(LifeSiteNews) — A federal judge has upheld a New Hampshire school district’s ban on parents wearing pink wristbands at sporting events to silently, respectfully protest the inclusion of males on female teams, ruling that the offense that could be taken at their message was more important than their intended meaning.
As LifeSiteNews covered last September, several parents of female soccer players at Bow School District received a notice from the superintendent of schools banning them from attending their daughters’ future games, asserting that by distributing pink wristbands that carried the simple message “XX” (referring to the two chromosomes indicating the female sex) had the effect of “intimidating, threatening, harassing, and discouraging” the boy playing on the opposing girls team, Parker Tirrell.
“You are hereby prohibited from entering the buildings, grounds, and property of the Bow School District, including but not limited to all school administrative office buildings, parking lots, and athletic fields, until further notice,” read a “NO TRESPASS” order from Superintendent Mary Kelley sent to parent Anthony Foote. “You are also prohibited from attending any Bow School District athletic or extra-curricular event, on or off school grounds.”
The trespassing order has since expired, but dispute remains over the district’s ongoing ban on signs and wristbands at school events. Foote, his wife Nicole, and fellow parents Kyle Fellers and Eldon Rash sued, and in the latest development in the case on Monday, U.S. District Court Judge Steven McAuliffe sided with the district, Fox News reports.
“While plaintiffs may very well have never intended to communicate a demeaning or harassing message directed at Parker Tirrell or any other [so-called] transgender students, the symbols and posters they displayed were fully capable of conveying such a message,” the judge claimed. “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.”
“This was adult speech in a limited public forum, which enjoys greater First Amendment protection than student speech in the classroom,” said Del Kolde of the Institute for Free Speech, who is representing the parents. “Bow School District officials were obviously discriminating based on viewpoint because they perceived the XX wristbands to be ‘trans-exclusionary’.”
Allowing gender-confused individuals to compete in opposite-sex sports is promoted by leftists as a matter of “inclusivity,” but critics note that indulging “transgender” athletes undermines the original rational basis for having sex-specific athletics in the first place, thereby depriving female athletes of recognition and professional or academic opportunities, as well as undermining female players’ basic safety and privacy rights by forcing them to share showers and changing areas with members of the opposite sex.
There have been numerous high-profile examples in recent years of men winning women’s competitions, and research affirms that physiology gives males distinct athletic advantages that cannot be negated by hormone suppression.
In a 2019 paper published by the Journal of Medical Ethics, New Zealand researchers found that “healthy young men [do] not lose significant muscle mass (or power) when their circulating testosterone levels were reduced to (below International Olympic Committee guidelines) for 20 weeks,” and “indirect effects of testosterone” on factors such as bone structure, lung volume, and heart size “will not be altered by hormone [use]”; therefore, “the advantage to [gender-confused men] afforded by the [International Olympic Committee] guidelines is an intolerable unfairness.”
Critics also warn that forcing girls to share intimate facilities such as bathrooms, showers, or changing areas with members of the opposite sex violates their privacy rights, subjects them to needless emotional stress, and gives male predators a viable pretext to enter female bathrooms or lockers by simply claiming transgender status.
Even the left-wing United Nations has acknowledged as much, via an October 2024 report by Special Rapporteur Reem Alsalem, which found that more than 600 female athletes around the world have lost more than 890 medals to men in 29 sports as of March 2024. “To avoid the loss of a fair opportunity, males must not compete in the female categories of sport,” the report concluded.
