Running afoul of female athletes

Logan Mihailoff began the 2026 high school cross country season on the boys’ junior varsity team at Camas High in southern Washington.

At Camas’ first invitational meet of the season on Sept. 5, the junior placed 76th.

Before September was over, Mihailoff decided he was a girl and started running for the Papermakers’ girls’ JV squad. At a Nike-sponsored invitational in nearby Portland, Ore., on Sept. 26, he finished second in the junior/senior JV girls’ division—behind only Sophia Rodriguez of Mount Si High in Snoqualmie, Wash., who beat Mihailoff by two full minutes.

Mihailoff’s presence in the Nike race prompted two female runners from Skyview High in the Portland suburb of Vancouver to leave the starting line and bow out of their race in protest. Weeks later, at Camas’ Oct. 13 dual meet against Battle Ground High, about a dozen of Mihailoff’s own teammates walked off the course, bringing national attention to a race that otherwise might not have received even local media coverage.

All of this has unfolded with a vote looming on a Washington state ballot measure, Initiative 638, aimed at keeping boys in grades K-12 out of girls’ sports. Washington voters will make the call on Nov. 3—and in a deep blue state where the LGBTQ agenda seems to reign supreme, the measure appears to be getting traction: Polling from Let’s Go Washington, which describes itself as “a non-partisan political action committee working to fix what’s broken in Washington State,” indicated that Initiative 638 may just pass. According to the poll, 56% of 7,500 of likely Washington voters say they would vote ‘yes’ on I-638, 24% say they would vote ‘no,’ and 22% were undecided.” In terms of party lines, the poll shows that 73% of Republicans supporting the measure, as well as 48% of Democrats and 52% of independents.”

The Washington Interscholastic Association (WIAA) is practically making Initiative 638’s case for it: In a statement to the conservative-leaning sports website OutKick, the WIAA claimed its hands were tied by state law with regard to Mihailoff competing as a girl.

As an attorney who has published a law journal article on the issue of boys competing in girls’ sports and teaches a sports law class at Trinity Law School in Southern California, I have to call “baloney” on the WIAA. The U.S. Constitution’s Supremacy Clause requires state law to yield where it conflicts with federal law. The Supreme Court just reaffirmed this summer that when enacting Title IX, the federal law that prohibits educational institutions from discriminating on the basis of sex, Congress meant “biological sex,” not “self-proclaimed gender.”

In fairness, the Supreme Court’s decision merely lets states maintain sex-segregated interscholastic sports programs—it does not require them to. Still, letting boys compete in girls’ sports undermines Title IX’s purpose, robbing girls of athletic opportunities by reducing them to also-rans, benchwarmers, or spectators in their own sports. Invoking state law is simply a weak excuse the WIAA and school administrators use to justify turning a deaf ear to girls’ complaints about fairness and safety—not to mention having to be in states of full or partial undress around boys who gain access to their locker room merely by claiming to be girls.

Alanna Smith knows firsthand what the female cross country runners at Camas High and its competitors are going through: The daughter of Hall of Fame major league relief pitcher Lee Smith competed in high school track and field in Connecticut against male sprinters Terry Miller and Aundraya Yearwood in the late 2010s. Between them, Miller and Yearwood rewrote Connecticut’s girls’ record books, setting a combined 15 state girls’ indoor and outdoor records.

Smith was an elite high school sprinter in her own right—good enough to earn a scholarship to the University of Tennessee, where she ran for one season before transferring to Georgia Southern University. But when Miller and/or Yearwood lined up against her, she knew a runner-up finish was the best she could hope for. That’s why she’s part of a lawsuit that seeks to strip Miller and Yearwood of their accomplishments.

“The titles should go to the girls who rightly won and deserve them,” Smith told me in early October after speaking at a rally in southern Washington in support of Initiative 638. “It’s really frustrating how hard we have to work just to get to place (high enough to earn a medal).

“Working hard to beat biological boys is different. It’s so demoralizing—you know the race is over before it starts.”

Girls like those who walked off the courses at Mihailoff’s races have repeatedly tried to express that truth to the WIAA and the administrators who oversee their athletic programs. The people in charge haven’t listened. Here’s hoping Washington voters will make them listen come Nov. 3.