A Christian school in Vermont won a six-figure settlement against the state’s high school sports governing body over a transgender athlete case. It isn’t good enough.
The Vermont Principals’ Association will pay Mid Vermont Christian $566,000 to settle a lawsuit by the school. The case goes back to 2023, when Mid Vermont Christian’s girls basketball team forfeited a playoff game rather than forcing its girls to play against Long Trail, a team that had a boy playing on it as a “transgender girl.” In response to this forfeit, the Vermont Principals’ Association voted unanimously to ban the entire school from participating in high school sports.
In short, the people tasked with overseeing Vermont high school sports disenfranchised an entire school’s worth of students because the school did not force girls to jeopardize their safety in a basketball game against a boy.
Along with the payout, the Vermont Principals’ Association agreed that no similar bans would take place in the future. That’s good news, and worthy of celebration. However, this obviously should not have reached this point in the first place. Aside from the fact that boys should not be permitted to participate in girls sports, it is undeniably cruel to punish a team of girls (and their entire school along with them) for not wanting to put themselves in danger playing a sport against boys.
If there were any true justice in Vermont, every single person involved in the VPA’s decision to punish Mid Vermont Christian would be expelled from the organization. The fact that this punishment was even conceived of in the first place is outrageous and inexcusable. The VPA is already forcing girls sports to accept male athletes, putting female athletes’ privacy and safety at risk and destroying the integrity of school sports. The VPA then deliberately chose to try to force female athletes to further risk their safety by making an example of a small Christian school.
The VPA being made to pay for its decision is a welcome development, but the people behind the decision have proven that they belong nowhere near the governance of school sports. They have shown that they do not have the best interests of student-athletes at heart, and that they are willing to violate the rights of those student-athletes to serve the transgender movement’s delusional (and, for sports, dangerous) agenda.
