A high school athlete, who is suing to bar male students who identify as female from competing in girls sports, won a Connecticut state championship race against a transgender opponent.
On Friday, Chelsea Mitchell, a student at Canton High School in Connecticut, won by .02 seconds in a 55-meter dash in the state championships against Terry Miller, a biological male who identifies as female.
Earlier this month, Mitchell and two other female athletes filed a lawsuit with their families against the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference for a policy they claimed violates Title IX, which prohibits discrimination based on sex.
“Girls deserve to compete on a level playing field,” Alliance Defending Freedom attorney Christiana Holcomb said in a statement following the lawsuit. “Forcing them to compete against boys isn’t fair, shatters their dreams, and destroys their athletic opportunities.”
Mitchell told the media that she is not worried that snagging the championship title over a transgender opponent will hurt her chances of winning in court.
“I don’t think it could go against; there’s still tons of girls that lose on a daily basis,” she said.
Miller and Adraya Yearwood were named in the lawsuit as examples of transgender athletes who have outstripped their competitors. The lawsuit points out to the fact that the pair have won 15 women’s championship titles.
Friday marked the first time Mitchell bested Miller in a competition.
The American Civil Liberties Union came out in defense of transgender athletes participating in women’s sports.
“The language of the complaint, which deliberately misgenders transgender youth and demands that high school athletics be organized by chromosomes, is an assault on the basic dignity and humanity of our transgender people,” Chase Strangio, the deputy director for Trans Justice with the ACLU LGBT & HIV Project, said in a statement about the lawsuit.
