Ivy League School Sued After Key Ruling on Trans Runner
A man who wanted to run in a women’s track meet in May is suing Princeton University for not letting him have his way.
Sadie Schreiner filed the lawsuit in New Jersey on Tuesday, suing the college and other organizations and individuals involved in the track meet, according to the Associated Press.
The lawsuit was filed several months after the NCAA changed its policy to ban men who say they are women from competing in women’s events after President Donald Trump issued an executive order to ban transgender athletes from women’s sports.
That was not news to Schreiner, who had competed for Rochester Institute of Technology.
In March, he posted on Instagram, “Today is NCAA Nationals, instead of competing for my team I ran what may be my last meet in the United States.”
“We stand by the allegations in the pleading,” said Susie Cirilli, Schreiner’s attorney.
“As stated in the complaint, the defendants’ individual actions were intolerable in a civilized community and go beyond the possible bounds of decency,” she said.
The lawsuit seeks a jury trial and unspecified damages over what it called a “humiliating, dehumanizing and dignity-stripping ordeal.”
While noting that Schreiner was born male, the lawsuit opened by saying “Sadie Schreiner is a woman who loves to run competitively.”
In the 200-meter race in question, an invitational open to unaffiliated athletes, Schreiner realized 15 minutes before the race for which he had registered and initially been accepted to run “that her name had been deleted from the official listing of the pairings of all registered runners in the 200-meter race,” the lawsuit said.
Schreiner was told that “despite the mandate of New Jersey law disallowing discrimination on the basis of being transgender, Princeton would not allow her to run solely because she was a transgender woman,” the lawsuit said.
“Simply stated, when Princeton University, unlawfully aided and abetted by the other individually named defendants, denied her right to run in the Larry Ellis Invitational track meet, they broke the law controlling guaranteed protections of the rights of transgendered women,” the lawsuit said.
The suit cited the “New Jersey Law Against Discrimination” and “the New Jersey common law protecting against unlawful conspiracies, and relief for the intentional infliction of emotional distress.”
The lawsuit claimed that although Schreiner was born male, he had a birth certificate that could prove that he is a woman.
Writing on Outkick, Ian Miller vented about “the delusions and self-obsession that athletes like Schreiner are consumed by.”
“Nobody’s banned from participating. Schreiner could quite easily have run in the men’s category against athletes of the same biological sex. But Schreiner would almost certainly lose, while not being able to live out the fantasy of dominating female athletes,” he wrote.
“That’s why this lawsuit exists. That’s why Schreiner and Lia Thomas and many others get so upset and affronted by reality-confirming rules and laws: because it prevents them from being able to win. They won’t compete against men, then act as though they’re prevented from participating,” Miller wrote.
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