The US Department of Justice is threatening the state of California with heavy fines days after a trans high jumper won two high-school track-and-field state championship titles.
AB Hernandez, a 16-year-old junior at Jurupa Valley High School, about 50 miles from Los Angeles, has become the focus of conservative anger and political threats in recent weeks. Now, she has won the gold medal in the girls’ high jump and triple jump, as well as silver in the long jump.
Her participation led the California Interscholastic Federation (CIF), which governs high school sports in The Golden State, to announce a “pilot entry process”, allowing “any biological female” student athlete who “would have” qualified for the finals – had Hernandez not beat them – to compete in the championships. This resulted in the runner-up in the triple jump also being awarded a gold medal, and two others, who cleared the same height as Hernandez in the high jump, being declared joint-winners.
The policy change came after direct attacks from president Donald Trump, who described Hernandez’s participation as “not fair and totally demeaning to women and girls”.
Trump threatened to hold back “large-scale” funding from Californian schools if the state refused to comply with his executive order that set out to ban trans women from female sports.
The executive order, entitled Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports, aimed to bar trans women from competing in female sports and declared that federal funding would be pulled from educational institutions that did not designate sports based on “biological sex”.
The order proclaimed that the “policy of the United States [was] to oppose male competitive participation in women’s sports more broadly, as a matter of safety, fairness, dignity and truth”.
It also said that under Title IX, a landmark piece of civil rights legislation which protects people from sex-based discrimination, schools and other educational institutions which received federal funds “cannot deny women an equal opportunity to participate in sports”.
In a letter to Californian public-school districts and the CIF, on Monday (2 June), the Department of Justice’s assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division, Harmeet Dhillon, claimed trans inclusion policies were unconstitutional.
“The Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex,” she wrote. “Knowingly depriving female students of athletic opportunities and benefits on the basis of their sex would constitute unconstitutional sex discrimination under the Equal Protection Clause.
“Scientific evidence shows that upsetting the historical status quo and forcing girls to compete against males would deprive them of athletic opportunities and benefits because of their sex.
“Therefore, you cannot implement a policy allowing males to compete alongside girls, because such a policy would deprive girls of athletic opportunities and benefits based solely on their biological sex, in violation of the Equal Protection Clause.”
Dhillon demanded schools and the CIF to “certify in writing” that they would comply.
Two anti-trans bills, which sought keep transgender athletes out of sports, were recently blocked by Californian state legislators, preventing the CIF banning trans girls from participating in the teams that align with their gender identity.
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