On the West Coast, Girls Fight Alone Against the Adults Who Should Protect Them

Oct 17, 2026
C.K. Bouferrache
Culture War | Transgender Agenda

"Transgender" male dominates high school girl's cross-country races as adults cheer.

Twelve girls on the Camas, WA High School cross-country team—the team that moved a boy onto its girls' roster halfway through the season—walked off the course moments after the gun at their own home race on Oct. 13. A few parents stood by with signs in quiet protest, knowing the district could ban them from their own children's meets for it. Camas coaches have refused to talk to reporters, and the school has tried to keep the whole thing quiet. 

The biological male runner started out on the boy's team, turning in mediocre race results. Then, in a blink, after identifying as female, he became a champion—beating out almost every other girl in the meets in which he participated.

Not one adult in charge would stand up for these girls, so they stood up for themselves.

Leftist Ideology Leaves Girls Behind

If you want to know how the "adults" in charge on the Left Coast think, start with Gavin Newsom. In March 2025, California's governor called transgender athletes in girls' sports "deeply unfair." Then he left the policy in place. It takes a weak man to see the unfairness and do nothing about it. 

Still, Newsom at least said it out loud. The Democratic women who hold power in Washington—U.S. Sens. Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell, Washington House Speaker Laurie Jinkins—won't even admit it's unfair, much less put a stop to it. Meanwhile, the schools and agencies under their watch punish the people who do speak up. It's the same story from California to Oregon to Washington, and it's left to girls—children—to fight it.

The Camas girls weren't the first to walk out of a race in protest. On Sept. 15, at a meet at Camas High, Skyview runners Sierra Retzlaff and Charlie Garrett, both 16, wrote "keep women in women's sports" on their arms and legs, ran about five meters off the start and stepped off the course. Sierra's father, Joel, held a sign and chanted on his way to his car. For that, Camas School District slapped him with a one-year criminal trespass notice banning him from every school it runs. Superintendent John Anzalone told Fox News the ban was about safety and pointed to a report that Retzlaff drove through an area the district had taped off.

The runner they were protesting started the season on the Camas High School boys' junior varsity team and finished 76th at the Ultimook race on Sept. 5. Ten days later, the same runner lined up with the girls and placed seventh. Retzlaff says that time would have placed about 60th among boys. Then "she" came second out of 195 girls at Nike Portland XC, a win against Union, and on Oct. 10 a spot in the girls' elite race at the Nike Hole in the Wall Invitational, where the runner beat 96 girls. 

That same time would have finished dead last in the boys' elite race. 

The school district says Washington Interscholastic Athletic Association (WIAA) rules tie its hands. Nobody at Camas HS has explained why coaches moved a boys' JV runner into one of the Northwest's top girls' fields in under a month. Boys who switch are rarely standouts against other boys, and race video of this runner shows none of the efficient stride of an elite distance runner.

Worst to First

Oregon has been at this for years. In May 2024, a transgender sprinter from Portland's McDaniel High won the 6A girls' 200-meter state title and took second in the 400 at Hayward Field, after never reaching district finals competing against his own sex. The U.S. Education Department opened a Title IX investigation into Portland Public Schools. A year later, Oregon's Democratic-controlled House voted down a bill to restore sex-based teams. 

At the 2025 state meet, two girls stepped off the awards podium in full view of the crowd rather than share it with a transgender high jumper who had also failed to make district finals in competition with his own sex.

In May 2024, the same month a boy beat Oregon's best girls for a state title, John Parks—a coach who has trained collegiate and Olympic athletes over four decades and chose to spend his time coaching high schoolers at Lake Oswego—wrote to the Oregon School Activities Association with a modest idea: an open division, so transgender athletes could compete without pushing girls off the podium. On May 23, an OSAA official contacted the district and accused Parks of harassing transgender athletes at recent meets—a charge Parks and his attorneys call false. Lake Oswego fired him on June 12. By his account, he lost his job for suggesting a compromise. His First Amendment lawsuit is still pending.

Meanwhile, California has doubled down. A boy from Jurupa Valley High School has won four state titles in girls' track since 2025. The California Interscholastic Federation's answer was to quietly revive a rule that gives an extra medal to the girl a transgender athlete knocks off the podium. The U.S. Education Department found California in violation of Title IX, and the state responded by suing the Justice Department. The Justice Department sued back, and on Aug. 31 Judge Cynthia Valenzuela, a Biden appointee, threw the case out.

Making a Mockery of Title IX

California risked $44.3 billion in federal school funding rather than change a policy the Justice Department said involved just five athletes. Title IX, passed in 1972, is the reason girls have their own teams and scholarships in the first place, and these states are paying lawyers with taxpayer money to keep it from protecting them. In Oregon in 2025, the state's female athletes sued and named Gov. Tina Kotek (D) as a defendant. President Trump signed an executive order in February 2026 to keep boys out of girls' sports. Then in June 2026, the Supreme Court ruled that states can separate sports teams by sex, and that banning biological males from girls' sports did not violate Title IX. Oregon could have changed course. For Kotek, it was never even a consideration. Her office wouldn't comment.

In Oregon, it has now reached the coaching staff. After the longtime head coach stepped down this spring, the West Linn-Wilsonville School District hired a transgender woman to coach Wilsonville High's girls' soccer team, which had won four straight Class 5A state titles. Parents say the new coach's résumé rests mostly on claiming to have played Division I and semipro women's soccer, and they point out the coach played on those women's teams as a biological male. No evidence exists that the Division I claim has merit. When parents complained, the district held a meeting for team parents only. Those who attended say district officials told them not to ask questions or record anything, and that the hire was final.

Washington has been here before. In 2024 and again in 2025, a boy from Spokane Valley's East Valley High won the Class 2A girls' 400-meter state title. Lauren Matthew, who posted the fastest time in the 2025 preliminaries, finished second. The adults could have stepped in then. Instead, they went after the girls. In Tumwater, WA, a girl who refused to play basketball against a boy found her own school investigating her. Meanwhile, the fixes went nowhere. When school districts asked the WIAA to limit girls' sports to girls, the amendment failed. Washington State Superintendent of Public Instruction Chris Reykdal jsaid President Trump's order protecting women's sports conflicts with state law.

On Nov. 3, Washington decides Initiative 638, a statewide ballot measure which would keep male students out of girls' school sports. Gov. Bob Ferguson (D) came out against it on Sept. 29, warning that it "won't create opportunities for girls." He didn't explain how a boys' JV runner in the girls' elite field creates opportunities for girls. He spent his statement attacking the measure's sex-verification requirement instead, because for Ferguson the agenda comes first and the girls losing aren't even a factor.

Teachers' Unions, Democrats Refuse to Protect Girls' Sports

When Ferguson is confronted on this, he goes on the attack. In January, when journalist Brandi Kruse asked how he'd feel about a male competing against his own daughter, he suggested she had an obsession with trans kids. He admitted he hadn't read the initiatives. Democratic legislative leaders refused to hold a single hearing on them. When Kruse broke the Camas story on X, her message was blunt: "ENOUGH IS ENOUGH. Stand up for these girls.-"The money against I-638 comes mostly from teachers' unions. The National Education Association and its Washington affiliate rank among its top donors, and their members staff these schools. The governor and the state school superintendent lead the campaign's endorsement list. Parents send their daughters to these schools trusting the adults there to protect them. The adults running them don't care whether those girls are safe or get a fair shot.

Power in this fight sits with grown-ups. Governors and legislative leaders control budgets and state agencies, and the unions behind them have millions to spend. Against them stand a few parents brave enough to put their names in the newspaper and a group of teenage girls who aren't old enough to vote. The two Skyview runners who walked off the course are 16. Title IX exists to protect girls like them, yet they've had to stand up and claim that protection for themselves while grown women and men with real power look away—or attack them. 

It's sickening to watch.

The policy those girls are up against doesn't rest on rules or science. In Washington and Oregon, a boy doesn't need a hormone test or a doctor's note to join the girls' team. He just has to say he's a girl. The NCAA and World Athletics have closed women's events to males, and Britain's Cass Review, the largest independent study of youth gender medicine, found the evidence for treating minors with "gender-affirming care" very weak. 

West Coast Democrats have ignored all of it.

Fighting Against Basic Decency

West Coast leaders have put billions in federal school funding at risk and poured taxpayer money into lawsuits against their own government, all to defend a position that 79% of Americans, including 67% of Democrats, reject. When a coach can lose his job for suggesting a compromise to protect his girls, and a father can lose access to his daughter's meets for holding a sign, every parent and coach in these states hears the warning: keep your mouth shut. These leaders hold their own voters in contempt. The unions and state agencies behind them picked their cause long ago, and they will push it over any child who gets in the way. They act untouchable, and so far nobody has proven them wrong—they write the rules and decide whether to enforce them.

Everyone can see what's happening—the girls on the starting line, their parents and most Americans. Yet the politicians and bureaucrats in charge keep insisting the emperor is fully dressed, and they punish anyone who points out that he isn't. So it fell to 12 high school girls in Camas, on their own home course and against their own coaches, to say it with their feet. They never should have had to. Every girl lacing up her spikes from Seattle to San Diego now knows a boy can decide halfway through a season that he's a girl and take her place on the podium. The people with the power to stop it know that too. Until voters force them to care, girls will keep paying the price.

MORE COVERAGE FROM RESTORATION NEWS

 Left Coast Insanity: Trans Sports Debate Follows WNBA to Portland

 What Happens When Socialists Take Over: DSA Aligned Portland Employees Conspire to Keep Police Funding Off the Ballot

 Taxpayer Money For Illegal Alien Legal Defense: The Legal Machine Behind Oregon’s Open Borders Rebellion—And Why Your State Should Pay Attention

 Rioters Will Be Rioters: "The Compromise:" What Portland's DSA City Council Built on May Day

 ICE Agents Targeted: EXCLUSIVE: Portland 'No Kings' Devolves into Riot, Federal Agents Doused with Lighter Fluid

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C.K. Bouferrache is a contributor to Restoration News. She has covered extremist movements in blue American cities for over a decade.

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