Appeals Court says Vermont public league must reinstate anti-trans Christian school
The court rewarded Mid Vermont Christian School's bigotry, carving out a religious exemption to a public league's basic anti-discrimination rules
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A bigoted Christian school that was kicked out of a Vermont state-sanctioned sports league after refusing to play against certain teams with transgender athletes has won a major legal victory.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit said in a decision last week that Mid Vermont Christian School (MVCS) must be reinstated in the state’s league as well as the Vermont Principals’ Association, overturning an earlier ruling. The three-judge panel consisted of two Trump appointees and a George H. W. Bush appointee.
All of this goes back to early 2023 when MVCS was a #12 seed slated to play against #5 Long Trail School in the Division IV bracket to win the Girls Basketball State Championship.
MVCS refused to play, however, because Long Trail had a trans player on the team.
MVCS Head of School Vicky Fogg made a predictably awful comment in defense of her school’s decision:
“We withdrew from the tournament because we believe playing against an opponent with a biological male jeopardizes the fairness of the game and the safety of our players. Allowing biological males to participate in women’s sports sets a bad precedent for the future of women’s sports in general.”
She didn’t explain how a trans athlete would impact the “safety” of her players. She didn’t say how the game would be unfair. Like so many right-wing bigots, she used buzzwords so she wouldn’t have to go into details. As research has shown, there’s no consistent evidence showing that trans athletes have a competitive advantage in women’s sports. More importantly, this was high school. It wasn’t even professional. It was meant to be fun—intended to celebrate the journey more than the outcomes.
For all her supposed concerns about the threat to women’s sports, by forfeiting the game, the Christian school denied all the girls on both teams a chance to display their skills on the court.
(For what it’s worth, Long Trail had a 14-6 record during the regular season (hardly undefeated) and lost the next game in the tournament by a fairly significant margin, 45-26.)
That’s when the people running the tournament took an important next step. The Vermont Principals’ Association, which oversees high school athletic competitions in the state, made clear they would stand by their inclusive policies. They have a zero tolerance policy when it comes to “discrimination based on a student’s actual or perceived sex and gender.”
The game had already been forfeited by the time the VPA learned what had happened, so they didn’t need to take immediate action.
Two weeks later, though, they made it official: Mid Vermont Christian School would no longer be allowed to participate in VPA-sponsored athletic events.
It was a unanimous vote of the 15-member executive committee. It wasn’t even a hard call; state law forbids discrimination against out trans athletes. Still, it was nice to see an athletic association do the right thing and not cave in to the demands of ignorant conservatives.
Jay Nichols, the VPA’s executive director, put it bluntly: “If you don’t want to follow VPA rules, that’s fine… But then you're just not a VPA member.”
MVCS immediately did what right-wing Christians do best: They pretended they were being persecuted and announced plans to appeal the decision:
“Mid Vermont Christian school is disappointed with the decision of the VPA Executive Council to ban us from participation in all VPA activities. We intend to appeal the decision,” the head of school at MVCS, Vicky Fogg, said in an email. “Canceling our membership is not a solution and does nothing to deal with the very real issue of safety and fairness facing women’s sports in our beloved state. We urge the VPA to reconsider its policies, and balance the rights of every athlete in the state.”
Somehow, “safety and fairness” didn’t bother any other team that played against Long Trail because no one else took the coward’s way out...
The school then amped up its victim complex by suing state officials for not accepting their anti-trans beliefs. In November of 2023, right-wing legal group Alliance Defending Freedom filed a lawsuit on behalf of the school and two families claiming that the state violated the school’s First Amendment rights “by preventing them from practicing their religious beliefs about sexuality and gender.”
When the Christian school reluctantly forfeited a girls’ high school basketball game against a team that had a male athlete playing for them, the [Vermont Principals’ Association] kicked Mid Vermont Christian out of the association. Now, despite 28 years of prior participation in the league, the school cannot compete in any VPA athletics, effectively blacklisting the school from all state-sponsored events in the state, including VPA spring sports for which schools are still creating schedules. The VPA is going so far as to exclude Mid Vermont Christian and its students from participating in co-ed academic competitions like the Geo-Bee, Science and Math Fair, and Debate and Forensics League, all because the school believes biological differences between boys and girls matter.
Well, yeah. That’s how it works. If the private Christian school didn’t want to abide by the public entity’s rules, then they had no right to demand access to the benefits. Sure, they could have formed their own Christian Bigot league and organized events with other like-minded schools across the state, but they demanded entry into the public league despite refusing to play by the league’s rules.
To put it another way, the Christian school chose this route, not the state. The state was already being generous by giving the private school the ability to compete against other teams.
The 71-page lawsuit cited Supreme Court decisions (like Carson v. Makin) that said if a state offered certain benefits to public schools, they couldn’t deny those benefits to private (usually Christian) schools. (The lawsuit failed to note how, in response to the Makin case, Maine lawmakers passed a law forbidding any taxpayer dollars from going to schools that discriminated against people on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. In response to that law, the anti-LGBTQ Christian schools in Maine said they would rather reject the benefits than follow the state’s rules.)
In Vermont, however, the Christian school wanted access to the state benefits without following the state’s rules. You didn’t have to be a lawyer to grasp how the situations weren’t identical.
The lawsuit also noted that the Vermont Agency of Education, in 2022, just like in Maine, passed laws requiring all private schools that wanted taxpayer-funded tuition dollars to obey non-discrimination laws. Mid Vermont Christian said no, which is why they were not designated as an “approved independent school.” That decision meant the Christian school couldn’t get access to public funds (specifically, the “State's Town Tuitioning and Dual Enrollment Programs”).
That’s why the lawsuit went after state education officials as well as those running the athletic competitions. They even laid out their choices, as if both were impossible for them to adopt:
The State has thus put Plaintiffs to an impossible Hobson's Choice: (1) abandon their religious beliefs, character, and practices and adopt and follow the State's gender identity rules so they can participate in school athletics and the Town Tuitioning Program, or (2) adhere to their religious beliefs, character, and practices, miss out on middle school and high school sports, lose valuable tuition reimbursements, and inevitably lose students necessary to keep its doors open.
Once again, this was a “Hobson’s Choice” of the Christian school’s own making. There was no reason to allow them to have their cake and eat it, too. They wanted to discriminate against LGBTQ students and have access to state dollars. They couldn’t have both. They needed to decide whether faith-based bigotry was more important to them than their own existence.
At no point should anyone have felt bad for them. If that school didn’t want to compete for transphobic reasons, that was their call. They didn’t deserve to be rewarded for it by continuing to have access to strong competition and an established league. Similarly, they didn’t deserve to have access to tuition dollars if they discriminated against LGBTQ students.
They were never punished for their Christian beliefs. They were punished for refusing to adhere to rules that amounted to nothing more than showing basic human decency.
Ultimately, that’s how a federal judge saw it too. He dismissed the request for a preliminary injunction in June of 2024, writing that Vermont officials applied their rules fairly across the board and weren’t singling out the Christian school in any way. If the Christian school planned to forfeit games against teams with trans athletes, the VPA had every right to kick them out.
The Christian school then appealed the decision. In a brief filed with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, the right-wing lawyers said the school’s expulsion amounted to religious discrimination.
They claimed the league allowed other teams to forfeit without penalty… while citing cases in which schools forfeited basketball games “during the COVID-19 pandemic” against a team with a student who had a mask exemption. Those teams weren’t kicked out of the league! But there’s no reason to believe the rules weren’t applied fairly. If the Christian school made the same request, to forfeit a game rather than play against an athlete more likely to spread COVID, they would not have been penalized for it. (A refusal to accept the very real threat of COVID took up several paragraphs in the appeal.)
The appeal also claimed the VPA harbored “hostility” towards the Christian school by kicking them out—and the argument came with a heavy dose of transphobia. The lawyers wouldn’t even accept the existence of trans people, misgendering the athlete in question.
That the VPA has only applied its newfound forfeiture-justifies-expulsion policy to religious schools that cannot compete against males who identify as female is "reason to suspect that the object" of the VPA's enforcement is "to target those beliefs and to exclude those who maintain them."
Now, sadly, the Second Circuit panel has agreed with that line of reasoning, reversing the earlier decision. The judges said the VPA’s decision to kick out the Christian school “was not neutral because it displayed hostility toward the school’s religious beliefs.”
Their evidence of this? Weeks before MVCS was kicked out of the VPA, the VPA’s Executive Director Jay Nichols testified before the state’s House Education Committee in support of a bill that would block private religious schools from taking public dollars because he said lawmakers shouldn’t “continue to allow misuses of taxpayer dollars to effectively discriminate against many of our children.”
During that speech, he cited the basketball incident:
[A] Christian school forfeits so they won’t have to play against this team that has a transgender student… Thank goodness the student in question didn’t attend that religious school . . . but what if they did? Would we be okay with that blatant discrimination under the guise of religious freedom?
That’s… a perfectly sensible comment and a reasonable explanation for why public dollars shouldn’t go to private religious schools.
But the judges said that was proof of Nichols’ anti-religious bias: “Such testimony supports the inference that the VPA’s punishment was ‘informed by hostility toward certain religious beliefs.’”
It’s not hostility to say that bigotry based on religion is still bigotry. If someone says their Christian beliefs lead them to oppose interracial marriage, it’s absolutely fair to call that racism. That’s not an attack on religion; it’s an attack on racism.
The judges also cited the VPA’s explanation that playing against a trans student didn’t violate the school’s religious beliefs because no one was asking them to accept trans identities. Just as a Mormon school wouldn’t give up its faith when playing against a Catholic school, a Christian high school didn’t shed its faith at the door when playing against a team with a trans athlete.
The judges hated that logic (italics theirs):
That statement did not just question Mid Vermont’s religious sincerity. It also attacked the validity of Mid Vermont’s objection.
That statement didn’t question their religious sincerity. at all. We know damn well they’re sincere about their bigotry. But using faith as an excuse to discriminate shouldn’t be tolerated by a state agency.
They concluded:
Put simply, the VPA may not impose discipline based on its view that Mid Vermont’s religious objection was “wrong.” On this record, Plaintiffs are likely to succeed in establishing that the VPA did exactly that.
In other words, if someone brings up faith, they should be allowed to get away with any kind of civil rights violation. It’s a perversion of justice to allow religious groups to use their faith as a weapon to circumvent the law.
Finally, the judges noted that kicking MVCS out of all extracurricular competitions—something they have since rescinded—went too far. They added that the VPA “ignored the detailed procedural requirements governing its disciplinary process”—they didn’t do the formal investigation, preliminary report, etc. before instituting its decision. Even though no one was questioning any of the facts and there was no “investigation” to do since everyone agreed on what happened.
The end result is that the Christian school will be allowed to compete in Vermont’s public league once again, despite the fact that they refuse to play by the rules. And they’re allowed to do that because their religion provides them cover for bigotry that would be unacceptable from any other school in the same league. (For what it’s worth, the case isn’t technically over yet, but the decision says MVCS can move forward as if it’s already won the case.)
True to form, the school’s basketball coach celebrated the legal win with his own anti-trans statement:
“I never thought I would be in court for simply adhering to my Christian and commonsense belief that boys and girls are different,” said Chris Goodwin, coach of the girls’ basketball team. “At Mid Vermont Christian School, we strive to exemplify biblical truth in and through everything we do. We’re grateful for our legal team at Alliance Defending Freedom who helped us get back in the game. As a coach, I always want my team to play in fair and safe competitions. As a dad, I want my daughter to know that she should always stand up for her beliefs and should never be punished for that decision.”
There was nothing unfair or unsafe about the game they forfeited. And it’s Christian privilege, not religious freedom, that’s allowing this school to promote bigotry while remaining in a league they have no business being a part of.
If there’s any upside here, it’s that the court didn’t rule against Vermont’s inclusive policy that allows trans athletes to compete in athletic competitions.
It doesn’t seem like the VPA plans to appeal this decision any further. Nichols said in a statement to a local media outlet that the group “do[es] not harbor any hostility toward religious viewpoints.” (We knew that even if the judges didn’t.)
Unfortunately, this decision hands every Christian Nationalist institution in the country a playbook for weaponizing religion against equality: All you have to do is cloak your transphobia in the language of “faith.” MVCS, with the help of friendly judges, turned the courts into accomplices in its discrimination. The message is unmistakable: In our current legal system, the rights of trans kids—and by extension, all LGBTQ people—are secondary to the demands of religious conservatives.
Public leagues exist to serve all students, bound by the principle of fairness, but this decision carves out a grotesque exception for those who would rather forfeit than recognize a trans child’s humanity. It signals that trans kids can be treated as disposable, excluded, or vilified—so long as someone invokes God while doing it.
That’s not neutrality. That’s the law legitimizing Christian cruelty.
Ah yes, Christians claiming persecution because they can't persecute others.
Once again, it's a case of people conflating their wants with their rights. They're always being persecuted, and it's always someone else's fault.