(LifeSiteNews) — Vermont will pay more than half a million dollars to a Christian school that was punished for its girls’ basketball team refusing to play against a gender-confused male.
As previously covered by LifeSiteNews, the Mid Vermont Christian School (MVCS) Eagles girls’ basketball team pulled out of the Vermont Division IV state tournament in February 2023 after learning that its opponents’ team would include a male who was over six-feet tall. As a result, the Vermont Principals’ Association (VPA) kicked MVCS out of its athletic association.
Last September, a federal circuit court sided with the school, ruling that it was “likely to succeed in establishing that (state officials) acted with hostility toward Mid Vermont’s religious beliefs. 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.”
“In upholding the expulsion, the VPA doubled down on that hostility by challenging the legitimacy of the school’s religious beliefs,” the court continued. “And as noted above, the punishment imposed was unprecedented, overbroad, and procedurally irregular. Those facts strongly support the inference that Mid Vermont’s religious objection ‘was not considered with the neutrality that the Free Exercise Clause requires.’”
Now, Fox News reported that the state reached a settlement in which it agrees to pay the plaintiffs, along with Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), which represented them, $566,000 in damages and legal fees.
“We were all in agreement that the right decision was to not compromise our beliefs and to withdraw, but the conversation with the players was the hardest,” Mid Vermont Christian coach Chris Goodwin said. “Because you play a 20-game season, and you put in the work and the expectation is that you enter the postseason tournament with a shot to see how you’re going to do and to see how far you can get. So there were some teary eyes, and some sad faces, but in the end, they all really did understand that it was the right thing to do.”
“In one of the hearings before the court, the state argued that the school was on the wrong side of history,” ADF senior counsel Dave Cortman added. “The school is on the right side of history and will be for following his faith in its beliefs, for doing what’s right … sometimes there’s a price to pay. But it’s always the right thing to do. You’re always on the right side of history when you stand up for truth.”
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.
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.
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 previous 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.
Even the left-wing United Nations has acknowledged as much via an October 2024 report by Special Rapporteur Reem Alsalem that found 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.
In America since the 1980s, more than 1,941 gold medals in female events that would have gone to female athletes have instead been claimed by men identifying as “transgender women” and, along with them, more than $493,173 in prize money across more than 10,067 amateur and professional events, according to data compiled by He Cheated and reviewed by Concerned Women for America.