A pair of teenagers from New Hampshire have filed what appears to be the first legal challenge to one of Donald Trump's executive orders.
Two transgender public high school students asked a federal court Wednesday to add the president and members of his administration as defendants in a lawsuit they filed last summer over their eligibility for girls' sports after the state barred transgender athletes in grades 5 through 12 from participating, reported the New York Times.
"Their court filing on Wednesday appears to be the first time that the constitutionality of Mr. Trump’s executive order, titled 'Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports,' has been challenged in court," the newspaper reported.
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Trump's order effectively bans trans athletes from taking part in girls' and women's sports, directs Department of Education to investigate schools that don't comply and withdraws federal funding from schools that fail to do so, and the teens' lawsuit calls his actions “a broad intention to deny transgender people legal protections and to purge transgender people from society.”
A federal judge issued an injunction in September allowing 16-year-old Parker Tirrell and 15-year-old Iris Turmelle to play on girls' teams while their suit was pending, but their filing states that Trump's order puts that at risk.
“I played soccer — nothing bad happened," said Parker, a sophomore at Plymouth Regional High School. “Not everyone was happy about it, but it seemed like the people I was playing against weren’t overly concerned.” But when she got home from school last Wednesday, she said, “my mom told me that Trump had signed an executive order banning trans girls from playing sports.”
“The amount of effort he’s going through to stop me from playing sports seems extraordinarily high," she added, "for not a very good reason.”
Iris, a freshman at Pembroke Academy took part in a middle-school program called Girls on the Run, and while she wasn't crazy about the running she wants to preserve her right to choose any sport she wishes – which right now includes her hope to try out for tennis and track at her school.
“Other girls have that,” she said. “Why shouldn’t I?”
U.S. District Court judge Landya McCafferty found last summer that the state had not demonstrated concerns about fairness and safety beyond the hypothetical, and her opinion noted that both students knew themselves to be girls at an early age, were diagnosed with gender dysphoria and began taking puberty-suppressing medication to prevent physical changes that would have given them an athletic advantage.
“Parker’s soccer team had a winless season last year, and Iris did not make the cut for middle-school softball,’’ wrote the judge appointed by Barack Obama.
