In the heat of California’s crowded gubernatorial race, billionaire Tom Steyer has made his position crystal clear: biological males belong in girls’ high school sports, and any objection amounts to a cruel “right-wing attempt” to victimize transgender youth. This stance, delivered on a recent podcast, underscores a deeper truth about progressive priorities in the Golden State.
When forced to choose between protecting the opportunities and fairness earned by generations of female athletes and affirming the latest gender ideology, Democrats like Steyer unhesitatingly choose the latter.
Steyer’s comments come as controversy swirls around athletes like AB Hernandez, a biological male competing in girls’ track and field events. Recent victories in high jump, long jump, and triple jump have highlighted the predictable physical advantages that puberty confers on males, advantages no amount of rhetoric can erase. Yet rather than acknowledge this basic biological reality, Steyer frames exclusion from girls’ teams as punishment that exacerbates mental health struggles, citing high suicide attempt rates among transgender youth.
This framing inverts victim and perpetrator with remarkable precision. The true victims here are the girls displaced from podiums, scholarships, and records—young women whose years of dedication are rendered meaningless by policies that treat sex as a feeling rather than a fact.
The Biology Denial at the Heart of the Policy
Steyer’s appeal to compassion rings hollow when measured against observable reality. Males who have gone through puberty retain significant advantages in strength, speed, and skeletal structure. Denying this does not protect vulnerable children; it erases the protected category of female sports that Title IX was designed to create. What began as a reasonable accommodation has become an outright displacement of girls from their own arena.
Critics rightly note that California’s approach turns competitive fairness into a political litmus test. While Steyer and his fellow Democrats fret over the emotional well-being of a tiny percentage of students identifying as transgender, they show little concern for the far larger population of biological females watching their dreams deferred. This selective empathy exposes the contradiction at the heart of modern progressivism: inclusion for some requires exclusion—and often humiliation—for others.
Recent scenes at California track meets, where female athletes have been forced to share podiums or lose qualifying spots, illustrate the human cost. Parents and girls have spoken out, only to be dismissed as bigots. Steyer’s rhetoric follows the familiar script: pathologize dissent, medicalize identity, and shame anyone who points out that boys are not girls.
Political Calculations in a Failing State
California faces crises of homelessness, crime, failing schools, and out-migration. Yet in the Democratic primary to replace Gavin Newsom, Steyer and others have elevated this cultural flashpoint. Their eagerness to champion policies rejected by the vast majority of Americans—and by growing numbers even within their own party—suggests a party more interested in signaling virtue than solving tangible problems.
Republican candidates in the race have taken the commonsense position: protect girls’ sports by recognizing biological reality. This stance aligns not only with science and fairness but with the instincts of parents across the political spectrum who understand that erasing sex-based categories harms the most vulnerable.
The debate transcends sports. It touches on fundamental questions of truth, parental rights, and whether institutions exist to serve reality or reshape it according to elite ideology. When billionaires lecture the public on compassion while defending policies that disadvantage working-class and middle-class girls, the disconnect becomes impossible to ignore.
A Return to First Principles
California’s experiment with gender identity in sports has produced exactly the outcomes sensible observers predicted: stolen victories, demoralized girls, and bitter division. Steyer’s defense offers no solution beyond doubling down on the very policies creating the harm.
As Scripture reminds us in Genesis 1:27, “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.” This created order is not a suggestion but a foundation for human flourishing. Societies that defy it do not progress; they unravel, one displaced girl and one confused policy at a time.
The coming primary and general election will test whether California voters recognize the cost of this ideology. Female athletes deserve better than to be collateral damage in a billionaire’s virtue campaign. Common sense, biological truth, and basic fairness demand a course correction—one that puts girls first in girls’ sports.
