A group of Bow residents who were barred from protesting the participation of a transgender girl in a high school soccer game last fall have now taken their case to a federal appeals court.

The residents – three parents and one grandparent of girls on the Bow soccer team – appealed a lower court judge’s ruling that school administrators acted reasonably when they ordered the group to remove pink armbands emblazoned with the “XX” symbol, which is associated with female chromosomes. School officials believed the armbands were specifically targeting sa player on the opposing team.

Lawyers for the group argued in a legal filing this week that the ruling of the lower court wrongly permitted viewpoint-based discrimination.

“Allowing messages officials deem ‘inclusionary’ but ‘exclusionary’ is textbook viewpoint discrimination,” they said.

Though previous court decisions have established that school administrators have wide latitude to enforce restrictions on speech in school settings, the Bow group argued that district Judge Steven McAuliffe incorrectly applied standards meant for students to parents.

“The First Amendment does not permit school officials to infantilize adults in this way,” the lawyers wrote.

Following McAuliffe’s ruling in April, the case briefly gained national attention when Attorney General Pam Bondi vowed to investigate the Bow school district for its handling of the situation. As of late April, the district had yet to receive any contact from federal officials, according to Superintendent Marcy Kelley.

Kelley and other administrators testified during a two-day evidentiary hearing last fall that they considered the protest to be harassment and they had a duty to act. The Bow High team was playing Plymouth Regional High School, one of three schools in the state at the time with a transgender girl who had publicly expressed a desire to play on a girls’ sports team

Lawyers for the school district will have an opportunity to respond to the Bow residents’ legal filing with one of their own before the First Circuit Court of Appeals decides whether to hear oral arguments in the case. The court will issue a ruling regardless of whether the case reaches the oral argument stage.

Jeremy Margolis can be contacted at jmargolis@cmonitor.com.