It was a great weekend for transgender track athlete A.B. Hernandez, but not so much for the California teen’s female competitors.
The male-born athlete won gold medals in the girls’ long jump and triple jump Saturday at the California Interscholastic Federation Southern Section Division 3 Finals at Moorpark High School, reigniting outrage from the defenders of single-sex girls’ sports.
“A boy just took a girl’s spot AGAIN at CIF Finals,” Sonja Shaw, president of the Chino Valley Unified School District Board of Education, wrote in a post on X. “This is NOT equality, it’s erasure.”
She and others urged President Trump to make good on his threat to pull federal funding from California for failing to abide by his Feb. 5 executive order, “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports.”
The federation has said it will continue to comply with state law requiring schools to allow students to compete based on gender identity, prompting the Department of Education to launch a Title IX investigation.
The Jurupa Valley High School junior won the girls’ triple jump with a leap of 41 feet and 4 inches, surpassing Crean Lutheran High School junior Reese Hogan’s second-place mark by more than four feet.
Hernandez also took first in the long jump with a mark of 19 feet and 2.75 inches, several inches ahead of La Canada senior Katie McGuinness’s 18 feet and 9 1/2 inches. Hernandez also took seventh place in the high jump, according to results posted on Athletic.net.
The finishes make Hernandez a favorite to medal in at least two events at the CIF State Track and Field Championships, which are scheduled for May 30-31 at Buchanan High School in Clovis.
Yesterday at the CIF Southern Section track and field finals, a boy athlete, Ab Hernandez from Jurupa Valley High School, “won” two first place medals.
He finished first in the girls’ triple jump with a 41’ 4” jump, over 4’ longer than 2nd place (the real winner) Reese Hogan… pic.twitter.com/CkFCf1REYx
— Beth Bourne (@bourne_beth2345) May 18, 2025
Former All-American swimmer Riley Gaines offered congratulations to Hogan, calling her “the real champion of yesterday’s triple jump at the CIF Southern Section Finals.”
“She set a new PR and school record,” Gaines wrote on X. “The boy standing atop the podium holding up a ’number 1’ is a fraud enabled by @CIFSS, @CA_Dem & @CAgovernor.”
She referred to the federation as well as California Democratic legislators, who killed legislation in April to bar male-born athletes in female sports, and Gov. Gavin Newsom, who called the situation “deeply unfair” in March but has taken no public action to address the issue.
Hernandez denied having an unfair physical advantage in an interview last week, citing an eighth-place finish in the high jump and third-place finish in the long jump at the May 10 preliminary meet.
“All I thought was, I don’t think you understand that this puts your idiotic claims to trash. ‘She can’t be beat because she’s biologically male.’ Now you have no proof that I can’t be beat,” Hernandez said in the May 15 interview with Capital & Main.
Hernandez added, “I’ve trained so hard. I mean, hours of conditioning every day, five days a week. Every day since November, three hours after school. And then all of summer, no summer break for me.”
Advocates for single-sex female sports argue that male-born athletes have physical advantages that females cannot match, including greater muscle mass, lower body fat, stronger bones, and greater lung and heart capacity.
Nereyda Hernandez, the athlete’s mother, has been outspoken in her child’s defense, accusing detractors of bullying and harassment.
“Her identity doesn’t give her an advantage; it gives her courage,” Ms. Hernandez wrote in a May 11 statement on Instagram. “It takes immense bravery to show up, compete, and be visible in a world that often questions your very right to exist, let alone to participate.”
