Jurupa Valley High School’s AB Hernandez won first place in girls high jump and triple jump on Saturday night at the California Interscholastic Federation’s State Track & Field Championships. She also took second place in girls long jump, making it, overall, a great performance for the high school junior. After each win, Hernandez took the podium, received her medal, and smiled for photos along with her fellow competitors. She looked happy, because most people do after they win. As the sun sunk lower in the sky and the late afternoon turned into night, it would look to a casual observer watching on a livestream, which I did, like a typical high school track meet: the national anthem was played, there was a reminder about good sportsmanship, high school athletes competed in various disciplines, upcoming events were called out on the loudspeaker, and parents and friends cheered in the stands.
Zoom outward, however, and there were signs that this meet was not typical. Hernandez had to share the podium and the spotlight. There was much more national coverage of the meet that would be expected, and online, discourse around Hernandez’s win would swiftly turn hateful. This is all because Hernandez is trans.
Though Hernandez has competed for years with the support of her local community, when two women began making noise online complaining about her being allowed to compete, they got a lot of attention and eventually caught Donald Trump’s eye. He issued a statement Tuesday about Hernandez filled with inaccuracies, saying she was unbeatable (she has lost before) and had won everything (again, she has lost before). That same day, CIF issued its own statement saying it would launch a pilot program to allow any cisgender female athlete who missed out on qualifying due to a transgender female athlete to compete anyway. Those new rules were also why, on Saturday, every time Hernandez won a medal, she had to share the podium with someone else as a co-medalist.
The new rules also did nothing to assuage the people dead-set on stopping Hernandez. A day after CIF announced its new rules, Trump’s U.S. Department of Justice sent it a letter, saying the federal government’s Title IX Special Investigations Team—the one created to weaponize the once-landmark anti-gender discrimination law—would investigate if CIF was discriminating against female athletes, 12 years after California approved statewide legislation guaranteeing transgender students access to sports based on their gender identity. Even though Hernandez had followed all the CIF rules in place, that did little to stop the anti-trans sentiments. On Friday, during qualifications, an airplane flew over the stadium carrying a banner that read “no boys in girls sports!”
The same reporter who got the video of the banner, Haley Sawyer, estimated the number of protestors there Friday at “roughly 10.”
You read that right—10. California is the largest state by population in the entire country with nearly 40 million people. Sure, some people have to work, some people are busy with childcare, or too frail to travel, or they’re students who have to study. But the math is the math. Out of a state with nearly 40 million people, just about 10 were so angry about Hernandez competing that they showed up at Veterans Memorial Stadium in Clovis, Fresno County. That’s the same Fresno County that has an estimated population of more than 1 million, is nearly equidistant to the state’s two biggest metro areas, and is easily accessible by car.
More people did show up on Saturday, but not a deluge. The Associated Press described the Saturday meet as “relatively quiet despite critics.” The Los Angeles Times put the number of Saturday protestors at “dozens,” which is more than 10 but still nothing more than a speck in a state of nearly 40 million people. That seems less than the number of people who lined up outside of local Trader Joe’s stores recently to buy mini canvas tote bags with the grocery store’s logo on them.
This is not meant to downplay the real vitriol brought by those who did show up. Reporting for Capital & Main, Cerise Castle said that at least one person protesting AB’s participation was escorted out. Video online showed a woman yelling in the face of AB’s mother, saying AB should not be allowed to compete. But even in that video, presented online as damning evidence, the framing is so tight that it’s difficult to know if more than few people were even paying attention to it while it was happening. Per the San Francisco Chronicle‘s Norah Furtado, the closest anything came to conflict was when a few people started jeering during Hernandez’s initial long jump attempt, but nobody in the crowd reacted and a voice on the intercom made it clear the behavior would not be tolerated.
Anyone can click a button online. It’s a lot harder to show up.That’s why, as rudimentary as it sounds, whether people actually showed up was, for a long time, a deciding factor on if an event was considered news. This is not meant to downplay or ignore the many, many problems with the old ways of news-gathering, which all too often used its power to downplay or outright ignore a lot of stories, especially those in minority communities. But we can give it a little credit for ignoring the many people who would often call newsrooms demanding front-page stories about what was little more than something that bothered them.
What those railing against Hernandez know is that in today’s decentralized information ecosystem, anger online wins and so their yelling must be covered even though few protestors came. Meanwhile, the single biggest source of complaints about discrimination to the U.S. Department of Education are from disabled students who said they had been denied help they needed or felt mistreated, not people complaining about trans athletes. Data also shows the biggest danger posed to all high school athletes, regardless of gender, is dying of sudden cardiac arrest, not competing against trans athletes. Having emergency action plans and installing AEDs in high schools would save more lives, but little is said about this online compared to the trans athlete furor.
Despite it all, the actual athletes seemed pretty chill and normal on Saturday as I monitored from the live stream and watched the press coverage roll in. They are athletes, after all, and they know how to block out noise. It’s all smiles in the Associated Press photos. Wilson High School senior Loren Webster, who came in first in the long jump, told the Times as much, saying “It wasn’t any other person I was worried about. I knew what I was capable of. I can’t control the uncontrollable.” Long Beach Poly High School senior Jillene Wetteland, who also took first in the high jump, told the Chronicle, “I love both of the people I tied with.” And River City High School senior Brooke White, who came in second on the long jump, said to the same reporter it was an honor to share her podium with Hernandez.
“Although the publicity she’s been receiving has been pretty negative, I believe she deserves publicity because she’s a superstar,” White said, “she’s a rockstar, she’s representing who she is.”
