Within the last week, two settlements have offered sharply different visions of what anti-discrimination law can mean for trans athletes in an increasingly hostile political climate.  JayCee Cooper’s settlement with USA Powerlifting followed a landmark October 2025 ruling, in which the Supreme Court held that USA Powerlifting had illegally barred Cooper from the women’s division in 2018, despite having no formal written policy on trans participation. That decision affirmed what the Minnesota Human Rights Act is meant to do: recognize anti-trans exclusion in sports as discrimination, and require institutions to change.

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But the week’s other settlement told a very different story. In Vermont, Mid Vermont Christian School won a $556,000 settlement after persuading the courts that its punishment for refusing to play against a team with a trans woman athlete was not the enforcement of a nondiscrimination policy, but a violation of religious freedom.

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In the 2023 lawsuit that set up this result, Mid Vermont Christian School and several families—represented by Alliance Defending Freedom—framed their refusal to play against a basketball team with a trans girl as a matter of upholding religious doctrinal integrity. The complaint emphasizes that the school’s “biblical worldview” requires it to treat sex as immutable and to organize sports teams, facilities, pronouns, and dress codes strictly by “biological sex,” to avoid any conduct that “affirms that biological males can actually be girls.” On that basis, the school claimed that complying with the Vermont Principals’ Association (VPA)’s gender identity policy would force it to violate its religious exercise, recasting its refusal to play against a trans athlete as constitutionally protected faithfulness rather than discrimination—and turning the VPA’s ban on the school into an alleged act of religious discrimination.

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Juxtaposing these two settlements allows us to see how legal frameworks meant to ensure equal access in sports are now being pulled in opposite directions. The Cooper case uses a human-rights-based framework to protect a trans athlete from exclusion. In contrast, the Mid-Vermont case treats the application of nondiscrimination rules by VPA as an engagement of “unconstitutional religious hostility” that produces a narrative of religious victimization.

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That is why the Mid Vermont settlement deserves attention well beyond one school and one basketball game: it is one of the few high-profile public cases in which a court-based religious-freedom claim is explicitly used to defend trans exclusion in school sports. It also points toward a broader anti-gender strategy in which institutions such as schools invoke religious discrimination or free speech to justify exclusionary conduct toward trans people, reorganizing the legal landscape so that the actor doing the excluding can be recast as the one whose rights have been violated.

 

This strategy is, however, not entirely new. In recent curriculum cases like Mahmoud v. Taylor, parents with religious objections have argued that state-required LGBTQ-inclusive lessons, books, or resources burden their faith and therefore require opt-outs. The Mid Vermont case pushes that logic a step further: from claiming a right not to encounter LGBTQ-inclusive ideas to claiming a right to refuse participation when a trans student is present, and then demanding constitutional protection for that refusal.

 

The danger is not only doctrinal but political. Once the anti-discrimination policies can be reframed as discrimination against religious objectors, schools and other institutions are handed a powerful legal vocabulary for defending exclusion while presenting themselves as the oppressed party. This shift threatens to turn religious liberty from a shield for belief into a weapon against equal access, especially for trans students whose mere inclusion on a team can now be cast as a burden on someone else’s faith.

 

If the Mid-Vermont case becomes an anti-trans template, any school or league that wants to exclude trans athletes can declare exclusion a matter of religious doctrine and walk into court as the injured party. In a country where right-wing, anti-gender groups are already working to roll back trans participation in sports, this litigation strategy offers a ready playbook for turning claims of religious freedom and free speech into tools against the very people human-rights protections were meant to cover. History has never looked kindly on those who weaponize faith to keep others off the field, and there is no reason to believe that it will be any more forgiving when the ones pushed to the sidelines are trans athletes.

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May 4, 2026