Olympic gold medalists rip Newsom for California's trans athlete situation ahead of protested track meet
Olympic gold medalists Nancy Hogshead and Kaillie Humphries say Gavin Newsom’s fairness rhetoric excludes California’s female track athletes, as protests loom over a trans competitor defending two state titles.
Three-time Olympic gold medalists are calling out California Gov. Gavin Newsom for policies that let a male athlete compete in girls’ track and field while claiming to uphold “fairness, dignity, and respect.” Nancy Hogshead, who swam for the U.S. in 1984, and bobsled champion Kaillie Humphries, a California taxpayer, both told Fox News Digital the governor’s stance deliberately ignores biological reality ahead of Saturday’s protested state playoff meet.
Hogshead, a lifelong Democrat and civil rights lawyer, rejected the statement from Newsom’s office that discussions should be guided by fairness. “Governor Newsom seems to exclude girls from his own standard of ‘fairness, dignity and respect.’ It is impossible to include a male, however they identify, into girl’s sports and have a fair competition,” she said. She noted government never segregates by race or religion but does so by sex precisely because of biology, adding that Newsom, as a former law professor, is failing basic analysis.
Humphries was blunter: “There is nothing fair about allowing boys to take opportunities from girls in sports. It’s just the left’s thinly veiled misogyny.” She urged Newsom to focus on California hosting the Olympics, which “actually knows the difference between men and women,” instead of pushing an agenda “out of the mainstream of the American public.”
The controversy centers on a Jurupa Valley High School trans athlete who won the girls’ triple jump and high jump titles last season and placed second in long jump. That performance triggered competing protests, an arrest, a “Save Girls Sports” banner plane, and Sophia Lorey’s ejection from the venue. This year Lorey is organizing a new rally at the CIF Southern Section Division 3 preliminaries in Yorba Linda.
The Trump White House weighed in through spokeswoman Allison Schuster, calling Newsom “a truly sick individual who has no regard for fairness, dignity, and respect” for allowing men to compete in women’s sports. Former Team USA cyclist Giddeon Massie added that it is “a chief of all lies, intellectually dishonest, and evil” to force women to race against men who could not succeed in their own biological category.
California’s 2013 law, AB 1266 signed by then-Gov. Jerry Brown, remains in force; it is one of 22 states permitting participation consistent with gender identity. The federal response has included a Title IX lawsuit against state agencies and a specific Department of Education investigation into the Jurupa Valley district. Hogshead’s point stands: the state’s own standard of dignity stops at the starting line for its female athletes.
Original reporting: Fox News.
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