Yes, Girls Care When Boys Take Their Trophies

“What if I told you that athletes don’t seem too worried about trans people?”

That’s the argument USA Today columnist Sara Pequeño made last week in a piece critiquing backlash to AB Hernandez, a boy who won two state titles at the California girls track and field championship on May 31.

Pequeño claims there are too few boys competing in girls sports to justify getting worked up about it. And even if there were, she suggests, female athletes wouldn’t care.

“While adults are up in arms about a single teenage girl, the athletes competing against her don’t seem to mind,” the columnist writes. “There isn’t even a huge number of athletes complaining about having to compete against their transgender counterparts.”

Um, what?

I’ve read my fair share of bizarre takes on sex and gender, but Pequeño is just … wrong. An absurd number of boys are participating in girls sports — and girls absolutely care about it.

Pequeño cites only two pieces of evidence proving “there are very few trans women and girls actually playing sports.” The first is a statement from NCAA president Charlie Baker claiming fewer than 10 athletes out of 500,000 “publicly identify” as transgender.

But transgender-identified men don’t always identify themselves, do they? Blaire Fleming played two full seasons on San Jose State University’s (SJSU) women’s volleyball team before his teammates, some of whom he had shared rooms with, learned his sex.

Fleming’s presence impacted not only SJSU volleyball players, but women across the NCAA’s Division I Mountain West conference. Five teams forfeited important games against SJSU to protest Fleming’s participation. Boise State forfeited twice.

For grade school sports, Pequeño points to outdated data from Save Women’s Sports, which she calls an “anti-trans advocacy group.”

“Save Women’s Sports … could only identify five trans students competing on girls teams from kindergarten through grade 12 in 2023,” the columnist crows.

That survey is no longer applicable. Between five and 10 transgender-identified boys are competing on girls K-12 teams in Washington state alone, the state superintendent of schools told a local news outlet earlier this year.

Pequeño would argue the numbers don’t matter, because girls don’t seem to care when boys compete in their sports. After all, California track and field athletes smiled on the podium with Hernandez, she argues. Brooke White, the female athlete who placed second in California for long jump, even posed for a picture with the male athlete.

Of course she did! Girls and women who call out male competitors often face severe social, athletic and even physical consequences.

When Stephanie Turner took a knee in April rather than compete against a man, USA Fencing officials disqualified her from the meet and sentenced her to a year probation.

When five middle schoolers refused to compete against a male track and field athlete last year, West Virginia school officials banned them from a future competition. The same boy took third in discus and eighth in shotput at this year’s West Virginia high school track and field championships.

When Alexa Anderson and Reece Eckard refused to share the podium with a boy at the Oregon track and field championships last month, officials excluded them from pictures. Anderson later received hate mail.

Slusser of SJSU received death threats for opposing Fleming’s presence on the team, according to a lawsuit against the NCAA. Slusser also alleges Fleming physically targeted her during games. A troubling incident caught on camera appears to show Fleming set the ball to a player on the opposing team, who spiked it at Slusser.

After the play, the opponent blew a kiss at Fleming and mouthed, “Thank you.”

Female athletes forced to change in front of male competitors face even stronger disincentives to publicly support sex-segregated sports.

Pequeño not only omits women’s concerns about sharing private spaces with men but takes pains to avoid legitimizing them.

In 2022, Lia Thomas, a male formerly known as Will, began swimming for the University of Pennsylvania’s women’s team. The NCAA’s clear favoritism for Thomas inspired Riley Gaines, a decorated NCAA swimmer who competed against him, to publicly oppose men in women’s sports.

To discredit Gaines, and to support her contention that women don’t care about men’s participation in women’s sports, Pequeño points to Olympian and Stanford swimmer Brooke Forde, who publicly stated she did not mind competing against Thomas in 2022.

“You might remember how Riley Gaines, one of the women who competed against Thomas, made an entire career out of complaining about her fellow competitor, even though the two women tied for fifth place at the 2022 NCAA Division I Women’s Swimming and Diving Championships,” Pequeño snipes.

“I think Forde’s opinion on the matter deserved, and failed to receive, equal attention.”

I think Pequeño failed to pay equal attention to more recent testimony from Paula Scanlon and other UPenn swimmers.

Scanlon and her teammates shared a locker room with Thomas every day. When she, a survivor of sexual assault, and others expressed discomfort changing in front of him, the University offered them therapy to “become more comfortable sharing previously sex-segregated spaces with members of the opposite sex.”

Either way, Thomas’ presence was non-negotiable. The University intimated Scanlon would regret going to the media.

Scanlon told Independent Women’s Forum:

Dozens of women, including Gaines, have voiced stories like Scanlon’s. Last week, high school swimmer Lilian Hammond described unknowingly changing in front of a male.

“It wasn’t until the last meet that I realized, ‘Oh, that is a trans person,’ and by that point it was too late,” Hammond told Fox. She continued:

At the last two school board meetings in California’s Lucia Mar Unified School District, athletes have complained about sharing locker rooms with men. One woman now changes in her car. The other recounted:

Women and girls have been reduced to begging for sex-segregated locker rooms. When they do, hundreds of hecklers like Pequeño call them “transphobic.” It doesn’t take a wizard to figure out why women might choose to hug AB Hernandez rather than make him, or his rabid supporters, mad.

Pequeño’s omissions, errors and outdated data suggest one of two things — either she didn’t do her research, or she’s not interested in hearing objections to boys’ participation in girls sports.

In either case, the columnist is entirely unqualified, and arguably negligent, to conclude women and girls “don’t seem too worried” about competing against men.

Additional Articles and Resources

Girls Shouldn’t Apologize for Protesting Boys in Girls Sports

Female Athletes Challenge Minnesota Policy Forcing Them to Compete Against Males

Education Department Finds UPenn Violated Title IX & Women’s Rights

Minnesota Lawsuit Advances Shockingly Poor Attack on Title IX

Attorney General Pam Bondi Sues Maine for Title IX Violations

USA Fencing Explicitly Prioritizes Men’s Feelings over Women’s Safety and Athletic Achievement

ADF Files Civil Rights Complaints to protect Female Athletes, Parents

Olympic Track and Field protects Women. Why Won’t Other Sports Do the Same?

Girls Sports Coaches are Incentivize to Recruit Men — Parents Shouldn’t Let Them

Maine Schools Violated Title IX, Must Apologize, Feds Say

Olympic Women’s Boxing Champ is Officially a Man

Shoving Girls of the Podium: More Male Athletes Participating in Girls Sports

Four Women’s Volleyball Teams Forfeit—Won’t Play Team with a Man