California has pioneered a new approach to solving the problem of trans athletes who want to compete in women’s sports: give them more girls to defeat. A male high school junior, AB Hernandez, started identifying as female and entered the state track and field competition. In an attempt to comply with Trump executive orders, California decided to let one more girl enter the competition.
Hernandez promptly took home gold in the girls’ high jump and triple jump.
California’s innovation, the addition of another girl for every athlete that identifies as trans, is a flagrant attempt to deny standing for a lawsuit; it allows the state to claim that no biological woman can plausibly say she was denied a chance to compete.
But this ruse is like the broader trans movement itself, which obliges you to deny the evidence dangling before your own eyes. It should not stand.
Famously, the chief justice of the Supreme Court said that his job in the judiciary was calling “balls and strikes” — merely calling the legal game according to the rules the law sets. The trans movement can be defeated only if the judiciary will confidently connect the letter of the law to physical reality.
Ambitious and acutely aware of the polling on this issue, California Governor Gavin Newsom has tried to stake out a position of common sense. He recently said in an interview with Charlie Kirk that it was “deeply unfair” for transgender athletes to participate in girls’ sports.
Newsom is not historically a shrinking violet when it comes to progressive cultural issues. Infamously, as mayor of San Francisco, he reacted to Proposition 8 — a ballot initiative narrowly and temporarily overturning California’s legalization of same-sex marriage — by promising that the future would see legal same-sex marriage go from California to the rest of the nation “whether you like it or not.”
But the Democratic coalition, and thus all the important institutions in his state, is run by zealots on the trans issue. And so Newsom’s attempt at moderation is becoming an object lesson in the inability of even the most ambitious Democrats to separate themselves from cultural radicalism. A vote for Democrats is a vote for imposing gender ideology.
California has not remedied the injustice of allowing young men to usurp the position of female athletes. It has merely expanded the number of victims of this injustice.