A federal appeals court rejected an attempt to force Washington schools to provide advance notice when a student athlete could compete against a transgender opponent, warning that doing so could compromise the privacy rights of other students and require schools to collect new, invasive information about children.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit denied an emergency request September 25 in Brown v. Washington Interscholastic Activities Association, a lawsuit challenging Washington policies that allow transgender students to participate in school sports consistent with their gender identity.
The ruling does not resolve the underlying lawsuit, nor does it establish a broad constitutional right for transgender students to participate on teams matching their gender identity.
But on the immediate question before it, the three-judge panel refused to order schools to identify transgender athletes — directly or indirectly — so another student could avoid competing against them.
That distinction matters.
The lawsuit began with a serious allegation
The case was brought by Stephanie Brown and her daughter, identified in court documents as K.M.K., a cisgender high school student who has competed in girls’ junior varsity wrestling in Washington’s Puyallup School District.
K.M.K. alleges that she was sexually assaulted by another student during a wrestling match in December 2025. Her attorneys with Alliance Defending Freedom say the opponent was transgender and that K.M.K. and her mother were not informed of that fact before the match.
The alleged assault remains an allegation in ongoing litigation. The transgender student and the student’s family are not defendants in the lawsuit.
Brown and K.M.K. subsequently challenged policies maintained by the Washington Interscholastic Activities Association, the state education system and the school district that allow students to participate on athletic teams consistent with their gender identity.
Among the relief they requested was advance notice whenever K.M.K. might compete against a transgender athlete, along with the ability to withdraw from those matches without adverse consequences.
A federal district court refused to issue a preliminary injunction.
Brown and K.M.K. appealed and asked the Ninth Circuit to intervene before the appeal was resolved.
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The appeals court said no.
The court rejected a claimed right to information about other children
Brown’s attorneys pointed to recent Supreme Court rulings involving parental rights, arguing that a parent has a right to receive enough information to decide whether their child should participate in a particular activity.
But the Ninth Circuit found an important difference.
Those cases involved information about a parent’s own child or a parent’s ability to opt their child out of particular instruction.
This case, the court said, asks for something different.
Brown was asserting what the panel described as a “novel right” to obtain medical information concerning other children.
The precedents cited by the plaintiffs did not establish such a right, the court concluded.
That distinction could have implications far beyond wrestling.
Schools routinely possess information about students that other parents may want to know. That does not automatically create a constitutional right for one family to obtain private information about another child.
Identifying transgender students creates its own privacy problem
The Ninth Circuit also confronted something often missing from political arguments surrounding transgender athletes: identifying which athletes are transgender requires identifying transgender children.
The court said the requested injunction could compromise the privacy rights of other students.
The plaintiffs argued that revealing an athlete’s sex identification amounted merely to providing “innocuous biographical data.”
The court disagreed with applying that reasoning here.
The earlier case cited by the plaintiffs involved information adults supplied on permit applications. This case involved information that could identify a child as transgender.
The court specifically distinguished sensitive medical information and noted that federal law generally restricts schools from releasing student records.
And there was another problem.
The school district may not actually possess the information necessary to create the system the plaintiffs wanted.
According to the record cited by the Ninth Circuit, Puyallup collects a student’s “legal gender” on a form, but does not require a physician’s examination or documentation to verify it.
The district also does not possess that information for athletes attending other school districts.
That means guaranteeing that K.M.K. would never be matched against a transgender athlete could require schools to begin collecting information they currently do not possess.
The Ninth Circuit described the potential result plainly: officials could have to collect “new, invasive information from an unknown number of students.”
Simply keeping the athletes apart wasn’t necessarily possible either
The plaintiffs offered an alternative.
Instead of telling K.M.K. that an opponent was transgender, schools could simply prevent the match from occurring.
That might appear to solve the disclosure problem.
The court found it wasn’t so simple.
Wrestling tournaments use weight classes and seeded brackets. Removing one competitor from a particular matchup could affect other athletes and potentially reveal why the change occurred.
The record therefore did not establish that officials could systematically prevent matches involving transgender competitors without either disrupting competitions or effectively identifying those students anyway.
The court also noted that K.M.K. had already identified two transgender athletes in her district who might compete during the 2026–27 wrestling season.
The district had said she could forfeit matches against transgender opponents without adverse consequences imposed by the district.
That weakened the argument that an emergency court order was necessary.
The Ninth Circuit did not decide the larger transgender-sports question
The limits of Friday’s ruling are important.
The Ninth Circuit did not hold that transgender students have an unrestricted right to compete in girls’ or women’s sports.
It did not finally resolve Brown and K.M.K.’s Title IX claims.
And it did not rule on whether the alleged assault occurred.
Instead, the court considered whether the plaintiffs met the demanding requirements for an emergency injunction while their appeal continues.
The panel found they had not.
The court also pointed to the Supreme Court’s 2026 decision in West Virginia v. B.P.J., noting that the Supreme Court expressly left unresolved a related question: whether Title IX and the Equal Protection Clause permit schools to allow transgender girls and women to participate on girls’ and women’s teams.
So the larger legal fight remains very much alive.
Why It Matters
The ruling exposes a problem hidden inside demands that schools give parents “notice” about transgender athletes.
Notice requires information.
And information requires someone to decide which children count as transgender, collect that information, maintain it and potentially disclose it.
For a transgender student, that can amount to involuntary outing.
The Ninth Circuit’s order recognizes that the rights of one student do not exist in isolation from the privacy rights of everyone else.
Whatever courts ultimately decide about transgender participation in school athletics, requiring schools to identify transgender competitors presents a separate civil-rights and privacy question.
In this case, the Ninth Circuit was unwilling to order schools to cross that line.
The underlying appeal in Brown v. Washington Interscholastic Activities Association continues.
Primary source: Read the Ninth Circuit’s September 25 order in Brown v. Washington Interscholastic Activities Association
Case information: Federal court record via GovInfo
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