A Vermont school district has agreed to settle out of court with a $125,000 payment to a family that district officials punished over their criticism of a boy the district allowed to use the girls’ locker rooms at the school.
Last year, a coach objected to rules set by Randolph Union Middle School in Vermont, where a teen boy who claimed to be a “transgender girl” was allowed to “creep out” girls in the girls’ locker rooms. The situation escalated when the school’s girls’ soccer coach, Travis Allen, complained to district officials that the boy was causing the real girls to feel uncomfortable.
After his complaint, though, the district suspended Allen.
Young trans people participate with placards written Transphobia kills and trans flags in the demonstration in the center of Rome for the rights of trans people organized by the Gender X movement, on April 1, 2023, in Rome, Italy. (Simona Granati – Corbis/Corbis via Getty Images)
The coach was specifically fired for “misgendering” the boy for being in the girls’ locker rooms. Last Oct., he told Fox News, “I made a media post, or sorry, a social media post that referred to the male student as a male, and I was punished because I misgendered him.”
The school also sanctioned Allen’s daughter, Blake, for speaking out. District officials banned her from using school locker room facilities for daring to speak out..
Michael Prince/Getty Images
Now, the school has agreed to a settlement in the case and will have to give Travis his job back and scrub any disciplinary measures taken against Blake from her school record.
According to a statement from the Christian conservative legal group Alliance Defending Freedom, the Allen family has earned a “resounding victory for freedom of speech,” Fox News reported.
In the lawsuit, the Allens claimed, “In objecting to a male being in the room while the girls are changing, Travis and Blake each made comments underscoring that the trans-identifying student is, in fact, a male, including by using male pronouns.”
It continued, saying, “Yet, their remarks were too much for Defendants’ transgender orthodoxy—Travis was deemed to have ‘misgendered’ the student, while Blake was found guilty of ‘harassment’ and ‘bullying’—so Defendants disciplined both of them.”
The suit insisted that “Superintendent Layne Millington, Co-Principals Lisa Floyd and Caty Sutton, and the Orange Southwest School District Board are state actors and ‘violate the First Amendment by attempting to dictate ‘what may be said on matters of public concern.’”
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