The U.S. Justice Department is defending itself against two New Hampshire transgender high school students who allege that President Donald Trump’s executive orders earlier this year would unconstitutionally deprive them of playing girls’ sports.

In a June 6 filing, Deputy Assistant Attorney General Richard Lawson argued the two students, Parker Tirrell and Iris Turmelle, had not established an imminent risk of being affected by the executive orders. And he contended that even if the executive order did affect the students, the administration’s intent — to prevent transgender girls from playing girls’ sports — is lawful.

“… The Sports Order’s classification is rationally related to the physical advantages of males in sports and serves the legitimate government purpose of ensuring equal opportunities for females,” Lawson wrote.

The filing comes as Tirrell and Turmelle are suing the state of New Hampshire in federal court to overturn House Bill 1205, a 2024 New Hampshire law that limits middle school and high school girls’ sports teams to children who were female at birth. That law would prevent Tirrell and Turmelle, both transgender girls, from participating on their sports teams.

In September, Judge Landya McCafferty of the U.S. District Court of New Hampshire issued a preliminary injunction that temporarily stops HB 1205 from applying to Tirrell and Turmelle, allowing them to continue playing while the case proceeds. That order does not apply to other transgender students in the state.

But while the state law is temporarily frozen, lawyers for Tirrell and Turmelle argue Trump’s executive orders this year pose a new threat. Those orders, titled “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government” and “Keeping Men out of Women’s Sports,” require the Department of Education to interpret Title IX, the law prohibiting sex-based discrimination in schools, to exclude transgender female athletes from female sports and warn school districts to align their policies to that interpretation or lose federal funding.

In February, attorneys for Turmelle and Tirrell filed a motion to expand their lawsuit against the state to also include the Trump administration, and specifically asked the New Hampshire District Court to strike down Trump’s executive orders.

The threat question

In its recent response, the Trump administration argues there is no evidence that the president’s executive orders have affected Tirrell or Turmelle yet, and that the lawsuit seeking to stop those orders should thus be dismissed. Without that direct harm, plaintiffs have failed to state a proper claim for a lawsuit, defendants wrote.

“Plaintiffs lack constitutional standing, and their stated speculative risk of future injury is not close to imminent and may never become ripe,” the Department of Justice wrote.