In March of this year, Gavin Newsom avowed on his podcast that it was “deeply unfair” for transgender girls to compete in girls’ sports. When asked by the conservative activist Charlie Kirk whether Newsom supported trans women in women’s sports, the California Governor said: “I think it’s an issue of fairness. I completely agree with you on that […] it’s deeply unfair. We’ve got to own that. We’ve got to acknowledge it.”

Now, Newsom has the opportunity to depict what fairness might look like. Yesterday a high school junior and trans girl named AB Hernandez finished first in the triple and high jump, and second in the long jump, at the California State Track & Field Championships.

Unlike in many sports across the country where biological men are competing against women, from Ultimate Frisbee to cycling, this meet allowed the females who came in second to Hernandez — Kira Grant Hatcher, Lelani Laruelle, Jillene Wetteland and Brooke White — to crowd onto the podium with Hernandez. This compromise was devised by the meet’s organisers, in hopes of deterring President Donald Trump from cutting the state’s federal funding if Hernandez competed.

Newsom hasn’t yet weighed in on the case, but he could and should. He has the opportunity to lead the way toward a better policy than the strange spectre of biological girls and trans girls sharing a platform, in part because Democrats have shirked their own responsibility to do so, leaving a vacuum for Newsom to fill. Even those Democrats who previously expressed concern about males competing against females, like Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton, couldn’t muster the courage to support the GOP-crafted “Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act”, which would have prohibited “school athletic programs from allowing individuals whose biological sex at birth was male to participate in programs that are for women or girls”. Some have tried to wriggle out of taking a hard stance, insisting that athletic organisations decide what to do, but in many cases, those organisations continue to favour “trans inclusivity” over fairness to girls and women, and over biological reality.

Perhaps one reason for Democrats’ hesitancy is that these completely reasonable ideas about sex and gender have been labeled “Right-coded.” Asserting the reality of biological sex aligns everyday Americans with Trump, whose first executive order in his second term noted: “The erasure of sex in language and policy has a corrosive impact not just on women but on the validity of the entire American system.”

When Newsom upheld the importance of sex-segregated sports on his podcast, some progressives and liberals reported “shock” at his mild-mannered assertion, seeing any pushback or questioning of “trans-inclusivity” not only as heresy, but hatred.

Politicians have to be strong enough in their convictions to shrug off those assertions, and stand up not only for what’s fair, but what’s true. Sex is binary and, in humans, dimorphic. Despite the existence of rare intersex conditions, there are only two reproductive categories, male and female, and they are biologically different.

This is not a fringe position. By some accounts, nearly 80% of Americans, and 67% of Democrats, are in favour of what would be termed by the trans lobby as “gender-critical” policies. Only the most narrow-minded people want to see transgender girls and women — that is, males who identify as female — discriminated against in housing or employment, as the Supreme Court’s Bostock case rendered illegal.

But most also understand that sex is real and immutable, no matter how someone identifies, and no matter how they alter their bodies. They may want all Americans to be able to live with dignity, but not see dividing sports and spaces based on the reality of sex as a form of discrimination. We can have compassion for trans girls, and respect their right to look and identify as they wish, without rewriting reality to accommodate them.

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Lisa Selin Davis is the author of Tomboy. She writes at Broadview on Substack.

LisaSelinDavis

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