CIF responds to transgender athletes’ refusal to compete in athletics finals

After a week of online resentment and transphobia directed at two runners who were scheduled to compete in the state’s track and field preliminary on Friday, neither showed up at the start of the scheduled 1600m races at Buchanan High School in Clovis.

“CIF is disappointed with two of our student athletes and their families because, due to the actions of others, they felt compelled to withdraw from the State Athletics Championships out of concern for student welfare.” -California Interscholastic Federation. , the governing body of high school sports in California, wrote in a statement provided to The Los Angeles Times.

“CIF strongly condemns discriminatory or offensive behavior that affects our student-athletes’ ability to compete in interscholastic competition.”

Last weekend, Sherman Oaks Buckley’s Lorelei Barrett finished third and Santa Rosa Sonoma Academy’s Athena Ryan finished second in the women’s 1600m at their respective group events. However, amid fierce debate over the fairness and legality of transgender girls’ participation in women’s sports, both have been the subject of thousands of comments criticizing their gender identity and suggesting that they took places in the prelims against cisgender girls.

Last Saturday at the Southern Section Masters event, one of the parents yelled multiple times, “Trip her!” in Barrett in the middle of a 1600m race, as can be heard in the video published to a channel called “THATRACKLIFE”. When Barrett ran head to head with Dana Hills’ Allura Markow in a pack-four with Ventura’s Sadie Engelhardt and Corona Santiago’s Riley Blade, the other parent can be heard saying, “Three girls and a guy.”

“It’s pathetic,” Max Engelhardt, Sadie’s father, said of the wake-up calls on Friday. According to him, one of the parents after the race tried to recruit him and his wife Shannon to protest the final result: Barrett’s third place.

“What I saw last week,” Engelhardt said, “was pretty ugly.”

On Sunday, November, a video of Barrett talking to running website MileSplit was tweeted by the Women’s Sports Independent Council, an organization that identifies itself as “advocating for protected categories of women in sports” and frequently posts content targeted at transgender athletes. .

At the same time fury erupted in Northern California when Ryan placed second in the women’s 1600 meters at the CIF North Coast Section Champions Meeting. At the rally, protesters carried a banner reading “Let’s Protect Women’s Sports.” remote on security.

“This policy of allowing male athletes to compete against girls is tearing women’s sports apart,” ICONS co-founder Kim Jones wrote in a statement to The Times.

Asked to comment on the ICONS playing a big role in the harassment and attacks on Barrett and Ryan, Jones replied: “Girls are suffering right now and this concern for boys is being put above safety and respect for girls. ”

The Barrett family declined an interview request earlier this week in response to inquiries addressed to coach Larry Medina Jr. Similarly, a representative from Sonoma Academy declined to comment on behalf of Ryan and her family on Tuesday.

World Athletics, athletics’ international governing body, announced new rules in March that would bar “male-to-female transgender athletes who have gone through male puberty” from competing in women’s world ranking competition. In April, the Biden administration proposed a rule ban schools to ban transgender athletes from competing.

The Times spoke to five local runner coaches who were either scheduled to compete in Friday’s girls’ 1600m or compete in Saturday’s Masters against Barrett, or both. When asked for their opinion, three said they were simply training athletes to compete against anyone in the field, regardless of their identity, while two expressed the belief that transgender girls should be placed in a separate race to compete.

“The adults created this problem,” said Oaks Christian coach Wesley Smith. “Adults should solve this problem.”

CIF protects the participation of transgender people in sports in its bylaws, as stated in the Guidelines for Participation in Gender Identity: “All students must be able to participate in CIF activities in a manner that is consistent with their gender identity, regardless of the gender listed. student records.

Students or parents must contact individual schools to indicate that students have a “permanent gender identity other than the sex shown on the student’s registration records” in order to change participation in sports based on gender, per the bylaws.

“All of our athletes, all eligible athletes, get the opportunity to compete against the gender they feel most comfortable with,” said Brian Seymour, CIF Deputy Executive Director.