A federal judge in New Hampshire sided with a local school district — and gender insanity — by blocking parents from wearing wristbands on school property to protest transgender-identifying boys from playing on girls’ sports teams.
In September several parents wore pink wristbands with “XX” on them to reference female sex chromosomes during a girls’ high school soccer game where trans-identifying male athlete Parker Tirrell, now 16, was playing on the other team, Fox News reported on Tuesday.
Bow and Dunbarton School Districts Superintendent Marcy Kelley responded to the wristbands by issuing a notice of trespass against the parents, including Antony and Nicole Foote, Kyle Fellers, and Eldon Rash, according to local media reports. The no-trespass order has since expired.
The parents subsequently sued the school district, alleging that their First Amendment rights had been violated and asking the judge to allow them to carry signs and wear wristbands featuring “XX” at school events while the case is ongoing.
On Monday U.S. District Court Judge Steven McAuliffe, a President George H. W. Bush appointee, sided with the school district and said it acted reasonably in preventing parents from protesting.
“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,” he continued.
A senior attorney for the Institute for Free Speech, one of the attorneys representing the parents, said he disagrees with the court’s decision.
“This was adult speech in a limited public forum, which enjoys greater First Amendment protection than student speech in the classroom,” attorney Del Kolde said in a statement. “Bow School District officials were obviously discriminating based on viewpoint because they perceived the XX wristbands to be ‘trans-exclusionary’.”
Plaintiffs filed a notice following the ruling saying they do not plan to enter more evidence before the judge issues a final decision, according to the report.
The case is unfolding amid a shift in the federal government’s policy on transgender-identifying athletes.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order on “Keeping Men out of Women’s Sports” which seeks protect female student athletes from having “to compete with or against or having to appear unclothed before males.” The order also mandates each federal department “review grants to education programs and, where appropriate, rescind funding to programs that fail to comply with the policy established in this order,” which protects women “as a matter of safety, fairness, dignity, and truth.”
Katherine Hamilton is a political reporter for Breitbart News. You can follow her on X @thekat_hamilton.
