A Christian school in Vermont is suing state education officials over the latter party’s transgender-athlete rules that allow biological males to compete in girls’ sports.
In the federal lawsuit filed Tuesday, the private Mid Vermont Christian School accuses the state of religious discrimination after being banned from all athletic tournaments for refusing to play a transgender opponent earlier this year.
In February, the school’s girls’ basketball team forfeited a match and withdrew from the state championship tournament because MVCS believed playing against a biological male was unfair and unsafe for its team. Two weeks later, the Vermont Principals’ Association decided to exclude the entire school from participating in future tournaments over the incident. Additionally, the Vermont Agency of Education cut the school from the state’s tuition and dual-enrollment programs.
MVCS argues Vermont’s favorable stance toward transgender student-athletes should not be applied as a punishment to private or religious institutions.
“The State is entitled to its own views, but it is not entitled, nor is it constitutional, to force private, religious schools across the state to follow that orthodoxy as a condition to participating in Vermont’s tuitioning program and the State’s athletic association,” the lawsuit reads.
The Alliance Defending Freedom, which represents MVCS, says this case is just the “latest example” of the state’s “blatant discrimination” against religious beliefs.
“Vermont has an infamous record of discriminating against religious schools and families, whether it be withholding generally available public funding or denying them membership in the state’s sports league because they hold religious beliefs that differ from the state’s preferred views,” ADF senior counsel Ryan Tucker said in a press release.
Tucker added Vermont is directly violating the U.S. Supreme Court’s Carson v. Makin ruling, which states the government cannot exclude religious schools from public funding. The 2022 decision was originally brought up in Maine.
Vermont law currently permits transgender players to participate in girls’ sporting leagues. It prohibits so-called discrimination based on gender identity, as there is no statewide ban on biological males competing with females.