After the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Little v. Hecox and West Virginia v. B.P.J., which held that states may limit girls’ and women’s sports teams to biological females without violating Title IX or the Constitution, parents of transgender teenagers in New Hampshire have withdrawn lawsuits seeking to let their children compete on girls’ sports teams. One student later chose to leave soccer, saying the experience was no longer enjoyable. As our sister site Twitchy put it, “That’s as good as self-deporting.”
That response captured the reaction from many critics of the lawsuit.
Two transgender girls who became the first to challenge President Donald Trump’s executive order, “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports,” have dropped their New Hampshire case following a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling that upheld state restrictions on transgender athletes competing in girls’ sports, their attorney said. The decision also reflected personal strain on the families involved.
“This case was always about two courageous young girls who simply wanted the same opportunities as their peers to participate in school life,” Chris Erchull of GLAD Law, the students’ attorney, said in a statement Thursday. “Their willingness to stand up to extraordinary hostility made clear the human cost of laws that target transgender youth.”
Opponents of the lawsuit see it differently. They argue that female athletes were the ones being put at a disadvantage, which is why Trump signed the executive order and why New Hampshire lawmakers later wrote similar restrictions into state law.
The teenagers, Parker Tirrell and Iris Turmelle, challenged Trump’s executive order last year by amending their 2024 complaint against New Hampshire’s law barring transgender girls from school sports. While the case moved forward, a federal judge issued an order allowing them to participate.
For Tirrell, that meant continuing to play on her high school girls’ soccer team. For Turmelle, it meant the chance to try out for other school sports.
Turmelle’s claim was effectively weakened when the family moved out of state to a place with different rules on transgender athletes in school sports. Tirrell, meanwhile, was the student who left soccer after saying the game had lost its joy. New Hampshire’s public radio network later interviewed Tirrell’s mother, Sara Tirrell, about the decision.
Starting in her sophomore year was right about when the lawsuit started. And that year was a little more stressful and difficult. There was a team that dressed for the game and then half of the varsity girls refused to play. There was another team that used eye black to paint ‘PGS’ under their eyes, [which stands for] “protect girls sports or protect girls soccer,” whichever, I didn’t really get clarification on what the ‘s’ was.
Based. Good on those girls.
Tirrell, 17, began her junior year last fall on the girls’ junior varsity soccer team. Things were fine at first, and each time she scored a goal, she got a round of ice cream from her parents. But a few weeks into the season, she decided to stop playing.
“With all of the political stuff going on, soccer wasn’t just about the game anymore,” her mother, Sara Tirrell, told The Associated Press in an interview.
[…]
“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,” Sara Tirrell said. “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.’”
A round of ice cream for scoring a goal? Manipulation much? The Tirrells seem absolutely oblivious to the fact that their decision to allow their child to transition and then allow him to be on a girls’ sports team was the source of their and their child’s difficulty.
Daughters of the American Revolution Now Vote to Admit ‘Transgender’ Women
Parker’s father 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,” Zach Tirrell said.
In the past, Parker also played soccer in a recreation league and could still do so.
“But I think it all kind of still sort of weighs on her,” her mother said. “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?’”
Parker’s parents hope she’ll return to playing soccer some day. In the meantime, “she plans to be around and use her voice to continue standing up to discrimination,” her mother said. “In some ways she’s had to grow up a lot faster than some of her peers.”
“Standing up to discrimination?” The women and girls who were disenfranchised by people like Parker Tirrell and his sad family stood up against being erased and marginalized, and fought valiantly all the way to the Supreme Court. They are brave survivors, but it is typical of this cult that the Tirrells are the ones playing the victim.
Editor’s Note: The 2026 Midterms will determine the fate of President Trump’s America First agenda. Republicans must maintain control of both chambers of Congress.
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