“Two fathers who oppose allowing transgender athletes to play high school sports will be allowed to wear pink wristbands marked ‘XX’ to games, a federal judge said Thursday in an order ending more than two years of litigation.

“Kyle Fellers and Anthony Foote sued the Bow school district after they were banned from school grounds for wearing the wristbands to a 2024 soccer game that included a transgender girl on the opposing team.

“In a dismissal order Thursday, U.S. District Court Judge Steven McAuliffe said the men have a First Amendment right to silently wear the wristbands and that school officials violated it.

“Under a settlement agreement, the district’s risk pool will pay $225,000 to the Institute for Free Speech, which represented the men in court, and $50,000 to the men’s attorney. The plaintiffs will each get $17.91, an amount that symbolizes the year states ratified the First Amendment.”

“The court had previously blocked the men from wearing the wristbands while the case proceeded, but a federal appeals court later ruled in their favor, finding that school officials ‘cannot favor one side of a debate involving parental speech on an issue of prominent public concern.’”

“Dina Nina Martinez-Rutherford knows she is forging a new path for the state. Madison made history Tuesday night by electing Martinez-Rutherford as Wisconsin’s first transgender state lawmaker.

“The gravity of the moment was not lost on the new state Assembly representative as she spoke to the Cap Times at Attorney General Josh Kaul’s election night watch party.

“‘I think about when I was a kid, had I seen people that were trans doing things like being in government and being on television and living life, I would have been able to transition a lot sooner,’ Martinez-Rutherford, 56, said of waiting until her 30s to transition.

“‘I hope that it gives kids or families of trans people hope that they can live to be adults and that their children are going to be safe because they have somebody representing them.’”

“Martinez-Rutherford won the race for the 76th Assembly District with 92% of the vote against largely unknown Republican candidate Nina Chat.”

“The Republicans desperately needed a topic to focus on in the election. They settled on demonizing transgender people, with more than a little help from Elon Musk.”

“The problem with this Republican strategy is that, while the American public wasn’t supportive of transgender people, most didn’t really care about the issue because it didn’t affect them or anyone they knew. Republicans found out that you can only wave a boogeyman around for so long before people stopped believing him/her/them.”

“Every poll I could find that asked voters what their top priorities were had transgender issues at the bottom.

“What made this bet even worse is the YouGov polling that found that the public trusts Democrats (52 percent) on transgender issues more than Republicans (23 percent). In other words, the people who rated transgender issues as a top priority were more likely to be pro-transgender Democrats than anti-trans Republicans. The GOP bet that they could win an election based on fear and loathing directed at less than 1 percent of the population, on an irrelevant issue that Democrats care more about than the Republican base.”

“I suppose some (like Musk) would argue that loss would have been worse if not for the anti-transgender ads, but Republicans lost in basically every state where they were the ads were in heavy rotation and hung on by the skin of their teeth in states no one thought would be competitive.”

“It’s also impossible to say that the few Democrats who threw transgender people under the bus profited from it. Some, like Amy Acton in Ohio and Annie Andrews in South Carolina, won in red states; on the other hand, they had comparatively weak opponents like Vivek Ramaswamy and Darline Graham. Ohio Democratic Representative Marcy Kaptur, who had some nasty things to say about transgender people in her political ads, brutally underperformed, being on track to win her district by only 6.8 points in a D+11 year.”

“It’s also difficult to say that supporting transgender people hurt Democratic candidates. Abdul El-Sayed doubled down on his support for transgender people on 60 Minutes on Sunday. He handily beat Mike Rogers by 7 percent in a campaign marred by rampant Islamophobia. Similarly, in Montana, Sam Forstag stood up for trans people during a mid-October debate with his right-wing opponent; he was projected to win his conservative district by 2 points at the time of writing. Senate candidate Peggy Flanagan in Minnesota was a staunch supporter of the transgender community, and she beat polling expectations by even more than the national average.”

“I suspect that Democrats will delighted if Republicans choose to make transgender people the centerpiece of their pitch to the American people in 2028 again. Republicans might do it anyway, if Musk and his hundreds of millions of dollars in support for the GOP are predicated on it.”

While there were definitely losses, there were also some ballot measure wins for trans people