiming their First Amendment rights were violated. While the no-trespass orders have since expired, they asked the judge to allow them to carry signs and wear the wristbands featuring the symbol for female chromosomes at school events while the case proceeds.
On Monday, U.S. District Court Judge Steven McAuliffe, a President George H. W. Bush appointee, ruled that the district acted reasonably in its decision to prevent parents from protesting.
McAuliffe said the parents’ "narrow, plausibly inoffensive" intentions were not as important as the wider context, and that adults attending a high school athletic event do not enjoy a First Amendment-protected right to convey messages that demean, harass or harm students.
"While plaintiffs may very well have never intended to communicate a demeaning or harassing message directed at Parker Tirrell or any other transgender students, the symbols and posters they displayed were fully capable of conveying such a message," he wrote. "And, that broader messaging is what the school authorities reasonably understood and appropriately tried to prevent."
"The broader and more demeaning/harassing message the School District understood plaintiffs’ ‘XX’ symbols to convey was, in context, entirely reasonable," wrote McAuliffe.
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Fellers and Foote testified that they had not intended to harass or otherwise target a transgender player on the opposing team, but the school district said differently. The group of parents had also not protested at any previous game.
In the days leading up to the game, another parent told school officials that she had overheard others talk about showing up to the game wearing dresses and heckling the transgender player.
"When we suspect there’s some sort of threat . . . we don’t wait for it to happen," Kelley said previously.
In February, the parents asked the court to rule that they be allowed to wear pink wristbands at the spring games to protest transgender athletes competing in girls’ sports. Their request for a preliminary injection was denied, and the court has yet to rule on the request to wear the pink wristbands at all school sporting events, per the Concord Monitor.
Del Kolde, a senior attorney for the Institute for Free Speech and one of the attorneys representing the parents, said he strongly disagrees with the court’s opinion issued denying their request for a preliminary injunction.
"This was adult speech in a limited public forum, which enjoys greater First Amendment protection than student speech in the classroom," Kolde said in a statement to the outlet. "Bow School District officials were obviously discriminating based on viewpoint because they perceived the XX wristbands to be ‘trans-exclusionary’."
After the ruling was issued, the plaintiffs filed a notice saying they do not intend to enter more evidence before the judge makes a final decision.
The decision comes just weeks after President Donald Trump signed an executive order intended to ban transgender athletes from participating in girls’ and women’s sports.
Fox News' Ryan Morik, Paulina Dedaj, Landon Mion, Jackson Thompson and The Associated Press contributed to this report.