Wayne Maines has been fighting for his daughter’s right to be treated just like every other girl for a very long time. Wayne and his wife, Kelly, adopted a pair of twins in 1997, but from a young age, Nicole was wasn’t like the boys her age, they realized. When she was just 4 years old, she told her father that she wished her “penis would go away." This was in 2001, before celebrities like Laverne Cox, Janet Mock, and Caitlyn Jenner had become household names. The word “transgender” wasn’t even on his radar.

When Nicole was 8, Wayne and Kelly took her to a gender clinic in Boston, five and a half hours away from their hometown in Maine. It was the first major program of its kind in the nation. Through regular meetings with a pediatric endocrinologist at the center, Nicole was able to medically transition. She’d come out in school much earlier, and Wayne said that her classmates and teachers were accepting and accommodating at first. But after students began using gender-segregated bathrooms in the fifth grade, he said that the grandfather of one of her classmates complained and recruited the student to harass her.

“Our lives were never the same after that,” Wayne said.

The school district, fearing a lawsuit, according to Wayne, forced Nicole to use a staff bathroom. While this was partially for her safety, Wayne said the decision marked her as an “other” and “neither a girl nor a boy.” Because the 10-year-old girl was headstrong, the district hired a bodyguard to accompany her to her classes, making sure that she didn’t use the girl’s restroom.

Wayne claimed that the “whole climate changed” following that incident. Kids who had never bullied Nicole before began to harass her in school. Wayne, who used to be an assistant peewee baseball coach, couldn’t go to sporting games anymore. Nicole and her brother, Jonas, who had both been active in extracurriculars and enrolled in Cub Scouts, stopped getting invited to many of their classmates’ parties. Wayne even stated that some parents would cross the street and walk on the other side of the road if they saw his family coming.

“It was a slap in the face,” Nicole remembered. “The school opened the door for people to be jerks. It underlined [the false idea] that trans students need to be kept away from other kids. We’re so ‘wrong’ and so ‘dangerous’ that we cannot be permitted to be around other students.”

The family moved to Portland and, according to Wayne, “lived in hiding” for two years. Before then, Nicole and her parents successfully filed complaints with Maine’s Human Rights Commission alleging discrimination in their old school district, which would be the start of a five-and-a-half-year battle to recognize her basic dignity. They also filed a lawsuit on behalf of their daughter. The state’s Superior Court ruled against Nicole in 2012, but that verdict was reversed by the Supreme Judicial Court less than two years later.

This was a historic first for the United States. The Maine ruling marked the first time a federal court upheld the rights of transgender students to use bathrooms that correspond with their gender identity.

After signing an amicus brief in support of Gavin Grimm in the Supreme Court case, the Maines family hoped the country would continue that progress. In March, the nation’s highest court was scheduled to hear oral arguments in G.G. v. Gloucester County School Board, a case that could have decided whether protections under Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 grant Gavin, a 17-year-old trans student, the right to affirming facility access in his Virginia school.