The Hanover County School Board in Virginia cannot prohibit an 11-year-old transgender student from playing on a middle school tennis team, U.S. District Judge M. Hannah Lauck ruled last week. The student is currently facing a discrimination lawsuit against the school board.

Lauck issued a temporary restraining order on the matter on Friday, saying the plaintiff “demonstrated that the board excluded her from participation in an educational program because of her sex when it rejected her application to try out for (and, if selected, to participate in) her school’s girls’ tennis team.” The lawsuit identifies the student only as “Janie Doe.”

The American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia filed a lawsuit on behalf of the plaintiff in July. The suit alleges that the Hanover County School Board discriminated against the student by not allowing him to play even though he successfully auditioned for the tennis team.

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Lauck, who represents the Eastern District of Virginia and was appointed by then-President Obama in June 2014, argued that preventing the student from joining the team “deprives her of the opportunity to play school tennis or requires her to interrupt her social transition in order to participate in school sports.”

“As Janie Doe faces a range of harms ranging from medical regression, social isolation and stigma, financial and logistical burdens, to the dignity damage that results from either ‘coming out’ as transgender or from transgender students not being welcomed or encouraged to participate in school sports at all, Janie Doe has made it abundantly clear that discrimination has harmed her,” Lauck wrote.

According to the lawsuit, the student, who has identified as female since age 7, was accepted onto the girls’ tennis team after a tryout. But then the family received a letter from the school board saying members had learned the child “was born a boy but now identifies as female.” The family requested “information to support the consistent identification of your student as female,” including any medical records.

Transgender golfer doesn’t understand athletes who blame a transgender competitor for their own athletic failures.

“We have jumped through every hurdle the Hanover County School Board has thrown at us, and I hate that we had to go all the way to court just so our child could play on a team she was already on,” the student’s father said in an ACLU press release. “As a family, we should be the ones making decisions about our children’s participation in extracurricular activities, not school board officials trying to score political points by bullying my daughter.”

Lauck’s ruling came the same week as the U.S. Supreme Court’s 5-4 ruling against an emergency motion by the Biden administration to enforce changes to Title IX. The changes would have allowed biological males access to women’s restrooms, locker rooms and dormitories in ten states.

Supreme Court Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett and Ketanji Brown Jackson (Jacquelyn Martin-Pool/Getty Images/File)

The Biden administration insisted that the rule did not affect athletic eligibility, but several Republican attorneys general filed suit, arguing that the rule conflicted with some of their states’ laws that prohibit transgender students from participating in women’s sports.

In June, several experts evidence presented to Fox News Digital that Biden’s claims that it would prevent biological males from participating in women’s sports were untrue.

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One incident occurred in West Virginia after it passed the Save Women Sports Act in 2021, which prohibits transgender girls from competing in sports against biological girls. Then a 13-year-old transgender middle school student in West Virginia, known as BPJ, successfully obtained a federal court injunction to be allowed to participate in women’s sports.

“We wanted to prevent sexual harassment of girls in the locker room and prevent women from being pushed off their own teams. Unfortunately, West Virginia’s role was only exposed during the litigation with respect to this one female athlete,” Rachel Rouleau, legal counsel for Alliance Defending Freedom, previously told Fox News Digital.

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