Two transgender girls can try out for and play on girls school sports teams while the teens challenge a New Hampshire ban, a federal judge ruled Tuesday.
The families of Parker Tirrell, 15, and Iris Turmelle, 14, sued in August seeking to overturn the Fairness in Women’s Sports Act that Republican Gov. Chris Sununu signed into law in July. While Turmelle doesn’t plan to play sports until December, Tirrell successfully sought an emergency order allowing her to start soccer practice last month. That order was expiring Tuesday.
In issuing a preliminary injunction, U.S. District Court Chief Judge Landya McCafferty found Tirrell and Turmelle were likely to succeed in their lawsuit. She found that the students “demonstrated a likelihood of irreparable harm” in the absence of a preliminary order.
So before I explain, it’s important to keep in mind that for these discussions I’m adhering to the separation of “gender” and “sex” as different terms. Your sex is your physical attributes, and your gender is a mental thing-- do you see yourself as a boy or a girl (or, as some people do, something different from both of those options-- I’ll stick to the two main genders here).
This means that transgender girls are people who were “assigned male at birth” (they have a male sex / their appearance caused people to treat them as a boy) and later realized that they see themselves as girls. They may or may not have physically transitioned (ie. changed sex), or may be in a state of partial transition (since genitalia, hormones, and some other things all make up sex, and those can disagree).
TL;DR: A transgender girl was born physically male, now considers themselves to be female, and may or may not have physically transitioned to match that new identity.
I appreciate you taking the time to look into this! It can definitely get complicated, especially if you start looking into edge cases, and in some regions it’s pretty rare to meet someone like this IRL, so natural exposure can be low.
Edit: As a useful guide I’ll also give a short list of transgender-related acronyms: