Two transgender girls who challenged President Donald Trump’s executive order, “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports,” have withdrawn their lawsuit in New Hampshire after a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling upheld state bans on transgender athletes in girls’ sports. The legal machinery moved first. The kids moved out of the way.
Their lawyer, Chris Erchull of GLAD Law, said Thursday, “This case was always about two courageous young girls who simply wanted the same opportunities as their peers to participate in school life. Their willingness to stand up to extraordinary hostility made clear the human cost of laws that target transgender youth.” That’s the part the institutions keep trying to bury: ordinary kids, school sports, and a state-backed campaign to decide who gets to belong.
Who Pays for the Rules
The teenagers are Parker Tirrell and Iris Turmelle. They took on Trump’s executive order last year and amended their 2024 complaint against New Hampshire’s law banning transgender girls from school sports. A federal judge granted a court order allowing them to play while the case proceeded. For Tirrell, that meant staying on her high school girls’ soccer team. For Turmelle, it meant a chance to try out for different sports.
Then the higher courts weighed in. Both sides agreed to pause the case and wait for the Supreme Court to rule on similar state laws in Idaho and West Virginia. Last month, the court upheld those laws. It also said barring transgender girls and women doesn’t run afoul of Title IX, the federal law that prohibits sex discrimination in education. The message from the top was plain enough: the apparatus gets to decide who can play, and the people affected are expected to absorb the damage.
Turmelle and her family moved out of New Hampshire last summer after proposed legislation against transgender people. One measure signed into law by Republican Gov. Kelly Ayotte last year prohibits medical professionals from providing puberty blockers and hormone replacement therapy to new transgender patients under age 18. Turmelle’s mother, Amy Manzetti, wrote in an op-ed at the time, “Though there may be a carve-out for people already receiving gender-affirming care, that is way too close a call for us to risk staying. Other New Hampshire laws also seek to erase her.”
The Cost of Staying Visible
The Williams Institute at UCLA estimates that about 3% of youth ages 13 to 17 identify as transgender. Corinne Goodwin, the executive director of Eastern PA Trans Equality Project in Pennsylvania, said in an email, “The challenges with relocation are significant and burdensome — this includes having to find new employment, buying and selling homes, packing and moving possessions, integrating kids with a new school system, losing access to longstanding family and friends, and potential loss of income. But these families do so because they love their kids and know that supporting them with the care and opportunities they need is critical to their long-term success and happiness.”
That’s the hidden bill. Not just court dates and legal briefs, but jobs, homes, schools, and the slow tearing apart of daily life when lawmakers and judges turn identity into a target.
Tirrell, 17, began her junior year last fall on the girls’ junior varsity soccer team. At first, things were fine, and each time she scored a goal, she got a round of ice cream from her parents. A few weeks into the season, she stopped playing. Her mother, Sara Tirrell, said, “With all of the political stuff going on, soccer wasn’t just about the game anymore.” It became about preparing for conflict.
Sara Tirrell said, “Were there any local Facebook groups where they were sort of agitating about potential protests and how do we prepare, and what are we walking into, and we never kind of knew. We were on a lot of pins and needles, especially after the previous season.” She was referring to a controversy at an away game where two dads from an opposing team were banned from school grounds for wearing pink wristbands marked “XX” to represent female chromosomes. They sued the school district and a judge ruled against them. They have appealed their case.
Order, Surveillance, and the Schoolyard
Last fall, there was an increased presence of school administrators at the games and bus drivers pulled in closer to the field so the students weren’t in the parking lot, Sara Tirrell said. She said, “Parker didn’t talk about it a lot, but I think she could see that stress for everybody — for her, for her teammates, for her coaches. She felt kind of bad about pulling them all into that circus again. And so she ultimately said, ‘This isn’t fun anymore and I don’t want to do it.’”
Parker’s father, Zach Tirrell, described the atmosphere as “palpable tension.” Even playing on her own turf, “there would typically be a couple of police officers at the home games where there weren’t previously,” he said. The school field became another managed space, with administrators, bus drivers, and police folded into the routine around a child’s game.
Parker also played soccer in a recreation league and could still do so. Her mother said, “But I think it all kind of still sort of weighs on her. It’s the same group of kids that she plays with who, honestly, have been very supportive and love to have her on the team and have expressed that to her many times over. But I think she still has that worry in her brain around, ‘What are other people going to say and do if I show up at a game?’”
Her parents hope she’ll return to playing soccer some day. In the meantime, her mother said, “she plans to be around and use her voice to continue standing up to discrimination. In some ways she’s had to grow up a lot faster than some of her peers.” The institutions keep writing the rules. The kids keep paying for them.