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A Vermont high school was expelled from the athletic association they were in, and cannot participate in any future sports, over said school's decision to forfeit a girl's basketball game against a team with a boy on the roster.
Coverage of the original incident:
Mid Vermont Christian School girls basketball refused to play Long Trail because of transgender player, forfeits playoff game
The latest:
Mid Vermont Christian School ousted from sports over transgender discrimination; Mid-Vermont Christian deemed ineligible by VPA; Mid Vermont Christian School ousted from Vermont Principals Association-sanctioned activities
A local letter to the editor called for a similar outcome last week.
The school is a Christian school, which I'm sure played a large role in all of this. For my part, I'm left wondering what Title IX was supposed to be for, in light of the Bostock decision and Gorsuch's but-for. If you are a boy, and claim to be a girl, and someone treats you as if you were a boy, then but-for your sex, you would expect to be treated as a girl, and therefore anyone treating you as a boy is discriminating on the basis of sex. Yet Title IX explicitly requires discrimination on the basis of sex, since it requires in practice equal numbers of athletic spots available for each sex.
The particular method of exclusion, through the state athletic association, seems like it would make a good target for a lawsuit under Title IX. The prescreens of a boy on the girl's team denies that spot to a girl (on the basis of sex), yet under Bostock that can't be the case.
How can you square this circle? How can you both require separate (discriminatory) athletic spots based on sex, while simultaneously requiring self-ID onto sex segregated teams?
There's another supreme court case currently being held regarding a high school football coach who was fired for praying on the field after games. I mention it because it gets at the religious aspect, rather than the sex aspect.
I found two particular parts interesting, aside from the question above. First, the boys defended the honor of their classmates:
And second, it's these boys who will also suffer for the girl's basketball coach's decision to forfeit, and for their Head of School's decision to comment. Their entire school, and all of their sports teams, are now without opponents against which to compete.
You don't have to square the circle because you're dealing with 2 entirely separate laws. Bostock ruled on Title IV of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, focusing on discrimination in employment. The broad strokes of the ruling relevant for this argument was that the law's prohibition on sex discrimination also prohibits discrimination on the basis of gender identity. Title IX is part of the Education Amendments of 1972. There has never been any blanket prohibition on sex discrimination, only specific laws that ban discrimination in specific circumstances but permit it in others. And high school athletics is one area where it is permitted. And if discrimination is permitted then the argument at the heart of Bostock doesn't apply. The question here is what qualifies someone as a member of a particular sex for the purposes of Title IX, and, to my knowledge, the court has not yet addressed that question.
The religious freedom question would be tough to argue as well, because it would be difficult to argue that the forfeit was for religious reasons. Suppose that VPA gave a girls team special permission to have 2 boys on the team because it was a small school that couldn't find enough willing girls to field a team. Both boys didn't make either the varsity or JV basketball teams and nobody is arguing that their presence would constitute an unfair advantage. Mid-Vermont Christian probably wouldn't argue that they had to forfeit because their religion prohibited coed sports. All this really boils down to is that someone whom they classify as a boy is playing on a girls team, and regardless of whether that's a good idea generally, it's unlikely that the school could demonstrate some long-running sincere religious objection to coed sports, at least not unless they were already segregating phys-ed classes. I'm not saying they couldn't theoretically do it, but it would be a tough row to hoe and would be dependent on establishing improbable facts.
The only argument they might have left is that the banishment either violated some kind of contractual participation agreement or was contrary to state law regulating interscholastic athletics more generally. I'm not going to comment on the probability of such an argument succeeding because I have no idea how these things work in Vermont, but I should make it clear that this is a Vermont issue and not a Federal one, and it comes down to what the law is in Vermont.
Not the same case; in this hypothetical the boys are included simply to make up the numbers, nobody is claiming "Billy is now really Mandy and you have to treat her like you would the other girls". And depending on the level of athleticism of the boys and what positions they play, they may or may not have an unfair advantage. If the two boys are six inches taller than the girls on either team, is that an advantage when playing basketball? If 15 year old boys are on average stronger than 15 year old girls, is that an advantage?
I think in the hypothetical case the Christian school wouldn't object on the grounds of co-ed sports; they might or might not play the other team but that would be a decision for the coach to make. So long as Other School was open about "these are boys, we're fielding boys because we don't have enough girls" that isn't violating any Christian principle that I can think of.
Suppose there was a Jewish school that forfeited a game because it was played on Saturday and they won't play on the Sabbath - do you think we'd have Letters to the Editor about "it's time this bigotry was done away with"?
I'm trying to find out what denomination, if any, this school belongs to; the following comes off their website, so they seem to be Evangelical and possibly ultimately derived from some branch of the Reformed. They are serious about Christian education, it's not just "one religion class a week" - same principles, basically, as Catholic schools. Thus the sports teams are not separated out from the practice of religion. They seem to be affiliated with the Association of Christian Schools International:
From the ASCI Statement of Faith:
This is Mid Vermont Christian School's Philosophy of Education:
The girls' basketball team started out playing in the ASCI league and later went on to the state basketball division so if they're banned or barred, I suppose they can just go back to the ASCI league (and the other sports teams of the school as well).
But it is striking how "all transgender people want is [harmless thing]" has now become "no room for dissent on this, toe the line or else!"
I brought up the analogy to highlight the specific difference between what the league is forcing them to do vs. what the league is allowing other schools to do. So to go back to your example about forcing a Jewish school to play on Saturday, I agree that that may be grounds for a valid religious freedom claim. But that isn't what's going on here; the present case is more analogous to if the Jewish school in question not only refused to play on Saturday, but refused to play another school because that school had played on Saturday. I have no doubt that Mid Vermont Christian is sincere in its religious beliefs, but the league, to my knowledge, isn't asking the school to admit transgendered students, but to simply play its schedule as it agreed to. Religious freedom doesn't mean unlimited accommodation.
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