Appeals court sides with Vermont Christian school in dispute over transgender athlete – The Boston Globe

A federal appeals court on Tuesday ordered Vermont’s school sports league to allow a Christian academy to compete, more than two years after the school forfeited a basketball game rather than play a team with a transgender athlete.

The court found that the Vermont Principals’ Association, which governs middle and high school sports in the state, likely violated the First Amendment rights of Mid Vermont Christian School when it expelled the institution over the forfeiture in 2023. At the time, the league “displayed hostility toward the school’s religious beliefs,” impinging on its free exercise of religion, the court wrote Tuesday.

The preliminary decision, by the New York-based US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, reverses an earlier one by a federal district judge in Vermont. It allows Mid Vermont, a K-12 private school in the Upper Valley village of Quechee, to compete for the time being while an underlying lawsuit wends its way through the courts. The school and the families of two students sued the principals’ association and other state and local entities in November 2023, alleging religious discrimination.

The Vermont case is one of many around the country testing the constitutionality of state laws and school policies governing transgender athletes’ participation in sports. The US Supreme Court plans this fall to review bans on transgender athletes enacted in Idaho and West Virginia but blocked by lower courts.

The Vermont dispute stems from a high school basketball tournament in February 2023, when Mid Vermont’s girls’ team was slated to play the Long Trail School, whose roster included a transgender girl. The Christian academy called on the league to prevent the transgender athlete from playing, but the league said doing so would violate its nondiscrimination policies and Vermont law.

The school forfeited the game and withdrew from the tournament, saying in a written statement that “playing against an opponent with a biological male jeopardizes the fairness of the game and the safety of our players.” Three weeks later, the Vermont Principals’ Association barred the school from participating in sports and other extracurricular activities, including spelling bees and debate competitions.

Mid Vermont later said that playing Long Trail would have violated its belief that “sex is God-given and immutable and that God created each of us either male or female,” but the league argued that playing another team does not involve adopting its views.

“This case has nothing to do with beliefs,” a league committee wrote at the time. “It has everything to do with actions and their impact on transgender students.”

The appeals court, however, found that the league — and its leader, in particular — likely did not apply its policies to Mid Vermont in a neutral manner. It pointed to testimony Vermont Principals’ Association executive director Jay Nichols gave to a state legislative committee shortly after Mid Vermont’s forfeit.

“Thank goodness the student in question didn’t attend that religious school,” Nichols told the committee. “But what if they did? Would we be okay with that blatant discrimination under the guise of religious freedom?”

The three appeals court judges who signed the order reinstating Mid Vermont — all appointed by President Donald Trump or President George W. Bush — took issue with those comments.

“The VPA’s Executive Director publicly castigated Mid Vermont — and religious schools generally — while the VPA rushed to judgment on whether and how to discipline the school,” the court wrote, adding that “the punishment imposed was unprecedented, overbroad and procedurally irregular.”

Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian legal group that brought the case, celebrated the court’s order Tuesday.

“The government cannot punish religious schools — and the families they serve — by permanently kicking them out of state-sponsored sports simply because the state disagrees with their religious beliefs,” said ADF senior counsel David Cortman, who argued the case.

Nichols said in a brief interview Tuesday that the principals’ association would not comment on pending litigation. But he pushed back on the notion that the league’s actions — and his words — were motivated by religious animus, calling himself a Christian.

“There’s nobody at the VPA that has any animosity toward any religion — none of our officers, none of our members or anyone employed by the VPA,” Nichols said.