NASHVILLE, Tenn. (CN) — Tennessee is facing yet another legal challenge to one of its several laws passed this year targeting transgender people, this time by a 14-year-old boy who wants to try out for the boy’s golf team at his high school in Knoxville.
The lawsuit, brought by the American Civil Liberties Union, challenges the state’s law that requires middle and high school students’ participation in sports teams be “determined by the student's sex at the time of the student's birth, as indicated on the student's original birth certificate.”
The law is one of five targeting transgender people that were signed by Republican Governor Bill Lee and went into effect earlier this year.
“When Tennessee lawmakers passed this discriminatory law, they could not identify a single instance of a Tennessee student facing any harm from a transgender athlete playing sports,” Hedy Weinberg, ACLU of Tennessee's executive director, said in a statement. “However, the emotional cost of this law to transgender student athletes is tremendous. We stand with trans students across the state as we challenge this law, and we urge other trans student athletes and their families facing such discrimination to contact us.”
A spokesperson for Lee said Thursday his office cannot comment on pending litigation.
Luc Esquivel, the boy who is bringing the lawsuit, is a freshman in high school and an avid golfer.
“I was really looking forward to trying out for the boys’ golf team and, if I made it, training and competing with and learning from other boys and improving my game,” he said in a statement. “Then, to have the legislature pass a law that singled out me and kids like me to keep us from being part of a team, that crushed me, it hurt very much. I just want to play, like any other kid.”
His parents share his heartbreak.
“It made me, and still makes me, so angry,” his mother, Shelley Esquivel, said in her own statement. “It is painful for a parent to see their child subjected to discrimination because of who they are. I’m proud Luc is taking this step, and his father and I are with him all the way.”
During legislative debate, the Tennessee bill was not endorsed by any sporting or health organizations, the ACLU noted in the lawsuit, adding that organizations such as the American Academy of Pediatrics have actually opposed such legislation.
Back in a March news post, the academy said its chapters have argued that such bills discriminate against transgender youths and that pediatricians have testified against the legislation, saying it’s based on myths, misinformation and misunderstandings of medicine and science.
The National Collegiate Athletic Association also has supported transgender participation in NCAA athletics, and before the Tennessee law was passed, the state’s own athletic associations had policies allowing transgender youths to participate in sports that matched their gender identity.
Republican-led states across the country passed a slew of anti-LGBTQ bills this year, but no state’s leaders have gone further than Tennessee's in enacting new laws targeting transgender people, the Associated Press reported in May.
With Thursday’s lawsuit, the state now faces at least three separate challenges to three of those laws.
In one case, the ACLU scored a tentative victory when a federal judge temporarily blocked a law requiring businesses to post signs letting patrons know if they allow transgender people to use the bathroom facilities that correspond with their gender identity. Violators would have faced penalties, including up to six months in jail.
In another case, the Human Rights Campaign sued the state over a law that applies to public schools and opens schools to civil litigation if they accommodate transgender people who wish to use restrooms that correspond with their gender identity. A hearing for a preliminary injunction has yet to be held in that case.
Meanwhile, 20 states are suing the Biden administration to stop the enforcement of what they say is a “regulatory overreach” in federal guidelines that protect transgender individuals from discrimination at work and in school, and leading the charge is Tennessee’s Republican Attorney General Herbert H. Slatery III.
The guidelines in question are issued by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the U.S. Department of Education and state that, based on U.S. Supreme Court precedent, it is discriminatory to require transgender individuals to operate in accordance with their biological sex assigned at birth.
Similar laws in other states have been blocked from enforcement in federal court.
Back in July, a federal judge in West Virginia blocked a law that banned transgender girls and women from participating in sports "where competitive skill or contact is involved."
An Idaho law banning transgender girls and women from participating in women’s sports also was blocked last year.
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