California Democrats keep choosing this crazy position — and it’s a guaranteed loser

Another season, another dominant performance by AB Hernandez of Jurupa Valley in girls’ track and field.

Hernandez, a senior, romped to victory at the CIF Southern Section Division 3 track and field preliminaries at Yorba Linda High School on Saturday, winning the long jump by more than a foot.

Then Hernandez won the triple jump by more than three feet, and tied for first in the high jump.

Three events, three top spots, one afternoon.

One problem: Hernandez is biologically male.

The girls who trained for years to compete watched their season’s biggest day rewritten in real time. Outside the venue, a “Save Girls’ Sports” rally held signs. Inside, the scoreboard held the proof.

This is the second consecutive year Hernandez has dominated girls’ postseason track in California. Last spring at Clovis, the transgender athlete took home gold in the high jump and triple jump, and silver in the long jump.

The state’s response was to let more girls onto the podium so the photos would look less embarrassing. But a bigger podium doesn’t change who is standing on the top step.

Gavin Newsom went on the late Charlie Kirk’s podcast in March 2025 and called boys competing in girls’ sports “deeply unfair.” Then he flew home to Sacramento and did nothing.

The 2013 law he hides behind is a state statute. He is the governor of the state. A man who can sign an executive order on plastic straws can find a way to protect a 16-year-old girl’s long jump record.

What makes this story impossible to dismiss as a right-wing crusade is the fact that there is criticism across the political spectrum. Martina Navratilova, the greatest women’s tennis player of the 20th century and a lifelong Democrat, recently noted that what’s happening in California is “cheating, which at the moment the rules allow. Thanks for nothing, Gavin Newsom.”

Nancy Hogshead, three-time Olympic gold medalist, civil rights attorney, and another lifelong Democrat, said the governor “seems to exclude girls from his own standard of fairness, dignity and respect.” Kaillie Humphries, the most decorated women’s bobsledder in Olympic history and a California taxpayer, called the policy “the left’s thinly veiled misogyny.”

These women built modern women’s sports while Newsom’s snarky communications staff was still learning to read.

When they say a male athlete winning girls’ state titles is a problem, the appropriate response is to listen. The actual response from the governor’s office was a press release full of jargon about inclusion and belonging, apparently composed by someone who has never set foot on a track.

The public is way ahead of the press shop. Sixty-five percent of Californians, in deep-blue California, say transgender athletes should compete on teams matching their sex at birth.

That includes Democrats. That includes independents. That includes the parents who drive their daughters to dawn practices and the coaches who watch those daughters get edged off the medal stand by someone built from a different blueprint.

The people have spoken. The governor has decided that the people are wrong.

So have the Democrats angling to replace him. At the most recent gubernatorial debate, every Demcorat candidate on stage said they would keep the current policy.

The party that markets itself as the protector of women has looked at California’s daughters, looked at the polling, looked at the medal stands, and concluded that the scholarships and recruitment opportunities of teenage girls are an acceptable sacrifice to appease the activist class on Bluesky.

The trans-sports answer wasn’t even the wildest thing the Democrats committed to in the debate. Most of the field raised their hands in favor of spending billions more to complete a high-speed rail line between Bakersfield and Merced, Several pledged to prosecute ICE agents. And they also promised to reopen Medi-Cal to illegal immigrants again, a program Newsom himself was forced to freeze last year because it was hemorrhaging billions.

The party that cannot balance its own state budget wants to expand the line item that broke it. The party that lectures the country on the rule of law wants to prosecute federal agents for enforcing it. And the party of women’s rights cannot bring itself to keep biological males out of girls’ sports.

Gavin Newsom’s office keeps deploying “fairness, dignity, and respect” as if the phrase has magical properties, as if saying it three times counts as strong leadership. It does not. 

The girls who came home from Yorba Linda on Saturday in tears know it. Their parents know it. Martina Navratilova knows it. Two-thirds of California voters know it.

The only people pretending otherwise are the ones whose politics depend on the pretense.

John Mac Ghlionn is a researcher and essayist.

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