The ACLU of Nevada is now threatening to sue school districts if a new White House issued policy to ban transgender athletes from high school girls sports is implemented.
The Nevada Interscholastic Activities Association which oversees high school sports in the Silver State said in April athletes can only play on teams that align with the sex on their original birth certificate.
“There are many laws that the United States has had over the years that were changed. Sometimes change is difficult,” NIAA executive director Tim Jackson said at the time. “We have a federal law in place and I do not think it would behoove us as a body to willfully violate a federal law.”
This was a reversal of a 2014 policy which allowed transgender students to play on sports teams that aligned with their chosen gender identity.
This new direction goes against the Equal Rights Amendment to the Nevada Constitution passed by voters in 2022 preventing the denial of equal rights on account of sex or gender expression.
The NIAA and its member school districts do not collect any data on whether any transgender student athletes have been participating in its sanctioned sports. At the national college level, NCAA President Charlie Baker has said he was aware of 10 transgender athletes competing in college sports across the country.
Truckee and North Tahoe said they would move from the NIAA to the California Interscholastic Federation after the current season due to this new policy, while leadership from other school counties, including Washoe, have indicated they would not go against NIAA rules.
In April, the group Silver State Equality said they were “deeply disappointed that the Nevada Interscholastic Activities Association (NIAA) changed its decade-long inclusive transgender student-athlete policy to one that is exclusionary.”
The LGBTQ civil rights organization added:
“We will continue to fight unapologetically for transgender Nevadans—who make up less than 1% of our state’s population—for the fewer than 10 nationally known NCAA transgender athletes, and for every transgender tourist and professional who comes to Nevada expecting to be treated with the equality and dignity they deserve."
Meanwhile, the U.S. Justice Department is suing Maine for allowing transgender student athletes to keep playing in girls’ and women’s school sports. President Donald Trump signed an executive order earlier this year “to rescind all funds from educational programs that deprive women and girls of fair athletic opportunities, which results in the endangerment, humiliation, and silencing of women and girls and deprives them of privacy,” according to wording on the White House website.