A trans girl played volleyball. Now her Florida school is under investigation.

Alex Burgess, who is in his second year of coaching, had no idea why the School District would be investigating his team. He didn’t know the investigation focused on one of his players. Nor did he have any idea that Florida had banned her from playing on the team.

After receiving the district’s call early this week, Burgess learned only from news reports that at issue was a 2021 state law — championed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) and implemented by the Republican-controlled state legislature — barring transgender girls from being on girls’ school sports teams.

The state Department of Education had instructed the district to investigate Monarch High for allowing a trans girl to play on the volleyball team. It appears to be the first time the law has been used to remove educators from a school or investigate them for potential lawbreaking.

The investigation, which began Monday, has put educators at risk of disciplinary consequences, disrupted the high school just before midterms and prompted hundreds of its students to walk out this week in protest. It has also forced a minor into the public eye.

“I’m most worried about her and how she’s doing,” Burgess said Wednesday, saying he had not known the student was trans before the district’s investigation. “I can only imagine what she’s going through.”

On Monday, Burgess’s job as a coach was “paused” and the principal, assistant principal and two staff members were temporarily removed from the Coconut Creek, Fla., school for the duration of the investigation, which could take weeks or months.

The student’s family had already challenged the state law: They sued the Florida Department of Education over the trans athlete ban in 2021. In November, a federal judge dismissed the lawsuit, ruling that the law didn’t violate federal rights under the Constitution or Title IX. (The family has until Jan. 13 to submit an amended lawsuit.)

The Department of Education alerted the district to the girl’s membership on the team about two weeks after the lawsuit was dismissed. An agency spokesperson has said the department did so after being notified of the student’s participation in volleyball, but has not said who notified the state, when or how.

A straight-A student who was happy and thriving, the teenager now doesn’t want to return to school, said Jennifer Solomon, a South Florida resident and LGBTQ advocate who has known the family for more than a decade.

The student’s parents declined, through Solomon, to speak with The Washington Post; she said they are taking time to care for their daughter. The student has not been publicly identified by the district. The Post does not identify people under 18 without their parents’ permission.

“This child’s life has been turned upside down,” said Solomon, a families support manager for the LGBTQ group Equality Florida. “And she didn’t hurt or harm anyone.”

The DeSantis administration’s push for the investigation, and misgendering of the student in a statement, drew criticism from some in the Monarch High community, LGBTQ advocates and the Miami Herald editorial board, which wrote that the governor’s administration “clearly doesn’t deem all children worthy” of protection from harm.

In a statement to some news media outlets, Education Department spokeswoman Cailey Myers said, “Under Governor DeSantis, boys will never be allowed to play girls’ sports. It’s that simple.”

“As soon as the Department was notified that a biological male was playing on a girls’ team in Broward County, we instructed the district to take immediate action since this is a direct violation of Florida law,” Myers continued. “It is completely unacceptable for the male student to have been allowed to play on a girls’ team, and we expect there will be serious consequences for those responsible.”

The teenager loves sports and has played on girls’ teams since she was seven, according to the 2021 lawsuit filed by her family. She began taking testosterone blockers at 11, has received estrogen since 13 and will develop through puberty as a girl, meaning she has no competitive advantage over, and is similar athletically, to her cisgender female teammates, her family said in the lawsuit.

“It is not an option for her to be on the boys’ team,” they wrote then, “because she is not a boy.”

The legislation at issue is part of the conservative remaking of Florida led by DeSantis, who is seeking the 2024 Republican nomination for president. Florida has led a wave of red states in passing legislation restricting the lives of LGBTQ people, including banning classroom instruction about sexuality and gender identity.

Nationwide, a wave of anti-trans state laws that began in 2018 has now seen hundreds of bills filed. By this spring, 2023 had set a record for the number of such bills being signed into law, an analysis by The Post found.

That has included legislation focusing on transgender athletes, particularly women: Since 2020, 23 states have passed laws barring transgender athletes from high school or college sports or both, according to the nonprofit Movement Advancement Project, which tracks the legislation.

The issue has become politicized despite transgender youth being a very small minority of the U.S. population — less than 2 percent of high school students, according to a 2019 CDC report — and the percentage of transgender girls likely to play sports and compete at an elite level is even more limited.

Signing Florida’s bill into law in June 2021, DeSantis and other state leaders portrayed it as protecting girls, alleging that trans people could otherwise erode women’s equality in athletics. The law, which legislators named the Fairness in Women’s Sports Act, was billed as a measure that would “preserve fair opportunities for female athletes.”

But advocates said the state’s aggressive legislative targeting of education and LGBTQ issues has created a climate of fear for both educators and trans people — one that some in Broward County said was exacerbated this week.

While the DeSantis administration argued that Monarch High had likely broken the law, critics said the issue was the law itself, which LGBTQ advocates view as unconstitutional.

“Just because a law is enacted doesn’t make it right or fair,” said Jon Harris Maurer, public policy director for Equality Florida.

Broward County Schools Superintendent Peter B. Licata told reporters Tuesday that the district would conduct an investigation to determine whether any of the staff members should face “discipline, as appropriate with anyone else that breaks the law.”

A School District investigative unit made up of former law enforcement officers will investigate the employees. Licata said their reassignments were “not an indication of discipline.”

“Nobody is guilty of anything at this point. That’s what the investigation is for,” he said.

Licata told reporters he was unaware of the family’s lawsuit against the state when he found out Nov. 20 about the student’s participation in volleyball. He didn’t specify whether he or the Department of Education initiated the conversation, though the state agency said it had told the district about the student.

Licata said he had spoken with a constituent Nov. 20 who reported “factors” that “were not appropriate” on the volleyball team and said the person who called in the tip was “choosing not to be identified.”

Licata, through a spokesperson, declined to be interviewed. The Department of Education did not respond to questions from The Post. A DeSantis spokesperson referred The Post to the Department of Education.

The heads of the district’s teachers union and principals association both said they thought the employees could have remained in their jobs during the investigation to minimize disruption to the students. Broward Teachers Union president Anna Fusco said workers are usually removed from their jobs when being investigated for allegations of harm against a student.

“None of the above harmed the child,” Fusco said. “They could’ve just told them that there’s an allegation, that you violated the law and we’re going to investigate. It didn’t have to be this hoopla, national attention.”

It was “rather apparent” that the district had felt pressure from the state to take action, said Lisa Maxwell, executive director of the Broward Principals’ and Assistant Principals’ Association.

“The state feels, obviously, very strongly about the situation,” Maxwell said. “So, in an abundance of caution … I’m presuming the district decided to help assure the state that this was an investigation being conducted in a very thorough way.”

Athletic director Dione Hester declined to comment. Principal James Cecil, assistant principal Kenneth May and Jessica Norton, who is a junior varsity volleyball coach and information management technician, did not respond to requests from The Post. All four have been given work at nonschool sites.

The association, to which Cecil and May belong, concluded in a review that neither administrator broke the law, Maxwell said. The group expects them to be cleared, she said.

Licata said his first priority was supporting students, but some school staff members questioned the district’s regard for the trans student’s well-being. Fusco accused the district of having “shown a lack of care” for the teenager.

Asked about concerns that the investigation may have outed the student to members of the campus community, Licata said he was “not aware of any of that.”

The fact that the student played on the team “only seems to be a problem because … a law exists that ostensibly seeks to discriminate against and ostracize trans people,” said John Seminario, an English teacher and former faculty sponsor of the school’s Gay-Straight Alliance.

“It doesn’t feel conducive to ‘providing all students with a safe and inclusive learning environment,’” he said, quoting a district statement about the reassignments.

LGBTQ advocates already thought Florida’s law had prevented other trans kids from playing sports at school, largely by discouraging them from signing up. Now, its ripple effect is being felt across the state’s second-largest School District.

The removal of the administrators disrupted Monarch High, Maxwell said. She said the principal and assistant principal are worried about their students. The assistant principal, for instance, had been working with students who were in danger of not graduating.

“He felt he was making great strides,” Maxwell said. “Him not being there, doing that work … That has an impact.”

Students staged two walkouts this week to protest the law’s enforcement. They demonstrated support for the administrators and student, carrying signs with slogans such as “Trans rights are human rights.”

Jordan Campbell, the captain of the girls’ volleyball team, told NBC6 Miami that her teammate was “not being treated like a human.” She said she was worried about her, saying she hasn’t come to school since the investigation began.

“She’s not being treated like she’s worth anything to anyone,” Campbell told the TV station. “It is truly disgusting. She’s a human and she deserves to be treated like one.”

In the 2021 lawsuit, the student’s family laid out what they feared would happen if the state law were enforced at the girl’s school. Losing sports, they said, would “create a sense of shame and diminish her positive sense of self,” have a possible long-term effect on her future and take away a source of pride, belonging and social connection.

“She cannot imagine life without these experiences,” the family wrote, “and feels it would be cruel to take this opportunity away from her.”