RIGHT SIDE

Fairness gets left off the podium

Asher Connelly

California faces a laundry list of urgent challenges: rising homelessness, recurring wildfires, and a strained immigration system. Yet somehow, what makes national headlines is a high school track meet—and a debate about who belongs on the winner’s podium.

At the center of the controversy is AB Hernandez, a transgender teen athlete whose victory in a girls’ race has ignited public outcry. For critics, the issue is not personal—it’s principled. They argue that allowing athletes who were born male to compete in female sports introduces physical advantages that can’t be ignored. Men, on average, have greater muscle mass, bone density, and cardiovascular capacity. These are not opinions; they’re well-established physiological facts.

To be clear: transgender athletes make up a statistically negligible percentage of competitors—less than 0.002% of U.S. college athletes and an even smaller fraction at the Olympic level. But for opponents of current policy, it’s not about how many trans athletes there are. It’s about what their inclusion, under current rules, represents: a redefinition of fairness in women’s sports without meaningful debate.

Imagine being a young female athlete who has trained for years, who has sacrificed sleep, parties, and her social life to chase a championship dream. Then imagine seeing that dream derailed not by a faster opponent, but by a governing body that changed the rules mid-game. That’s the emotional core of the argument: not hatred, not fear, but frustration with what feels like a betrayal of women’s athletic spaces.

Those calling for withholding federal funding from institutions that allow biological males to compete in female categories are not calling for cruelty. They are calling for clarity. This isn’t about erasing anyone’s identity—it’s about protecting fairness and ensuring the next generation of women athletes aren’t pushed to the sidelines in the name of progress that forgot to ask them first.