Federal judge rules transgender student can play on girl's tennis team in Virginia
The Hanover County School Board in Virginia can't block an 11-year-old transgender student from playing on a girls’ middle school tennis team, U.S. District Court Judge M. Hannah Lauck ruled last week. The student is currently engaged in a lawsuit against the school board for discrimination.
Lauck issued a preliminary injunction on the matter Friday, saying the plaintiff "established that the Board excluded her, on the basis of sex, from participating in an education program when it denied her application to try out for (and if selected, to participate on) her school’s girls’ tennis team." The lawsuit only identifies the student as "Janie Doe."
The American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia filed a lawsuit on behalf of the plaintiff in July. The suit alleges that the Hanover County school board discriminated against the student by not allowing them to play after successfully trying out for the tennis team.
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Lauck, who oversees the Eastern District of Virginia and was appointed by then-President Obama in June 2014, argued that preventing the student from joining the team "denies her the opportunity to play school tennis entirely or demands that she contravene her social transition in order to participate in school athletics."
"Because Janie Doe faces a litany of harms ranging from medical regression, social isolation and stigma, financial and logistical burdens, and the dignitary harms of either ‘outing’ her as transgender or communicating that transgender students are not welcomed or encouraged to participate in school athletics at all, Janie Doe has made more than a clear showing that the discrimination has harmed her," Lauck wrote.
According to the lawsuit, the student, who has identified as a female since age 7, made the girls’ tennis team after trying out, but then the family received a letter from the school board stating that members had learned the child "was born male although now identifies as female" and requested "information in furtherance of your student’s consistent expression as female," including any medical documentation.
"We jumped through every hoop Hanover County School Board asked us to, and I hate that we had to go all the way to court just so our child could play on a team she already made," the student's father said in a news release from the ACLU. "As a family, we should be the ones determining our children’s participation in extracurriculars, not school board officials trying to score political points by bullying my daughter."
Lauck's ruling came the same week as the U.S. Supreme Court's 5-4 ruling against a Biden administration emergency request to enforce changes to Title IX. The changes would have permitted biological men to enter women’s bathrooms, locker rooms and dorms in 10 states.
The Biden administration insisted that the regulation does not address athletic eligibility. However, multiple Republican attorneys general sued, arguing that it would conflict with some of their state laws that block transgender students from participating in women’s sports.
In June, multiple experts presented evidence to Fox News Digital that Biden's claims that it would not result in biological men participating in women's sports weren't correct.
One incident occurred in West Virginia after it passed the Save Women Sports Act in 2021, prohibiting transgender girls from competing against biological girls in sports. Then a 13-year-old transgender middle school student in West Virginia, known as BPJ, successfully obtained a federal court injunction to compete in female sports.
"We wanted to avoid the sexual harassment of girls in the locker room, avoid women being displaced on their own teams, and unfortunately, during the litigation, West Virginia's role was stayed just in terms of that one athlete," Alliance Defending Freedom legal counsel Rachel Rouleau previously told Fox News Digital.
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