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“Their willingness to stand up to extraordinary hostility demonstrates the human cost of laws targeting transgender youth.”
FILE – Parker Terrell, a transgender athlete who plays on her high school girls’ soccer team, chairs the ball, Friday, March 7, 2025, in Plymouth, New Hampshire. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa, File) Charles Krupa/AP, File
CONCORD, N.H. (AP) — Two transgender girls who were the first to challenge President Donald Trump’s executive order, “Keep Men Out of Women’s Sports,” have withdrawn their lawsuit in New Hampshire based on a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling that upheld the state’s ban on transgender athletes in girls’ sports and their personal difficulties, their attorneys said.
“This case has always been about two brave little girls who simply wanted to have the same opportunities as their peers to participate in school life,” their attorney, Chris Erschul of GLAD Law, said in a statement Thursday. “Their willingness to stand up to extraordinary hostility demonstrates the human cost of laws targeting transgender youth.”
Teenagers Parker Terrell and Iris Turmel faced Trump’s executive order last year amending their 2024 complaint against a New Hampshire law banning transgender girls from school sports. A federal judge had issued a court order allowing them to play while the case proceeded.
For Terrell, that meant being able to continue playing on the girls’ soccer team in high school. For Turmel, it was a chance to try different sports.
The two sides agreed to pause the case and await a ruling from the Supreme Court as it considered similar state laws barring transgender girls and women from playing on school and college sports teams in Idaho and West Virginia. Last month, the court upheld the laws. She also said that banning transgender girls and women does not conflict with the federal law known as Title IX, which prohibits sex-based discrimination in education.
A teen and her family decided to move from New Hampshire
Turmel and her family moved from New Hampshire last summer after proposed legislation against transgender people. One measure signed by Republican Gov. Kelly Ayotte last year prohibits medical professionals from providing puberty blockers and hormone replacement therapy to new transgender patients under the age of 18.
“While there may be an exception for people who are already receiving gender-affirming care, this is too close a call for us to risk staying,” Turmel’s mother, Amy Manzetti, wrote in an op-ed at the time. “Other New Hampshire laws also seek to erase it.”
Most Republican-controlled states in the past five years have adopted laws or policies that limit gender-affirming care for transgender minors and limit the school bathrooms that transgender people can use, as well as athletic restrictions. The Williams Institute at UCLA estimates that about 3% of youth between the ages of 13 and 17 identify as transgender.
“The challenges of relocation are significant and stressful — this includes having to find new jobs, buying and selling homes, packing up and moving belongings, integrating children into a new school system, losing access to family and old friends, and potentially losing income,” Corinne Goodwin, executive director of the Eastern Pennsylvania Gender Equity Project in Pennsylvania, said in an email.
“But these families do it because they love their children and know that supporting them with the care and opportunities they need is critical to their long-term success and happiness.”
The other teen gave up playing football in high school
Terrell, 17, started her junior year last fall on the girls’ junior varsity soccer team. Things were fine at first, and every time she scored, she got a round of ice cream from her parents. But a few weeks into the season, I decided to stop playing.
“With all the politics going on, soccer is no longer just about the game,” her mother, Sarah Terrell, told The Associated Press in an interview.
It became more about preparing for the possibility of conflict.
“Were there any local groups on Facebook that were kind of teasing about potential protests and how we prepare for them, what we’re marching on, we never knew,” she said. “We were in a very difficult situation, especially after last season.”
She was referring to the controversy at an away game in which two fathers from a rival team were banned from school grounds for wearing pink bracelets marked with “XX” to represent female chromosomes. They sued the school district and the judge ruled against them. They have appealed their case.
Last fall, there was an increased presence of school administrators at games and bus drivers moved closer to the field so students wouldn’t be in the parking lot, she said.
“Parker hasn’t talked about it a lot, but I think she can see that stress that everyone is experiencing — hers, her teammates, her coaches,” Sarah Terrell said. “She felt bad about drawing them all into that circus again. So in the end she said, ‘This isn’t fun anymore and I don’t want to do it.'”
Parker’s father described the atmosphere as “obvious tension.”
Even when they’re playing at home, “there’s often two police officers at home games where there wasn’t one before,” Zach Terrell said.
In the past, Parker also played football in a recreational league and can still do so.
“But I think all of this is still weighing on her,” her mother said. “It’s the same group of kids that she plays with who, honestly, have been very supportive of her and love having her on the team and have expressed that to her many times. But I think she still has that worry in her mind, ‘What will other people say or do if I come to a game?’
Parker’s parents hope she will return to playing soccer one day. In the meantime, her mother said, she “plans to be present and use her voice to continue standing up to discrimination.” “In some ways, she had to grow up much faster than some of her peers.”
Associated Press reporter Jeff Mulvihill in Haddonfield, New Jersey, contributed to this article.