Governor Gavin Newsom's Big Idea About Female Sports
What If We Were Fair to Female Athletes and Also Kind to All?
Hi friends and welcome newcomers! Delighted to be gathered here together.
Athletes who identify as trans are not the problem. They can still play sports – in the proper sex, weight, and age categories, like everyone else.
Last week, California Governor Gavin Newsom emerged from the fallout shelter where Democratic officials have been huddling since the national election.
“It’s deeply unfair” to allow males to compete in women’s sports, he announced.
This fact has been obvious since at least 600 BC, when women competed in the Heraean Games. But basic facts have been obscured by the recent campaign to grant males access to women’s sports and locker rooms.
Newsom was a college baseball player. Athletes understand on a visceral level that male athletes are bigger, stronger, and faster than female athletes. It’s a fact you can’t miss on any ballfield.
Easy to Call Out the Unfairness
Newsom was talking to Charlie Kirk on "This Is Gavin Newsom,” a new podcast. “I completely agree with you on that. So that’s easy to call out. The unfairness of that.”
Wait: If it were easy, Newsom, a potential 2028 presidential contender, would have called it out long ago, before five Division I women’s volleyball teams forfeited games against San Jose State University to protest a male player on San Jose’s female roster last season, leading to two lawsuits. (See my columns here and here.)
Note: We need to speak clearly. CNN recently used the phrases “female transgender athletes, transgender girls, and transgender women” in a single article. No wonder 21 percent of the American public still believes “female transgender athletes” should be allowed to play female sports. Do they understand who “female transgender athletes” are?
The controversy in women’s sports is not about gender identity, though it feels like that to some people. From the female point of view, the problem is males. Hence I use the word male.1
Newsom should have called out the unfairness before the recent Ontario Relays, where AB Hernandez, a Jurupa Valley High School trans-identified male track athlete, finished first in the girls’ triple jump by a whopping eight feet.
The Collateral Damage of Letting One Boy Play
Hernandez, a junior, has won first place fifty times in girls’ high jump, long jump, and triple jump events over the past two years. Fifty times! He placed second in another seventeen and third in four. That’s 71 medals. Seventy-one multiplied by fifteen – the average number of kids in each of those events – equals 1,065: the number of times girls were bumped off their own podium, or bumped down.
This is the collateral damage of letting one boy compete against girls based on gender identity. Female athletes lost chances to win, placed lower, felt demoralized, felt cheated, and were cheated more than one thousand times – not even counting all the events missed by the girl who was left off the team to make room for the boy. And not counting the damage done to the other kids, who wonder: Why are adults forcing girls to compete against boys?
Next time you hear, “But there aren’t that many,” consider the collateral damage.
Newsom also should have called out the unfairness before Republicans claimed the higher ground on women’s rights, which might have cost Democrats the presidency.
“We’re getting crushed on [women’s rights]” Newsom admitted in the podcast. “Crushed."
Newsom should have called out the unfairness before February, when the federal government opened a Title IX investigation into the California Interscholastic Federation (CIF), which governs the state’s school sports. CIF had announced that it would follow California law, which allows students to play sports according to gender identity, rather than federal law, which does not. This is illegal, as activist Bev Talbott had eloquently explained to CIF in January.
Attorney General Pam Bondi’s Title IX-investigation letter to CIF closes with, “Federal law requires giving girls an equal opportunity to participate in sports and athletic events by ensuring that girls need to compete only with other girls, not boys.”
Strange times. Republicans, who have repeatedly tried to weaken Title IX, are now enforcing it. So far, these late-blooming feminists do not seem interested in the 53-year-old problem of unequal distribution of sports funds and opportunities (women athletes still receive $1 billion less each year!), which also violates Title IX, but they must be given credit for tackling this new problem, no matter how cynical many of us may feel about their motivations and their inconsistencies regarding other women’s rights.
Yet for saying “It’s deeply unfair,” Newsom is now getting crushed anew from all sides.
From gymnastic champion
: “Newsom didn’t say that he’d do anything about the issue!” Sey is the founder of XX-XY Athletics, an athletic brand “here to protect women’s sports and spaces” and best known for their provocative videos challenging Nike to “just do it,” too.Let’s hope decisive action comes next.
From writer Gabriel Haaland: “Why is Newsom choosing this moment in history to align himself with MAGA, a group who is trying to ‘erase’ a tiny group of people who are marginalized, dehumanized, harassed, and killed on a daily basis?”
But is it girls’ responsibility to shield boys from political crosshairs by sacrificing their own athletic dreams?
Helen Joyce, author of Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality, notes that gender-distressed boys have been promised something parents can’t deliver “without involving everyone else in a pretense. If you tell your child that yes, he ‘really is a girl’ … you require all the rest of us to play along, not just now but always.”
Girls and their advocates did not sign off on this deal. Parents (and, I’ll add, teachers, the media, doctors, online communities, and society at large) made a promise they can’t keep. I pity the kids sprinting headlong into this reality.
Humility and Grace
“There’s also the issue of humility and grace,” continued Newsom. “These poor people are more likely to commit suicide, have anxiety and depression. The way people talk down to vulnerable communities is an issue that I have a hard time with. Both things I can hold in my hand. How can we address this issue with the kind of decency that I think is inherent in you but not always expressed?”
Sey didn’t like that, either. “He pivoted straight to emotional blackmail, essentially saying well, we’ve got to just accept it and give the guys what they want even though it is unfair for girls, otherwise they might kill themselves.” This man … simply sees which way the political winds are blowing.”
True, it’s not girls’ responsibility to shield boys from mental health challenges, either.
But Newsom is saying: Could we make fair decisions while also being respectful? Could we “hold both things”?
Female sports for female athletes. Respect for all.
This is what my group, The Women’s Sports Policy Working Group, has been championing for years: Female sports for female athletes. Respect for all.
If we don’t restrict the female category to females, “You would lose women’s sport. It’s as simple as that,” said World Athletics President and Olympic champion Seb Coe recently.
But we can do this without vilifying people who identify as transgender.
“True moderation must confront uncomfortable truths,” writes Corinna Cohn, a writer and “ambivalent transsexual.” “Women’s spaces and sports must remain protected, and ideological demands must not override basic rights and biological realities.”
While considering Newsom’s newfound support for female athletes – which seems to be inspiring similar awakenings among other leading Democrats, including Corey Booker and Tammy Baldwin – please don’t miss both parts of this message:
Fairness + Decency.
We can hold both things.
Thoughts? I’m always curious.
See also the archive of #SaveWomensSports stories.
A trans friend who was kind enough to review this story tells me that the word male is painful to people who identify as transwomen. I’m sorry to hear that, and it’s not my intent.
But with males spiking volleyballs at our heads and grinning atop our podiums, we need to talk biology. Brief review: Humans are mammals. Mammals only have two sexes and cannot change from one to the other. Everyone is male — designed to produce sperm — or female — designed to produce eggs, gestate, give birth, and nurse. This remains true regardless of whether the reproductive elements are used, removed, or function properly.
Males are on average bigger, faster, and stronger, with larger hands, feet, heads, hearts, and lung capacity. This matters in sports.
Genders, by contrast, are cultural inventions. They can be deeply felt, like religions, but genders do not affect athletic performance. Even testosterone suppression does not eliminate male performance advantage. And just 31 percent of trans-identified people have used hormone treatments or puberty-blocking hormones.
See also Martina Navratilova’s Guest Column for why we must use the word male.
When we first stood outside of a volleyball game at a nearby high school to protest the male on the girls' team, we had a conversation with a parent from that team who told us that the boy believed he was a girl. That's when we realized that his entire community was going along with the lie and we were possibly the first adults to tell these boys the truth. That became part of the reason we protested. To be the one to tell these athletes the truth that no he is not a girl.
When I ask myself why the word male is painful to males who 'identify' as women, the first answer that comes into my head is that it hurts because they know it is true. It hurts because it forces them to confront their self-deception. It hurts because it shows that not everyone is prepared to enter into their self-deception and reinforce it. It's a human thing. When we are forced to face how foolish or hubristic we are, it hurts. Always.