Donald Trump released yet another deranged statement on Tuesday, demanding that a transgender high school student be barred from participating in the California state track and field championships, which are scheduled to be held this weekend in Clovis, Calif. The inane thoughts that make their way from Trump’s obviously diminished mind onto his Playskool social media platform should not demand the attention of any right-thinking Americans, and yet in this case the California Interscholastic Federation (CIF) snapped to attention, rewriting its qualification rules in an attempt to appease those behind what’s become a national hate campaign directed at a 16-year-old high school student.
The student Trump was referring to in his post is named AB Hernandez. She is set to compete in the high jump, triple jump, and long jump at the state championships, and she has spent the past few months being harassed by a local group of bigots. This group is led by Sonja Shaw and Jessica Tapia, both members of the Save Girls Sports association. Shaw is currently running for California superintendent of public instruction, and Tapia was recently fired from her teaching position at Hernandez’s high school for refusing to respect trans and nonbinary students’ pronouns. At a qualification meet earlier this month, Tapia and Shaw led a group that spent hours heckling and harassing Hernandez as she competed.
Cerise Castle of Capital & Main has done a fantastic job covering this story, which has all the familiar beats: Hernandez has been on the track team for three years and never drew any attention until now; she finished first in triple jump, eighth in high jump, and third in long jump at the qualification meet; she has shown nothing but grace and maturity in the face of intense bigotry. “There’s nothing I can do about people’s actions, just focus on my own,” Hernandez told Castle. “I’m still a child, you’re an adult, and for you to act like a child shows how you are as a person.”
Shortly after Trump targeted Hernandez with his statement, the CIF announced that it was changing the rules to allow “biological girls” who failed to qualify for events in the state championship the opportunity to compete in those events anyway. “Any biological female student-athlete who would have earned the next qualifying mark for one of their Section’s automatic qualifying entries in the CIF State meet, and did not achieve CIF State at-large mark in the finals at their Section meet was extended an opportunity to participate in the 2025 CIF Track and Field Championships,” the CIF said in a statement.
Hernandez will still be allowed to compete, which makes this rule change an awkward and misguided attempt at compromise that will only embolden people like Tapia and Shaw, who claim that Hernandez’s presence in the competition somehow infringes on the rights of her cisgender competitors. The CIF has essentially made it official policy that any student (or more likely any student’s parent) who feels aggrieved about not qualifying can pin their personal failure on Hernandez and show up to compete anyway.
Here we are once again confronted by a central truth about the people who lead these anti-trans campaigns in sports, which is that although they are first and foremost hateful bigots, they are also huge fucking losers. Sports serves many valuable purposes: Creating a place where someone like Hernandez can find community, camaraderie, and comfort in her body is a big one, but so is teaching kids and young adults how to deal with failure. The freaks who make it their mission to antagonize Hernandez and other trans athletes always claim to be acting out of a duty to fairness. Anyone who has ever played or seriously engaged with sports knows, however, that “fairness” is often the first word out of the mouth of a loser. There is always, always something “unfair” for the loser to latch onto and turn into an excuse. Walk around any youth sports competition and you’ll hear plenty of them: That team has a kid who is too big and strong; the rich kids from one county over have access to better equipment; my kid would have won if he hadn’t rolled his ankle last week.
Sports will always, eventually, take something from you, and then it will leave enough space for you to convince yourself that your loss was unjust. What you get out of the experience often comes down to what you do with the impulse to fill that space. Years of cultural conditioning has taught athletes that it is best to ignore that impulse, to accept failure on its own terms and derive whatever lessons you can from it. But now we are faced with a growing chorus of hateful losers who want to reverse all of that conditioning, and in the process turn sports into something small and stupid. The lesson these people want to give to their children is that if circumstance places their athletic failure near the success of someone who belongs to a specifically marginalized group, they are free to huff and puff and stomp their feet until the President of the United States himself intervenes to validate their tantrum. The quicker these people get shoved into a locker, the better.