transgender

Feds Pressure California After Boy Wins in Girls Track and Field Championship

California played a high stakes game of chicken with the federal government over Title IX enforcement last week, culminating in a boy winning two girls state track and field titles on Saturday.

Now, California officials’ commitment to “inclusivity” could cost the state billions in federal funding.

California planted itself on the Department of Education’s (DOE) radar in February after the California Interscholastic Federation (CIF) publicly vowed to defy “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports” — an executive order prohibiting boys from playing girls sports in programs that receive federal funding.

President Trump signed the order on February 6. One day later, CIF told Fox it would follow California Education Code Section 221.5(f), which reads:

A pupil shall be permitted to participate in sex-segregated school programs and activities, including athletic teams and competitions, and use facilities consistent with his or her gender identity, irrespective of the gender listed on the pupil’s records.

The Department of Education launched an investigation into CIF in February for its statements. After months with no news, the conflict drifted out of public focus.

It exploded back into the media in mid-May, when AB Hernandez, a boy, began dominating girls high school track and field events in California ahead of the state championship.

As of May 13, Hernandez led the state in girls triple and long jump. In regional championships, he won the triple jump by “nearly seven feet,” according to Sports Illustrated, the long jump by more than three feet and the high jump by a foot.

Not surprisingly, Hernandez won state titles in the women’s high jump and triple jump at the championship on May 31, 2025. He took second place in the long jump.

Sophia Lorey is the outreach director at California Family Council, a Focus on the Family-allied family policy council. CIF officials escorted Lorey out of the state championships for passing out “Save Girls Sports” wristbands to fans.

“What I witnessed at the California State Track and Field Championships was not progress, it was the erasure of girls sports,” Lorey told the Daily Citizen of her experience.

“Watching two girls share one of the biggest moments of their athletic careers with a male competitor was a painful reminder of how far we’ve strayed from truth and fairness.”

But CIF didn’t just wreck female competitors’ athletic ambitions by allowing Hernandez to compete — it played fast and loose with the state’s federal education funding.

On May 27, just days before the competition, President Donald Trump weighed in on social media.

“California … continues to illegally allow men to play in women’s sports,” he wrote, citing Hernandez’s qualification for state finals.

The president continued:

This is not fair and totally demeaning to women and girls. Please be hereby advised that large scale funding will be held back, maybe permanently, if the executive order on this subject matter is not adhered to.

“This is a totally ridiculous situation!!!” he emphatically concluded.

CIF clearly thought the President meant some kind of business. It expeditiously issued a rule change bumping girls who competed against Hernandez to the place, or medal, they would have received in a race without boys. CIF also invited girls that had been bumped out of contention by Hernandez to participate in the championship.

But Hernandez still competed. He still beat his female peers. Rightful winners shared the podium with him at award ceremonies.

On May 28, the Department of Justice (DOJ) announced it would be joining DOE’s investigation against CIF for violating Title IX.

“My office has found reasonable cause to believe that CIF… is engaging in a pattern or practice of discrimination against female athletes,” Harmeet K. Dhillon, assistant attorney general for the DOJ’s Department of Civil Rights Investigations, wrote in a letter to the organization.

Dhillon cites CIF Bylaw 300.D, which reads:

All students should have the opportunity to participate in CIF activities in a manner that is consistent with their gender identity, irrespective of the gender listed on a student’s records.

“As a result of CIF’s policy,” she continues, “California’s top-ranked girls triple jumper, and second-ranked girls long jumper [AB Hernandez] is a boy.”

CIF wasn’t the only group Dhillon implicated. In the same letter, she announced her office would also investigate whether CIF, the California Department of Education, Jurupa Union School District (Hernandez’ district) and “any applicable state laws” had violated girls’ constitutional right to equal protection under the law

The Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution reads, in part:

No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States … nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of laws.

A press release from Dhillon’s office helps contextualize the DOJ’s Fourteenth Amendment investigation. In August 2013, then-Governor Jerry Brown signed Assembly Bill 1266, which created the California Education Code allowing students to participate in sports according to their “gender identity,” rather than their sex.

Dhillon’s probe indicates the DOJ is exploring whether to challenge AB 1266, and all its resulting codes and bylaws, in court as unconstitutional.

But that’s later down the line. Right now, California and the feds seem preoccupied with the state’s apparent violations of “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports.”

If guilty, the state’s federal education funding, which totaled $10 billion in FY 2024, could be on the line.

President Trump certainly seems to think so. On Monday, he promised “large-scale fines would be imposed [on California]” via Truth Social.

California State Superintendent of Public Instruction, Tony Thurmond, seems equally convinced financial consequences aren’t imminent.

“Let’s be clear: sending a letter does not change the law,” Thurmond told ABC7 News on Tuesday. “The DOJ’s letter to school districts does not announce any new federal law, and the state law on this issue has remained unchanged since 2013.”

In the meantime, advocates like Lorey and California Family Council will continue whipping up support for women and girls.

“This isn’t just about sports,” Lorey emphasized. “It’s about truth, safety and the future of female opportunity.”

“If we don’t stand up now, we risk losing what generations of women fought to earn.”

Additional Articles and Resources

Girls Shouldn’t Apologize for Protesting Boys in Girls Sports

Supreme Court Protects Maine Rep’s Right to Vote, Defend Girls Sports

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

Minnesota Lawsuit Advances Shocking Poor Attacks on Title IX

Attorney General Pam Bondi Sues Maine for Title IX Violations

Department of Education Launches Multiple Investigations Into Title IX Violations

Department of Justice Launches Title IX Task Force to Protect Women’s Sports

Maine Schools Violated Title IX, Must Apologize, Feds Say

On 50th Anniversary of Title IX, Groups Fight to Protect Women’s Sports

Poll Finds Majority of Americans Want Transgender Athletes to Play on Team of Birth Sex

Trump Signs Executive Order Protecting Women’s Sports and Spaces

‘Speak Out’ Rally Features Stories of Leaving Homosexuality and Transgenderism

Our allies at California Family Council (CFC) and the Changed Movement are hosting a symposium and rally, “Speak Out,” at the state Capitol in Sacramento on June 11-12.

The informative symposium features experts who will explain how LGBT ideology has gained such power, enough that it threatens free speech and religious freedom, while the rally showcases testimonies from individuals who left homosexuality and transgenderism to follow Christ – something the world says is impossible.

This false belief is so entrenched that cities and states actively oppose the freedom to leave LGBT identities and behaviors – and the California State Legislator has taken the lead in opposing First Amendment rights for those who wrestle with these deep issues.

Elizabeth Woning, one of the founders of Changed, is one of those who chose to follow Christ. Elizabeth Woning “came out” in her early twenties and attended seminary as an open lesbian. She was an activist, lobbying within her denomination for same sex marriage and ordination of LGBT-identified individuals.

Woning shares her story of leaving lesbianism at the Changed website and in the book, Changed: #OnceGay Stories, along with dozens of others (including this writer) who left homosexuality or sexual identity confusion.

“Speak Out” commemorates the seventh anniversary of CFC and Changed speaking out against California Assembly Bill 2943, “an effort by the state to ban resources  those leaving homosexuality and transgenderism,” said CFC. Hundreds gathered at the Capitol to oppose the measure, including individuals testifying about their journey out of homosexuality.

CFC, which supports life, family, religious freedom and free speech, further explained:

In 2018, the LGBTQ legislative caucus sponsored AB 2943, a bill so sweeping it threatened churches, counselors, authors, and even bookstores with legal action for offering any service, product, or program that supported helping someone wanting help to change their unwanted same-sex attraction or gender dysphoria, including help to change associated behaviors.

It was a direct assault on freedom of speech and religion, including the preaching of the gospel of salvation through repentance and faith in Jesus Christ.

The Changed Movement notes that our culture only gives one option for those wrestling with LGB or T issues – you must embrace this identity. The group lists these societal messages to strugglers:

  • If I have same sex attraction, there’s only one option for me.
  • I must be affirming of the LGBTQ lifestyle, but my desire to change is not tolerated.
  • If I don’t fit in with the other boys/girls, I must be trans.
  • I was told abuse and porn weren’t factors, but they were for me.

The organization states, “California should protect freedom of conscience for everyone,” adding:

Imagine if following your conscience or religion was restricted by the government simply because you have previously identified as LGBTQ. Today, freedoms have been taken away from many Christians who seek support and encouragement to follow their faith when it involves letting go of LGBTQ identities. 

Whether it’s restricting counseling from children who may have been sexually abused (like so many of us) or requiring schools to offer suicide helps that promote LGBTQ ideology, Californians who question their sexuality or gender are not truly free. In many states, like California, following your conscience comes with public pressure and intrusion of government policy when you question your sexual identity. 

Changed and CFC plan to meet with legislators in Sacramento to proclaim, “We exist!” and “California must remain free – for everyone – to follow their consciences.”

The organizations explain, “California legislators must step away from government-mandated sexuality and stop controlling people’s identities and personal beliefs.”

The “Speak Out” symposium, “California at Risk: The Truth About Gender Ideology,” begins on June 11 at 1:00 p.m. at the Sheraton Grand Hotel, Sacramento. Attendees can register here.

Prayer and the rally at the state Capitol’s West Steps in Sacramento begins at 8:00 a.m. The schedule for the event can be found here.

Focus on the Family encourages Californians to attend “Speak Out,” and all believers can pray for and support this growing movement.

Related Articles and Resources

Can Minors Receive Counseling Help for Unwanted Same-Sex Attraction or Sexual Identity Confusion? Federal Courts Split on Local Prohibitions.

Elizabeth Woning Left Lesbianism for a Relationship with Christ – She Wants Others to Have that Same Freedom

Freedom from Homosexuality – What’s the Controversy?

Is Therapy to Leave Homosexuality Damaging? New Review Says, ‘No Proof of Harm’

Just a Good Christian Boy

Supreme Court Agrees to Hear Case on Colorado’s Counseling Censorship Law

Transgender Resources

Understanding Homosexuality

Image from Changed Movement.

DOJ Targets Those Mutilating Children with ‘Transgender’ Drugs and Surgeries

The FBI is targeting medical professionals and institutions that mutilate children with experimental “transgender” interventions – drugs, hormones and surgeries – that leave children sterile, sick and permanently damaged.

The announcement came on Facebook and X:

The move by the FBI to protect children followed Attorney General Pam Bondi’s internal memorandum titled “Preventing the Mutilation of American Children“:

There is a radical ideological agenda being pushed throughout every aspect of American life – from TV programming and Hollywood film production to children’s books and elementary school classrooms – that teaches children to deny biological reality.

Gender ideology, masked as science, teaches that children should process adolescent stress and confusion as a case of mistaken identity and that the solution is not to root out and eliminate the underlying condition but to acquiesce in it permanently through life-altering chemical and surgical intervention.

Bondi rebuked the medical community, which should be rooted in evidence-based science and medicine, for not serving “as a bulwark against this sociological disease,” adding,

“Between 2019 and 2023, an estimated 14,000 children received “treatment” for gender dysphoria, with more than 5,700 subjected to life-altering surgeries.”

“The practitioners who provided this so-called ‘care’ profited while their patients were left permanently disfigured, scarred and sterilized.”

The memorandum spotlighted the influence of social media on detransitioner Chloe Cole, who was 11 years old when she “joined Instagram and was bombarded with ‘LGBT content and activism’”

As Daily Citizen previously reported, medical professionals chemically and surgically “transitioned” Cole when she was a young teenager, prescribing puberty blockers and testosterone when she was just 13 years old and performing a double mastectomy when she was only 15.

Cole has been a staunch opponent of what is erroneously labeled “gender-affirming care, testifying against these medical interventions before Congress and state legislatures.

She also filed a lawsuit against Kaiser Foundation Hospitals, The Permanente Medical Group and three doctors that had improperly treated her with chemical and surgical interventions, leaving her with “deep physical and emotional wounds, severe regrets, and distrust of the medical system.”

Transgender medical procedures can have life-long consequences, such as those Cole described in her testimony before Congress, saying testosterone gave her “menopausal-like hot flashes,” deepened her voice and masculinized her appearance. She said her future fertility is “unknown.”

She went on to state, “I still struggle to this day with sexual dysfunction, and I have massive scars across my chest and skin grafts that they used, that they took from my nipples, are weeping fluid today, and they were grafted into a more masculine positioning, they said.”

All these procedures worsened her mental health and did not turn her into a male.

Bondi’s memorandum followed an executive order from President Trump “Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation.” It states says the DOJ will investigate crimes “under the banner of so-called ‘gender-affirming care’” as female genital mutilation, a felony.

In addition, “The Department of Justice will investigate and hold accountable medical providers and pharmaceutical companies that mislead the public about the long-term side effects of chemical and surgical mutilations.”

The DOJ is also investigating violations of the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act for making false claims. The agency will work with state attorneys general to prosecute hospitals and practitioners of “gender medicine,” and promote legislation to protect children.

The memorandum ends with a statement on the urgency of protecting children from mutilation.

“Protecting America’s children must be our top priority, whether from drug cartels, terrorists or even our own medical community.”

“Every day, we hear more harrowing stories about children who will suffer for the rest of their lives because of the unconscionable ideology behind ‘gender-affirming care.'”

Daily Citizen is thankful for this effort from the DOJ and the FBI to safeguard children from dangerous, ineffective, traumatizing medical procedures.

Again, you can report tips of any hospitals, clinics or practitioners performing these surgical procedures on children at 1-800-CALL-FBI or tips.fbi.gov.

Related Articles and Resources:

Colorado Counselor Asks U.S. Supreme Court to Hear Free Speech Case

Counseling for Sexual Identity Concerns: A Measured, Careful, and Compassionate Approach.

Expert in ‘Transitioning’ Children Admits ‘We Were Wrong’ About Puberty Blockers

Four Brave Young Women File Lawsuits Alleging Harm from ‘Transgender’ Interventions

HHS Releases Report on Harms of ‘Transgender’ Medical Interventions for Minors

Important New Journal Article Calls Out Doctors for Harming Youth with Medicalized Gender Ideology

New Video Equips Parents and Counselors to Help ‘Gender Dysphoric’ Children

President Trump Signs Order Protecting Children From Transgender Medical Interventions

Transgenderism and Minors: What Does the Research Really Show?

If you or someone you know need help dealing with the transgender issue, check out Focus on the Family’s Transgender Resources page.

Focus on the Family’s Counseling Department offers help from licensed counselors. To request a conversation with Focus on the Family’s Counseling Department, call 1-855-771-HELP (4357) weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. (Mountain Time), or complete our Counseling Consultation Request Form. Please be prepared to leave your contact information for a counselor to return a call to you as soon as possible. The consultation is available at no cost to you due to generous donor support.

To learn more about defeating gender ideology, click here.

Image from Shutterstock.

Male Boxer Khelif Barred from Female Category After Rule Change

Boxers must undergo mandatory sex testing before competing, World Boxing announced last week.

The statement specifically bars male boxer Imane Khelif from competing in female boxing until he undergoes sex testing. He was set to make a “competitive comeback”  next week at the Eindhoven Box Cup in the Netherlands, the BBC reports.

Khelif won gold in female, welterweight boxing at the 2024 Olympics, despite questions about his eligibility. A year earlier, the International Boxing Association disqualified him from women’s competition after two independent blood tests found he had XY chromosomes.

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) required no such tests. Anyone with a female designation on their passport could compete in the women’s category, as Khelif did.

Four months after his gold medal win, journalists unearthed a medical report showing French endocrinologists diagnosed Khelif with a rare disorder of sexual development (DSD) in 2023.

5-Alpha-Reductase deficiency is an exceptionally rare DSD causing male babies to produce too little dihydrotestosterone, which stunts the early development of reproductive organs. Doctors commonly mistake babies with 5-Alpha for girls.

But 5-Alpha does not stop men from producing and responding to testosterone. Khelif went through male puberty, with all its athletic advantages. Upon examination, endocrinologists found he not only had XY chromosomes, but normal male levels of testosterone and male reproductive organs.

Khelif’s diagnosis must have been terribly confusing and disheartening. But it also should have prevented him from boxing against women in the Olympics.

Instead, he and his team downplayed the diagnosis as “a problem with [Khelif’s] chromosomes.” He entered the women’s category in the Olympics after knowing about his biology for nearly a year.

By all accounts, he planned to continue beating women up this year. Thank God World Boxing stopped him — and let’s pray the IOC will adopt similar, common sense eligibility requirements in 2028.

Additional Articles and Resources

Olympic Women’s Boxing Champ is Officially a Man

Two Men Win Olympic Gold for Battering Women

Olympic-Sized Stupidity: It’s Wrong for Men to Fight Women

Olympic Privilege? Officials Protect Sports – But Only at the Highest Level

Male and Female Biology Matters

World Rugby Finds Men and Women are Different, Announces New Guidelines Protecting Elite Women Players

Dez Bryant: Pride Month Propaganda is ‘Far From Right’

The typical social media feed grew a lot more colorful earlier this week as entities from corporations and professional sports teams to countless individuals switched out profile photos and logos to coincide with the beginning of Pride Month.

Thankfully, not everybody is ready to surrender the rainbow. Our friend Allie Beth Stuckey proclaimed, “Happy Noahic Covenant Month. Love seeing symbols of God’s mercy everywhere!”

Sadly, the NFL doesn’t see it that way. They switched out their traditional logo to include the rainbow and have even produced and distributed a video that states:

“Football is gay. Football is lesbian. Football is beautiful. Football is queer. Football is transgender. Football is for everyone.”

This statement was too much for Dez Bryant, the former Dallas Cowboys receiver.

“These are wild statements to make,” Bryant wrote on X. “Excuse my silliness. I’m going to proudly tell my boys football is none of these things. I have nothing against Gays, but this is far from right.”

He then added:

“It’s gay players in the NFL … but forcing it in people’s faces… especially children… can send the wrong message… Football is a real community, like the gay community. Imagine telling gays they have to advocate for straight people… they probably would have a problem.”

He’s right, but that Bryant feels compelled to offer the caveat that his comments don’t reflect animus towards homosexuals just shows how much progress the radical propogandists have made in trying to intimidate and silence any difference of opinion.

First launched in 1970 on the one-year anniversary of the Stonewall Riots in New York City, it was President Bill Clinton who formally proclaimed June “Gay and Lesbian Pride Month” on June 2, 2000.

Over the last quarter-century, “pride” events have morphed from days to multiple months. Billion-dollar corporations like the NFL, NHL and Major League Baseball have all fallen in line. If you were hoping to escape the ideological radicalism by retreating to the innocence of a ballgame, good luck during this month and even well beyond.

Dez Bryant didn’t share what he would tell his sons about what football really is, but he hasn’t been shy about sharing what he’s learned in church.

“I learned more about myself today in church,” he once wrote on X. “Regardless of your upbringing, good or bad, keep the honor of authority in the forefront of your life because there is blessing when you choose to honor in spite of the circumstances.”

The former NFL start then shared Deuteronomy 5:16:

“Give honor to your father and your mother, as you have been ordered by the Lord your God; so that your life may be long and all may be well for you in the land which the Lord your God is giving you.”

He added:

“Instead of us looking at the commandments as old fashioned we should look at them as well fashioned. I hope everyone is having a blessed Sunday.

Dez Bryant is catching grief for his “pride month” comments this week, but we need more people of influence to offer an alternative perspective, to counter the propagandists, and most importantly, acknowledge that it is never right to praise what the Lord says is wrong.

Image from Getty.