Female wrestler who claims male sexually assaulted her on the mat seeks emergency order from SCOTUS

When a federal appeals court known for its rock-bottom track record in Supreme Court reviews reinstated California's so-called gender secrecy policies in schools, parents and teachers ran to SCOTUS for an emergency injunction. The gambit worked, prompting a broadside by six justices against lower courts for ignoring a century of precedents.

Now a mother and daughter in Washington state are seeking the same shortcut around the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which rejected their plea to force a school district and state athletic association to warn them before the girl unwittingly competes against another male in girls' wrestling, as happened when one allegedly sexually assaulted her on the mat.

"The Ninth Circuit stacked the deck against K.M.K. from the get-go" by applying a "doubly demanding standard" to Kallie Keeler's motion for an emergency injunction pending appeal, according to the teenager's emergency application to SCOTUS on Friday with her mother, Stephanie Brown. (As a minor, Keeler goes by her initials in legal proceedings.)

The appeals court required Keeler to show "the merits clearly (not likely) favor her and that 'extreme or very serious damage will result'" if she doesn't get an emergency injunction, defying SCOTUS by dismissing the physical and competitive threat to Keeler from males on the mat as an unresolved factual dispute, the emergency application says.

The high court explicitly recognized the "reality" of males' safety and fairness threats to females, especially in "contact sports," when it approved state bans on males in girls' sports, according to the duo's lawyers at the Alliance Defending Freedom, which says it has 20 victories at SCOTUS since 2011.

The 9th Circuit also falsely claimed Keeler and her mother wanted "medical information about other children" – the gender identity of males who identify as the opposite sex, a rationale also invoked to frustrate public records requests – when they in fact requested to know only whether Keeler "is set to wrestle a male," the duo says. 

The application argues that the Puyallup School District, Washington Interscholastic Activities Association and Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction don't have to tell them anything in "most instances," but "simply not schedule" Keeler against a male.

Yet the defendants "demand that K.M.K. continue competing against males or sit out sports entirely" and refuse to opt her out of matches with males "without penalty" or notify Brown so she can pull her daughter out herself, the application says.

ADF spokesperson Claire Carson emphasized to Just the News in an email that "only the school district" has pledged that it won't penalize Keeler for opting out of a "particular match," which "doesn't protect her from penalties – such as unexcused forfeitures – imposed by the WIAA, the body that actually governs school wrestling." 

The second problem is the mother and daughter would have to possess "information no one's giving them: that Kallie is going to wrestle a male athlete," Carson wrote. Neither the district nor WIAA has agreed to either stop matching her against males or "give her an excused forfeiture under the WIAA rules without forcing her to guess."

No regulatory safe harbor for 'a system without a female-only category'

Their Sept. 22 opening brief at the 9th Circuit argues Brown and Keeler each qualify for a preliminary injunction, to protect the mother's "fundamental right to direct her daughter's care, upbringing, and education" and the daughter's Title IX right to be treated no worse than boys, who have "greater athletic opportunities than girls" under WIAA's gender identity policy.

"Before the policy, recognizing that girls have no leg up over boys and were historically excluded from many sports, all girls were already allowed to compete on a boys’ team if there was no girls’ team," while the association still deems any coed team "a boys’ team that can only compete against other boys’ teams," the brief says.

The gender-identity policy now opens girls' sports to "females and some males," letting the latter compete under athletic standards designed for females, thus operating "a system without a female-only category" that is outside "Title IX’s regulatory safety harbor," it also says.

ADF's Carson didn't answer Just the News on the typical body-mass index in girls' versus boys' wrestling, but the opening brief specifies that WIAA sets "14 male weight classes and 14 distinct female weight classes" and different minimum body fat percentages between the sexes, 7% for males and 12% for females.

The defendants can't feign ignorance about the harm the gender-identity policy is causing female athletes at large, not just Keeler, whose alleged assailant is still eligible to wrestle her and whose girls' team has another male wrestler in the weight class just above Keeler's, according to the brief. 

A male athlete won state titles in girls' track and field in 2024 and 2025 and another "tackled" a girl in girls' basketball last year, prompting a federal Title IX investigation, yet WIAA "changed nothing," the brief says. 

The superintendent of public instruction bore down on WIAA to retain the gender-identity policy against protests by conservative districts in the state and threatened to strip state funding from "holdouts," most of whom gave in, the plaintiffs allege. 

Submitted to Justice Elena Kagan, who reviews 9th Circuit emergency applications, the Friday filing by Brown and Keeler invokes a more robust factual record on male athletic advantage than SCOTUS reviewed when it upheld state bans on males in girls' sports.

Their expert witnesses, University of Nebraska exercise scientist Gregory Brown and former American Medical Society for Sports Medicine President Chad Carlson, testified that males have an "inherent advantage" in wrestling's most important traits and will cause "predictable, identifiable, increased, and unequal risks" to females.

This is true regardless of "what drugs they take" – puberty blockers, supplemental estrogen and testosterone suppressors — which WIAA doesn't require of males anyway, letting them compete as girls by self-identification, the application says.

Appeals court 'barely acknowledged the sexual assault'

By construing the plaintiffs' emergency motion as a request for a "mandatory injunction" that orders the defendants to "do something" rather than "preserve the status quo," the 9th Circuit set a higher bar for Brown and Keeler, currently the subject of a "9-2 circuit split" that cries out for resolution by the high court, the emergency application says.

It also characterizes the status quo as a "fuzzy and easily manipulable" concept, distracting courts from the core issue: "preventing irreparable injury when the applicant is likely to succeed."

The 9th Circuit spuriously claims Keeler doesn't need an emergency injunction because her season doesn't start until "mid-November," ignoring "the time necessary to seek relief from this Court if there was an adverse ruling, precisely the situation that materialized," the application says.

The appeals court also "barely acknowledged the sexual assault" Keeler allegedly endured by the literal hand of her opponent – the incident was caught on video – in assessing the balance of equities between her and male opponents whose "privacy rights" are at stake if their sex were to be disclosed to Brown, the application says. 

This spring's parental rights precedent Mirabelli, which the 9th Circuit deemed irrelevant by claiming Brown sought private information about other students, gives the mother "the right to decide a question regarding her daughter’s physical health: whether K.M.K. wrestles males," the plaintiffs say. 

All they want is "modest temporary relief [...] the opportunity to opt K.M.K. out of wrestling males, with notice when necessary."