The young volleyball player at the heart of 5 staff suspensions and large student protests in Monarch High School, Florida never experienced a testosterone-fueled puberty and has no conceivable athletic advantage.
Monarch High School’s principal, James Cecil, was abruptly suspended from his duties and hundreds of students walked out of their classes in protest, all because a girl who’d never been known as anything else at the school was participating with her peers on the volleyball team. Miles away from scaremongering stories of boys posing as girls to intrude on women or gain an advantage, this story of a young athlete being targeted, and the collateral damage caused to the entire community, exposes the truth of how laws targeting trans youth operate in practice.
The name of the volleyball player at the center of the controversy in Broward County is not publicly available, but reporting for the Miami Herald has linked the student to a lawsuit filed in 2021 on behalf of a then-thirteen-year-old trans girl referred to in the suit as D.N. The suit sought to challenge Florida’s 2021 ban on the inclusion of trans athletes in school sports teams. Superintendent Peter Licata, the man responsible for abruptly reassigning MHS Principal James Cecil along with the Assistant Principal Kenneth May, Athletic Director Dione Hester, and two other staff members claims not to have known about the lawsuit before his decision. It is currently unclear whether the suspended principal and other staff members were aware of the suit, the law’s requirements, or the transgender athlete’s trans identity. Licata has described receiving a tip from a constituent letting him know a trans athlete was participating on the MHS volleyball team.
The 2021 lawsuit describes a trans girl, then in middle school, as having displayed signs of gender dysphoria from earliest childhood. It states that she was formally diagnosed and undergoing a social transition at age seven, and commencing puberty blockers at age 11, forestalling any potential impact of testosterone on her athleticism.
screenshot from 2021 court filing, hosted by Courthouse News
The suit describes the girl as having joined a girls’ soccer team soon after her social transition and that much of her social life revolves around her participation in athletics. At the time of the suit the girl was still playing soccer, but it mentions that she intended in 2021 to try out for volleyball.
According to the Miami Herald’s reporting, the lawsuit was recently dismissed after U.S. District Judge Roy K. Altman sided against the family and with the state of Florida on November 6, but is currently being amended.
The student seems to enjoy massive support in the school, with hundreds of her fellow students joining a walk out to protest for trans rights and against the reassignment of their principal.
If the student has been on puberty blockers followed by estrogen, as suggested in the lawsuit, this would likely negate any claim of her having an unfair athletic advantage over cisgender players. The influence of testosterone during puberty is the only theoretical avenue by which trans women are claimed to attain a competitive advantage, as pre-pubertal children display no innate sex-based differences in athletic ability. After puberty, studies have been unable to conclusively show trans women who undergo testosterone suppression for a period of years retain any athletic advantage, however the question is hotly contested. Trans women who suppress testosterone to certain approved levels have been eligible for elite competition for many decades, but a movement is growing to ban their participation despite a lack of clear evidence showing their advantages over cis women.