Boys in Girls’ Sports: California’s Track Farce Exposed

Outside Yorba Linda High School this past Saturday, the California Interscholastic Federation’s Southern Section Division 3 preliminaries offered a study in institutional failure. Parents gripped signs. Athletes stretched in silence. A “Save Girls’ Sports” rally, organized by former NCAA women’s soccer player Sophia Lorey, drew a crowd that the governor’s press office would rather not acknowledge. Inside the venue, AB Hernandez—a biological male from Jurupa Valley High School—won the girls’ long jump at 20 feet, 4¼ inches, dominated the triple jump at 42 feet, 4 inches, and tied for first in the high jump. Biological girls who trained for years through four-hour practices and predawn conditioning watched those results on the scoreboard.

I coached high school track and field for years—boys and girls both. The performance gap is not imaginary. It is structural, measurable, and consistent. What happened at Yorba Linda is not inclusion. It is displacement, dressed up in progressive language and enforced by a state government that has confused compassion with capitulation.

California’s enabling statute, AB 1266, signed by Governor Jerry Brown in 2013, requires public schools to allow students to participate in sports programs “consistent with their gender identity.” Twelve years later, the policy’s human costs are legible on every scoreboard. The Jurupa Unified School District has stated it will continue following state law regardless of federal pressure. Sacramento has chosen ideology over its own daughters.

The Biology Is Not in Dispute

Males carry chromosomally programmed advantages that emerge at puberty and do not dissolve with hormone suppression. Testosterone levels in males run 15 to 30 times higher than in females. Larger hearts, greater lung capacity, higher fast-twitch muscle mass, and denser bone structure follow from that hormonal architecture. Peer-reviewed research published in ‘Current Sports Medicine Reports’ documents that male-to-female transgender athletes retain meaningful performance advantages even after two or more years of hormone therapy. The measured gap in speed and power events runs from 10% to 30%. That is not a margin coaches coach around. That is a different sport.

Even the International Olympic Committee, not previously known for ideological courage, drew a hard line. In March 2026, the IOC announced that women’s events at LA28 and every future Games would be restricted to biological females, with eligibility determined by a one-time SRY gene screen. The gene triggers male physical development; athletes who test negative qualify for the female category permanently. The IOC can read the data. Sacramento, apparently, cannot.

Last Year’s State Meet Showed the Stakes

If the Yorba Linda prelims feel abstract, consider what happened last year at the 2025 CIF State Track and Field Championships in Clovis. Hernandez won state titles in the girls’ high jump and triple jump, and finished second in the long jump. CIF officials scrambled mid-week to award co-medals to biological female athletes in each event Hernandez entered, an improvised policy patch that solved nothing. Scholarships, recruiting timelines, and the defining moments of a high school athletic career are not amenable to co-winner press releases. Biological girls lost. The CIF just chose not to say so.

The human cost is not hypothetical. Podium spots, athletic scholarships, and state titles are finite. A 2025 New York Times–Ipsos survey found that 79% of Americans support restricting transgender athletes from women’s sports. This is not a fringe position. The fringe is the policy.

The Legal and Political Landscape Has Moved

Federal action is no longer rhetorical. President Trump signed Executive Order 14201 in February 2025, directing agencies to enforce Title IX as originally written, sex means biological sex, and threatening to rescind federal funding from non-compliant institutions. The Department of Justice filed a Title IX investigation against the California Interscholastic Federation. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon stated the federal position plainly: “Title IX exists to protect women and girls in education. It is perverse to allow males to compete against girls, invade their private spaces, and take their trophies.”

The U.S. Supreme Court granted certiorari last July to hear challenges to transgender sports bans in Idaho and West Virginia. Twenty-seven states have already enacted laws defining sports categories by biological sex at birth. None of them has watched girls’ athletics collapse. Female participation in those states has not declined. What has declined is the practice of asking girls to absorb unfairness as a form of tolerance.

Compassion Is Not a One-Way Lever

Acknowledging that transgender youth face real social pressures does not require dismantling competitive fairness for the far larger population of girls those protections were designed for. Nobody is proposing to end transgender students’ access to education, extracurriculars, or life. The question is narrower: should biological males compete in biological females’ athletic categories? The data says no. The courts are moving toward no. Most of the country already answered no.

My son graduated from West Point and flies helicopters. My brother served 20 years as a Green Beret. Both spent careers in institutions where standards exist because outcomes matter, and where the absence of honest standards has consequences. A girl who trains for years to compete in a state championship does not need the winning margin explained away in a statement from the governor’s communications director. She needs a level playing field.

Title IX, passed in 1972, was written because biological females were being systematically pushed aside by biological males in educational programs and athletics. Rewriting that protection in the name of inclusion is not progress. It is the opposite. The law has not changed. The courage to enforce it is what’s missing.

The Path Forward

Every state legislature that has not yet acted should define sports categories by biological sex. Congress should codify Title IX as written. Federal agencies should withhold funding from non-compliant districts; the mechanism already exists. Parents must show up: at school board meetings, at meets, and at the ballot box. The Yorba Linda rally proved that organized voices move institutions. Silence does not.

Biology did not become a political opinion on its own. Policy made it one. The correction is neither complex nor unprecedented: define categories honestly, enforce them consistently, and stop asking girls to carry the ideological weight of adults who will not be on the podium. The next California track meet should feature girls racing girls, jumping against girls, and winning on merit alone. No co-medals. No mid-week rule patches. Just the fair competition that Title IX was actually written to guarantee.