Paying lip service

California Gov. Gavin Newsom is a colossal phony. For proof, one need only look at two things: his podcast conversation with conservative Christian rabble-rouser Charlie Kirk, and his subsequent handling of the issue of boys competing in girls’ athletics.

Let’s look at the podcast first: Forget, momentarily, that as California’s chief executive, Newsom has bigger fish to fry than hosting a podcast. Right-wing commentators and political opponents can point to a mountain of evidence indicating that Newsom’s nearly complete eight-year run as governor was an unmitigated disaster.

Newsom started the podcast earlier this year in response to Donald Trump’s election to the presidency. Newsom is among Trump’s staunchest political foes. However, Newsom is also politically savvy enough to see that Americans elected Trump in large part due to the way Americans are leaning on certain issues. The podcast is perhaps a not-so-veiled attempt to make Newsom appear to be moving toward the center on those issues in time for a presidential run.

Chief among those issues is boys competing in girls’ athletics. Five years before Newsom even ran for governor, California was at the forefront of this issue, enacting state laws allowing high-school athletes to freely choose which categories to compete in based on gender identity rather than biological sex. At a time when relatively few male athletes were competing on girls’ and women’s teams, California proudly proclaimed itself a progressive champion while showing little, if any, concern about its new laws’ impact on actual women and girls.

Fast forward to the present: On May’s final weekend, A.B. Hernandez, a 16-year-old boy competing for Jurupa Valley High, won the girls’ high jump and triple jump at California’s state track and field championships. He also placed second in the long jump.

Observers of prep sports in California could long see Hernandez’s success at the state championships as a foregone conclusion—especially in the triple jump, in which the junior set invitational-meet records virtually out of the gate this season. Newsom’s podcast conversation with Kirk took place not long afterward. In fact, Kirk mentioned Hernandez by name in that podcast, setting the stage for Newsom’s stunning admission that he saw some inherent injustice in letting boys compete in girls’ athletics, calling it “deeply unfair.”

“I’m not wrestling with the fairness issue,” Newsom told Kirk. “I totally agree with you on that.”

As a native Californian, albeit one who now lives in Oregon, I never would have expected such an admission to escape Newsom’s lips in a trillion millennia. Newsom has openly and unabashedly supported the LGBT agenda since his days as San Francisco’s mayor.

However, Newsom also invoked Christian language in defending his allowance of injustice, asserting that he deserved “grace” because he had—in his mind, anyway—valid concerns about children who self-identify as transgender killing themselves if adults didn’t affirm their proclaimed identities. I’m not inclined to give Newsom any grace. Pro-LGBT politicians have long played the suicide card to paint those who refused to deny the basic truth that God created everyone male and female—and didn’t get their plumbing wrong—as mean-spirited bigots.

But even if I were to grant Newsom a small measure of grace, especially since Christians don’t want to see kids who call themselves “trans” kill themselves any more than he does, Hernandez’s victories at the state track and field meet would cause it to dissipate. Since acknowledging that letting boys displace girls as champions in their own sports is unfair to girls, Newsom has done nothing to change the situation in his state.

Newsom has issued no executive order mandating that public schools, the California Interscholastic Federation—which regulates high school sports in the state—or any of the state’s universities keep sports segregated by sex. (San Jose State’s women’s volleyball team won multiple matches by forfeit last season because the Spartans boasted a male player on their roster.) Nor has he worked across the aisle with Republicans or even with fellow Democrats to enact legislation aimed at protecting girls.

Newsom’s open defiance of Trump’s executive order requiring states to protect girls’ sports or else lose federal funding is even greater proof of Newsom’s unrepentant stance. In fact, it seems Trump’s support of keeping girls’ and women’s athletics free of males has only spurred Newsom to resist doing the right thing even more.

To be fair, Newsom isn’t alone. Up the coast in Washington, Donovan Brown—aka Veronica Garcia—repeated as the state’s Class 2A girls’ 400-meter champion on Gov. Bob Ferguson’s watch. And in Minnesota, Gov. Tim Walz has turned a blind eye to pitcher Charlie (aka “Marissa”) Rothenberger’s dominance on the softball diamond, which has spawned a lawsuit from anonymous opposing players. Sadly, instances of boys dominating against girls or compelling them to forfeit, either out of safety concerns or in protest, only continue to grow.

Like most liberals, Newsom has long proclaimed himself a champion of women’s rights. His refusal to stand up for female athletes to be champions in their own sports proves otherwise.