Three female high school students have filed a federal lawsuit that claims Oregon's policy of allowing transgender athletes to compete in girls sports violated Title IX protections against sex-based discrimination in educational settings.
The lawsuit was filed against Gov. Tina Kotek, a Democrat; the Oregon Department of Education; the Oregon School Athletics Association; and the Forest Grove, Newberg, and Portland school districts.
Madelyn Eischen, 18, sat out two competitions in April when she discovered she would be competing against someone believed to be a transgender girl, even though at one of the meets, the biological male did not compete. The names of the two other plaintiffs weren't revealed in the complaint because they are minors.
"I just think about all of these young girls in my life that look up to me, and I have a lot of younger cousins, and I just cannot stand by and think about them having to face these situations that I've had to go through," Eischen told KDRV-TV in Medford, Oregon, on Tuesday.
"I'm a high school athlete, and I just want a fair competition. I've talked to a lot of people about this, but I would want some sort of meeting, some sort of convening of the districts or OSAA to formally define something that's equal for all sides."
The issue of fairness has been at the crux of the debate regarding biological males competing in girls' and women's sports, given the fundamental physical differences between the sexes. But the lawsuit also touches on the emotional toll it takes on female athletes.
"The other piece of this that I think our new lawsuit does a really good job of calling out — and it's not really talked about much — is the hostile environment created in violation of Title IX, when schools, state athletic associations, state departments of education have policies that allow this," Leigh Ann O'Neill, chief of staff for the Center for Litigation at America First Policy Institute, told Newsmax on Wednesday.
"We're talking about every female in Oregon is walking through her day, knowing that at any moment she can go to her high school locker room and there can be a boy undressed in there because the policy allows it.
"She could join a new sport team and get cut from the roster because a male has now decided to identify that he identifies as a girl. There is very little in terms of safeguarding; it's all based on self-identification of being transgender."
O'Neill said in any other setting, such "hostility" would not be tolerated, using as an example Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which, among other things, prohibits sexual harassment in the workplace.
"If you have a boss who makes lewd comments to you and makes you uncomfortable every single day and they do nothing to fix the situation, they're legally liable for that," she said. "Here, we have girls who are uncomfortable every single day. And it's not just because [the state and schools] don't know they're uncomfortable. They have deliberately passed a policy that makes them uncomfortable."
AFPI in May filed a federal civil rights complaint with the Department of Education in support of two other Oregon female high school track and field athletes who, frustrated by placing behind a biological male, stepped down from the victory podium at a meet and turned their backs in protest as the other athletes received medals. O'Neill said her group is preparing to file a lawsuit based on that case.
Washington, D.C., and 21 states have laws allowing transgender students to participate in sports that align with their gender identity, according to the Movement Advancement Project. The Trump administration has tried to pressure states with threats of withholding federal funding to comply with Title IX, but O'Neill said the issue likely will not be settled until the Supreme Court weighs in.
The Supreme Court in its next term is expected to hear challenges to laws in Idaho and West Virginia that restrict participation in girls' and women's sports to biological females.
"The federal government has a lot that they can do in terms of pulling funding as a mechanism to garner compliance from the state associations," O'Neill said. "But at the end of the day, there has to be a Supreme Court ruling that says biological sex receives greater constitutional protection than gender identity. That's the ultimate correction for the problem."
Newsmax reached out to Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield, a Democrat, and the OSAA for comment.
Michael Katz ✉
Michael Katz is a Newsmax reporter with more than 30 years of experience reporting and editing on news, culture, and politics.
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.