My daughter Parker started playing soccer at 4 years old, on Saturday mornings at our local elementary school. This fall, at 16, she quit. Not because she stopped loving the game. Because the adults around it made loving the game impossible.
Parker is transgender. She told us in so many little ways from toddlerhood — the pink baseball glove, the pink fishing pole, the Build-A-Bear in a tutu — and then, at 13, in words, while helping me fold laundry: “Well, since this laundry is coming out, I probably should too.”
I want to be clear about what happened next, because I think many people imagine trans kids getting hormones handed out like Halloween candy. It took a year of work with her therapist, her pediatrician and a gender clinic before Parker started puberty blockers, and another year before hormone therapy was added. Baseline testing, letters of support and the approval of both her parents. Two years, five professionals, one carefully made medical decision. By the time she started hormone therapy, her therapist wrote that she no longer saw evidence of anxiety or depression in our daughter. The care was working.
Meanwhile, Parker played soccer. In 8th grade, with girls she’d played alongside since age 4, under a school athletic policy that had handled this question for years without incident. In 9th grade, on a high school team that lost every single game. At 5’6″ and 108 pounds, my daughter was neither the tallest nor the strongest player on her own team, let alone a threat to anyone else’s.
Then came 2024, and suddenly her right to keep doing what she’d done since kindergarten was up for debate in the New Hampshire state capital. We testified before State House and Senate committees. I wrote a letter to then-Governor Sununu every day for 90 days — stories about Parker, facts about trans kids in sports. Ninety letters, not a single reply. HB 1205 passed, and a law aimed at a problem that didn’t exist banned my daughter from playing with her friends.
With attorneys from GLAD Law and ACLU of New Hampshire, Parker sued the state, and a federal judge granted an injunction letting her keep playing while the case proceeded. Throughout it all, her teammates and coach were clear they wanted her to stay on the team. Yet what she won in court, adults took from her on the sidelines. Parents complained on Facebook that my twig of a daughter endangered their children. Opposing players refused to high-five her. One team’s parents wore wristbands marked “XX” and refused a referee’s request to remove them until police escorted them off the field. Parker didn’t fully understand what was happening. She only knew the game had been stopped because of her.
Classmates who saw her on the news yelled at her to “use your man voice.” And three weeks into her junior season, my daughter — the kid who danced through warmups, who rode the bus home with her teammates even when a parent offered a ride — quit. She told us later she couldn’t stand dragging her team and coaches into the circus that adults had made of her playing a child’s game.
Now our legislature, which introduced six separate bathroom bills this session, debates where my daughter may pee while wearing her prom dress. The final bill is currently waiting on Gov. Kelly Ayotte’s desk after she thankfully vetoed the previous attempts that came to her this year. Her healthcare survives only as a grandfather clause in a bill that bans it for the trans kids who come after her. My husband and I have a plan for staying in New Hampshire, a plan for leaving it and a plan for leaving the country. Most families like ours have already gone. Every surrounding state protects kids like mine; we remain the holdout in the middle of New England.
When I nag Parker about the clothes on her bedroom floor, she has a stock reply: “Let me live!” She’s being a teenager, not an activist. But she has said the whole thing. She doesn’t want to hurt anyone on a soccer field or in a bathroom, and she can’t make anyone’s child transgender. She wants what your kid wants — to play, to be left alone, to live her one life.
No signature on an executive order or Supreme Court ruling can change who my daughter is. But it can change what her life costs her. And that part isn’t up to her. It’s up to the rest of us.
Let her live. Let all of them live.
Sara Tirrell is the mother of Parker Tirrell, a transgender teenager who sued to stop New Hampshire’s ban on transgender girls playing on girls’ sports teams.