Editorial: CA must stand firm for trans athletes

Leave it to the Trump administration to try and put a damper on Pride weekend. Just as the Bay Area Reporter’s Pride issue was going to press last week, the federal Department of Education announced that the California Department of Education was in violation of Title IX for allowing trans girls to compete on female sports teams. The state has 10 days to take corrective measures or risk an “enforcement action.”

We strongly urge state Attorney General Rob Bonta to stand firm and not comply with this order. State Superintendent of Instruction Tony Thurmond should also reject the Fed's demands. (Thurmond is running for governor in 2026 and has a solid record of support for trans students – he even got kicked out of a school board meeting over the issue.)

In its notice, the federal education department cited the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent ruling in U.S. v. Skrmetti, which upheld Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for trans minors. The administration has argued that when schools recognize transgender identities, they violate girls’ rights under Title IX, which prohibits sex discrimination, as the New York Times reported. The department also cited California Governor Gavin Newsom’s comments earlier this year in which he agreed with conservative provocateur Charlie Kirk that trans women and girls shouldn’t play on female sports teams, in yet another instance of Newsom’s words coming back to bite him.

In June, Bonta did file a preemptive lawsuit against the Trump administration, following a U.S. Department of Justice order telling schools to indicate whether they will exclude trans athletes. Bonta’s lawsuit was aimed at preventing the feds from withholding funding.
Equality California, the statewide LGBTQ rights group, issued a blistering response, criticizing the U.S. Department of Education’s rationale.

“The U.S. Department of Education’s ‘findings’ are a dangerous distortion of Title IX and a direct attack on transgender youth in California,” stated EQCA Executive Director Tony Hoang, a gay man. “Let’s be clear: this isn’t about fairness in sports and never has been – it’s about a federal administration weaponizing civil rights laws to target transgender students and force California to comply with their hateful anti-transgender agenda.”

The education department’s shot across the bow is just the latest example of the Trump administration’s animus toward the trans community. It started on January 20, the day President Donald Trump was sworn in to his second term. And it’s continued, especially in light of the recent high school track meet in the Central Valley where trans student AB Hernandez placed first in two events.

The California Interscholastic Federation, which governs student sports in the Golden State, rolled out a new policy ahead of that state championship meet. As the Los Angeles Times reported, under the new rules, a cisgender girl who was bumped from qualifying for an event final by a transgender athlete would still advance to compete in the finals. In addition, the federation said, any cisgender girl who was beaten by a transgender competitor would be awarded whichever medal she would have claimed had the transgender athlete not been competing.

And that’s what happened. Hernandez shared the gold with two other students in the high jump after all three cleared the same height. The federation’s policy seems to be a reasonable compromise that allows female trans athletes to compete – and win. Even Newsom praised the policy when it was announced in late May.

This latest salvo from the U.S. Department of Education, like so much else the Trump administration is doing, serves as a distraction from the horrible things the president is pushing. This week, the U.S. Senate passed his One Big Beautiful Bill at the expense of working and poor people across the country. The federal deficit is set to increase by $3.5 trillion, according to U.S. Senator Alex Padilla (D-California), thanks to the tax cuts for billionaires included in the bill.

Meanwhile, Padilla stated in a news release that an estimated 17 million people, including 2.3 million in California, will lose access to health care via Medicaid under this bill, which will impact HIV services. (The bill now returns to the House of Representatives for another vote because the Senate approved amendments to the House version.)

Under the bill, food assistance programs will be decimated, Padilla pointed out, as well as rural hospitals. That deficit explosion was too much even for former Trump buddy Elon Musk, who vowed to start a new political party in protest (good luck with that, Elon, but thanks for at least amplifying the terrible legislation). Who knows, by the time the midterm elections roll around next year, maybe enough people will have experienced the ill effects of the bill to vote enough Republicans out of Congress to give the Democrats control, but that’s for another day.

So, as hard-working people and those who are low-income begin to experience the disruptions that the bill will cause, Trump will keep talking about trans athletes and his administration will keep announcing draconian policies against them even as we don’t think the issue will be at the top of most people’s minds. Wednesday it was revealed that UPENN had caved to Trump’s demands that it ban trans athletes from female sports teams and erase trans swimmer Lia Thomas’s records in order to unfreeze $175 million in federal funds for the university.

For most Americans, it’s hard to get worked up about the relatively few numbers of trans athletes when your kid needs urgent medical care that you don’t have access to or you can’t afford groceries because your food stamps were cut off. The trans issues are low hanging fruit that Trump hopes will keep MAGA types satisfied – and keep them posting transphobic crap on social media.

But trans students aren’t going away, just as trans adults continue living their lives despite the risks and exhaustion that are now part of their reality. As EQCA’s Hoang noted, “Transgender youth belong in our schools, on our teams, and in our communities – without apology and without exception.”

Hoang also pointed out that the Golden State has “long led the nation in protecting LGBTQ+ students, and we will not stand by and allow the Department of Education to roll back those long-standing protections based on hate and misinformation.”

And that’s the bottom line – it’s the misinformation and lies spewing from Trump and his sycophants that are causing the harm, not trans athletes.