Gavin Newsom Wants Your Daughters To Lose

This Saturday, AB Hernandez will compete at the California Interscholastic Federation (CIF) state preliminaries, one more win away from the state finals. The girls lining up beside him have trained for years for this moment. Some of them have been training their whole lives. And the thing that strikes me is that I know exactly what it feels like to watch that work become irrelevant because an institution decided it did not matter.

Hernandez is fresh from a clean sweep in all three jumping events at the CIF Southern Section finals, winning the high jump, long jump, and triple jump against the top girls in Southern California. Photos of the medal ceremony went viral, and you can see why. The CIF implemented a “pilot program” that awarded any female athlete who finished behind Hernandez a one-spot promotion, meaning some girls shared the podium’s top spot with him; two first-place plaques were awarded for one first-place finish. California’s solution to the male athletic advantage is not to address the advantage. It is to redefine the word “winner.”

Here is what that pilot program cannot fix. It cannot give back to the girls who finished 2nd through 4th their actual placement. It cannot give the girl who would have placed first a solo podium moment she earned. It cannot undo the fact that Hernandez, a high school student competing in a California sectional meet, posted results that would have medaled in two events at the 1960 OLYMPICS. His long jump of 20’4.75″ converts to 6.22 meters. The bronze medal at Rome that year went to a woman who jumped 6.21. His high jump of 1.78 meters places him above the mark that earned a silver medal among the best female athletes on the planet. A kid competing at a California high school track meet is clearing marks that would have put him on an Olympic podium against some of the greatest women in the history of the sport. These are not girls’ high school results. They are elite women’s Olympic results, being posted against teenagers in a sectional final. No participation trophy reshuffles that math.

It is time to be honest about what happened to my teammates and me on the University of Pennsylvania swim team, and what is happening now to girls in California who have no more power to change it than we did. We were told that men in women’s sports was non-negotiable. These girls are being told the same thing, just with nicer packaging. A co-championship ribbon is still a consolation prize. Calling it “equity” does not change what it is.

Governor Gavin Newsom’s office put out a statement last week calling the outcry from distressed parents a “cynical attempt to weaponize this debate as an excuse to vilify individual kids.” The people holding “Save Girls’ Sports” signs at that meet are not there because they want to vilify anyone. They are there because their daughters trained through 5 a.m. practices, sacrificed weekends, and poured years into a shot at a podium that is now being handed to someone with a Y chromosome. That is not vilification. That is a mother at a track meet, watching her daughter lose something real, and being told by the governor of California that the problem is her attitude. California passed Assembly Bill 1266 in 2013 and has had over a decade to watch exactly what happens when male athletes compete in female divisions. The results are not ambiguous.

The CIF preliminaries are this Saturday. If Hernandez advances, the state finals begin May 29 in Clovis. Every girl in those jumping events has a name, a personal record, and a coach who believed in her. None of them chose to compete in this situation. None of them has a governor going to bat for them. What they have is a “pilot program” and a shared podium, and the quiet, maddening knowledge that the institution responsible for protecting their competitive opportunities decided that was good enough.

It is not good enough. It was not good enough for my competitors and me when we were forced to compete alongside an elite biological male, and it is not good enough in California. They just keep finding new girls to lie to.

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Paula Scanlan is a senior fellow at American Principles Project and a former member of the UPenn women’s swim team.