Julie Hamill, president of the California Justice Center, offers CNN’s Brianna Keilar a simple solution to the trans sports question.
Did you swoon when you first saw Canadian Jordan Peterson take on a British TV host over gender issues? Or cheer as Canadian conservative Pierre Poilievre, whilst nonchalantly eating an apple in an orchard, dismantled a reporter on economic issues?
Lest you suppose that Canadians uniquely excel at this sort of gracious humbling of opponents, consider that a California attorney just had her Canadian moment on CNN. While explaining why many Californians object to the presence of a male who identifies as a female while competing in girls’ prep sports, Julie Hamill calmly disassembled CNN host Brianna Keilar’s bias/prevarication/spin. She offered a master class in Canadian-style communications. (Disclosure: Hamill is my colleague at the California Policy Center.)
Quick backgrounder: Always an outlier, California has since 2014 allowed (even encouraged) schoolchildren to choose from an ever-expanding menu of gender identities, including agender, genderqueer, gender fluid, Two Spirit, bigender, pangender, gender nonconforming, or gender variant. Going further, it requires everyone else not merely to respect but to endorse – even finance – those assertions of gender.
CIF has required that female athletes compete against anyone, including males who identify as females. The domination of one of those males, AB Hernandez, in this year’s track and field finals has catalyzed a kind of nonpartisan parent revolt. President Trump stepped into the breach, declaring California’s approach to girls sports a violation of federal law and threatening that he’d withhold federal funds to state schools that engage in that same violation. Following Trump’s intervention, CIF declared it would allow girls displaced by boys to participate in finals, and might even create three categories in future sporting events – girls, boys, all-comers.
That’s where Hamill’s education of Keilar begins. Videophobes can benefit from the full text (helpfully provided by CNN) but they’ll miss the way in which Hamill (however unintentionally) communicates her confusion/disbelief about Keilar’s assumptions. Here’s the exchange in full:
