The flailing political career of PYLUSD Trustee Leandra Blades may have hit a dead end in her latest effort to target a vulnerable community in furtherance of her culture wars. Leandra’s proposed transgender ban inspired highschool transgender celebrity athlete AB Hernandez, and her mother Nereyda, to drive over from Jurupa Valley to speak at the April 8 PYLUSD meeting. And their public comments, which you can hear HERE (AB at 2:47:32, Nereyda at 2:45:20) put Leandra’s demagoguery to shame with their compelling arguments and serene faces.

The “Bully Pulpit”

The contrast of the mother and daughter’s composed statements with those made by Blades and her acolytes could not have been greater. On the one side was the love of a mother for her child, the love of an athlete for competition, and the respect between an athlete and her teammates. On the other side was the hysteria of fear, anger, ignorance, and lies by those motivated by hatred toward everything that does not fit within the parameters of their self-serving “religion” and political ambition.

The fact that AB Hernandez has become a national target in the assault on transgender athletes makes the use of her name in this piece permissible. Her prowess at local and regional track meets has enabled the Murdoch international media empire to use her as a prime example of why transgender athletes should not compete against other female athletes. Local and national Fox news channels have mentioned her by name, as has the New York Post. The young Ms. Hernandez has been further vilified by the Christian bigots Payton McNabb and Riley Gaines, whose presence at Donald Trump’s State of the Union speech only added to that spew of lies and distortions. McNabb and Gaines have become the pretty [?-ed] young faces of former women athletes allegedly victimized by the inherent unfairness of having to compete against transgender females. Some of the problems with their stories have been recently covered by John Oliver. Together they have distorted the physical, psychological, and professional traumas they incurred after having to compete against transgender women.

While McNabb’s injury may have very real consequences, John Oliver has shown that such an injury likely had little to do with the fact that it was caused by a transgender athlete. Both McNabb and Gaines have made careers opposing LGBTQ+ rights in general, and transgender athlete rights in particular. If you have Christian friends who voted for Trump, they will eagerly explain to you how what happened to McNabb and Gaines illustrates the evil represented by the “woke agenda.”

Newsom’s FLOP

Further contemptible disparagement of AB Hernandez came at the hands of Governor Gavin Newsom in his effort to find common ground with the bigots that helped put Trump in the White House. In a podcast with Charlie Kirk on February 26, the Governor conceded to Kirk that Hernandez offered an example of a problem with basic fairness in allowing transgender athletes to compete. Republicans have long indicated that transgender athletes are the latest targets in their “war on woke.” Since the assault on transgender athletes is a key component of the current Republican Party platform, Newsom should have been much better prepared to defend this assault on a fellow Californian.

Here is a word of advice for the governor or any podcaster who wants to talk with the various Goebbels wannabes in today’s Republican Party. The first query should always be to demand an unequivocal “yes” or “no” answer to the simple question of whether Joe Biden won a free and fair election in 2020. If the interviewee cannot unequivocally answer “yes” to that question, the interview should immediately end on the knowledge that the person is either fundamentally dishonest or intellectually incapable of sustaining meaningful conversations on topics that matter. The problem with interviewing the likes of Charlie Kirk, Steve Bannon, and Michael Savage is not only that they are pathological liars like the president they support, but aside from that they are dreadfully tedious. Trump won the election not because of such intellectual frauds and moral atrocities. Trump won the election because of the corrupting role of money in politics. The Charlie Kirks in this scheme are nothing other than its fetid byproducts.

As we witness daily the frontal Republican assault on every core constitutional principle, the Bill of Rights, and the US leadership role in the global economic and security order, the predicament posed by AB Hernandez might seem a tad trivial. Amid all these fundamental crises brought on by the Republican party, the far-right propaganda sphere nevertheless obsesses on the matter of transgender athletes. Newsom should have been far better prepared to address the transgender issue. He should have talked to Hernandez, her mother, her teammates, her competitors, and had a far more nuanced view of the “fairness” issue. Instead, Newsom chose to play on Kirk’s turf and by the rules Kirk dictated. The issue of transgender athletes is one that Democrats can fight and win, but they will need to be far more intelligent about it than recently illustrated by the California Governor.

The Bully Dais

The chance to see and hear AB Hernandez and her mother Nereyda resulted from the perverse political ambitions of Sonja Shaw and her buddy Leandra Blades. Sonja Shaw is running for California State Superintendent of Schools from her current perch as President of the Chino Valley Unified School District. Over the last few months, Shaw has built her political brand by targeting the sixteen-year-old Hernandez in an on-line bullying campaign. She has joined forces with fired teacher Jessica Tapia who, like Payton McNabb and Riley Gaines, feels herself to be a Christian martyr victimized by the woke mob. Shaw publicly tore up Nereyda’s cease-and-desist letter that demanded she respect the privacy of her daughter (pic below). In Shaw’s world, freaks like AB Hernandez have no privacy rights or even a right to exist as the person she is. In the view of today’s Republican Party, criticizing Shaw’s bigotry is a frontal attack on all of Christianity.

This same phony “Christianity” and political ambition led Leandra Blades to bring this pageant of the absurd to the April PYLUSD board meeting. Leandra, following scripts produced in the same think tanks that have brought us DOGE and tariff policy, wanted to place an item on the agenda that would ban transgender athletes from competing on the assertion that such athletes have an inherent advantage and pose privacy risks to girls who might encounter a naked transgender athlete in a girl’s locker room. The Board’s refusal to place this item on the board agenda infuriated Blades. She has demanded it be placed on the May agenda and threatened litigation if it is not.

There is good reason to keep it off the agenda. Her ban on transgender athletes clearly violates state law and the California Interscholastic Federation (CIF) rules based on that law. Violating state law has never been a barrier in Blades’ pursuit of her political agenda. She uses frivolous litigation to drain funds from public schools. It cannot be said enough: the goal of Blades and her ilk is to destroy the system of free, secular, and universal public education that has developed in this nation since its inception. Frivolous litigation is one of principal tactics they use to undermine the fiscal foundation of public education.

This transgender phrenzy is characteristic of the MAGA playbook in general and Leandra Blades in particular. There is a grand total of zero transgender athletes in the PYLUSD. The transgender ban is just another example of how Blades uses culture wars to solve problems that do not exist and create problems where there had been none. The costs to the district go far beyond the massive waste in frivolous litigation. She has made the PYLUSD into a wilderness of ill-conceived, mismanaged and wasteful programs where teachers training at the best colleges will not want to work and where top administrators will not apply.

Despite Blades’ transphobic resolution violating state law, her ignorance and hatred may become sanctioned at the federal level. The national Republican Party plans to use Title IX to undermine state laws protecting the rights of transgender athletes. In effect, the Republican Party is claiming that there is no such thing as a transgender individual. It is a characteristically preposterous application of Title IX that runs counter to precedent and established science. We are dealing, however, with a Trump SCOTUS that has no regard for either precedent or science.

Blades might ultimately be on the correct side of the politics in this matter because our politics have been so corrupted. The bad science Blades embraces is exceeded only by the horrible theology that underlies her worldview. Enter all those who love to hate in the name of “their sweet Jesus.”

No good answer to a stupid question.

The hysterical bigots at the April PYLUSD board meeting presented the array of misinformation, distortions, and outright lies characteristic of those incapable of conceiving a non-binary world. They told us repeatedly that boys are inherently bigger, stronger, and faster than girls. They explained the immutability of gender identity at birth and the absolute certainty and finality of X and Y chromosome combinations. They incoherently presented awful biology and worse theology. For them, maleness is defined by the penis and femaleness is defined by the absence thereof. It is as simple as that. For the most part, the people embracing this bad biology are the same ones opposed lifesaving covid protocols. In other words, these are the same buffoons who hide behind the pseudo-intellectualism of the Charlie Kirks of today’s Republican Party.

The biology of transgenderism is extremely complicated, relatively new, and constantly evolving. The X and Y chromosomes are not immutable absolutes unaffected by various enzymes, hormones and other genes. There are, for example, legal males with X and Y chromosomes who lack the SRY gene and therefore have a female body. The combinations of chromosomal, enzyme, hormone, and other genetic influences are innumerable.

Gender identity is thus a spectrum that cannot be reduced to the simplistic and stupid question asked by Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn to Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson: “What is a woman?” Tennessee clearly never learned its lessons from the Scopes trial. The proper response to Blackburn’s stupid question is: “Why do men have nipples?” Teachers are often too kind when they tell students that there is no such thing as a stupid question. Senator Blackburn proved that there is.

What Yahweh Told Moses

For those raised in the Judeo-Christian tradition, there are two foundational verses that should cause us all to approach the issue of transgenderism with humility. Exodus 3:14 and 20:7 reveal a God whose majesty is beyond our comprehension. The grandeur and complexity of the universe should be treated with reverence and awe. There are many things in this universe that we will never know or understand. But as Joni Mitchell wisely and succinctly said: “Life is for learning.” Claiming to know the ways and mind of God, as many of these Christians do, is nothing other than blasphemy. It is a desecration of the second commandment, which comes right after the warning against idolatry.

Various forms of hatred against the LGBTQ+ community are now central to that segment of Christians who embrace today’s Republican Party. It took centuries for many Christians to eventually and incompletely embrace Copernicus’ challenge to the geocentric view of the universe. It took centuries for many Christians to eventually and incompletely accept the idea that giving someone the mild cowpox virus could prevent dying from the serious disease of smallpox.* It may take centuries for many Christians to eventually and incompletely accept the idea that a woman might have a penis. Why, though, have these religious extremists focused so much attention on sixteen-year-old AB Hernandez?

*For those who do not know, the word for cow in Latin is like its Spanish cousin and is the etymology for the word vaccine. This original vaccine contributed to the ultimate eradication of smallpox and helped world population grow from the one billion on earth at the time of Edward Jenner first applications of the vaccine to the 8 billion on earth today. Would someone please tell the United States Secretary of Health and Human Services this story?

It Takes an Open Heart and Mind

Republicans have targeted AB Hernandez because she happens to be an outstanding athlete. Transphobes use her as evidence in claiming the inherent advantage transgender females have in sports competition. That allows the bigots to claim that they are not transphobic but merely interested in preserving the integrity of women’s sports. A transgender female playing second-string right field on the high school softball team, and there are some, simply does not have the propaganda cache that Ms. Hernandez provides. Nor does the transgender male who plays right guard on the high school football team. Ms. Hernandez is a problem because she is good.

Really good.

Before looking at her athletic prowess, however, we need to get to know her a bit as a person. AB, the youngest of Nereyda’s four daughters, is the granddaughter of Salvadorean and Mexican immigrants. AB’s dad passed away not long after she was born. Both of her maternal grandparents died due to Covid-related complications when AB was eleven. It is possible that some of the motive pushing AB to excel in athletics is a way of coping with the grief of the tragedies she has experienced. The grief that AB and her widowed mother have suffered has been overcome by their love for each other and the support of their community. Everyone who listened to their public comments with open hearts at the PYLUSD board meeting was certainly moved by what this young woman represents. Not everyone, though, has open hearts or open minds.

Sonja Shaw is evil. It is not possible to know the story of AB Hernandez and undertake the hate-filled campaign against her that Shaw has unless you are a soulless monster. The public ripping up of the Nereyda’s cease and desist order reveals her utter lack of empathy and should become an iconic image for whoever runs against her in the campaign for State Superintendent of Education.

Shaw is a landmark, perhaps a gargoyle or griffin, on the spiritual hellscape brought on by today’s Republican Party. What Shaw has done to AB Hernandez needs to be investigated by the best legal minds and fully prosecuted. Sonja Shaw should have charge over NO child’s education. Perhaps it will be the case that AB Hernandez will contribute to ending the political career of Sonja Shaw and that this story will reverberate in a positive way throughout the country to counter the national campaign targeted against her by phony Christians and media hacks. It is not just the assertion of superior male athletic prowess that is at issue. There are also concerns as to where a transgender female might change clothes.

Where to Shower?

AB presents very much as a female. It is important to point this out because so much hysteria is generated by the fear that a transgender female might reveal her penis in a locker room. Anyone who looks at AB and knows anything at all about teenage boys would have to know that AB properly belongs in the girls’ locker room. The potential for verbal and physical abuse against AB would be much greater in a boys’ locker room. Our schools have dealt with such transgender challenges for some time now. These problems are all resolvable and their particulars are so diverse and complex that we need to rely on our great administrative staffs to address each individual instance. In AB’s case, this would be a matter best discussed with her family, friends, and community. That is exactly what she suggested to the PYLUSD school board.

Good, but not quite LeBron

From the evidence we have, it would NOT appear that competing as a transgender female has given AB an inherent advantage over other girls. AB is tall and thin. She is listed as 5’8” and weighs around 120 pounds.

Her most impressive event is the triple jump, where she has gone slightly over 40 feet. This is an outstanding mark, but significantly below the girls’ national high school record of just under 45 feet, set in California by a cisgender female in 2004. The boys high school record for the triple jump is 54 feet, 10 ¼ inches. It should also be noted that of the three events in which AB competes regularly, the triple jump is the one that most demands the combination of athleticism and training, power and finesse. While AB may be a gifted athlete, she has also worked very hard at her craft.

Her long jump personal best is also impressive but nothing that would place her beyond other elite female high school athletes. AB’s best long jump measures over 17 feet, well below the national record set by a cisgender female at 22 feet, 4 inches. The boys’ long jump record is 26 feet, 10 inches.

Finally, the same applies to her high jump mark. While she has approached the 5-foot mark, the current national record set by a cisgender high school female in 2015 is 6 feet, 4 ½ inches. The national high school boys’ high jump record is 7 feet 7 inches. AB is a great athlete, but she does not represent an insurmountable challenge to other elite cisgender female athletes.

Let us put to rest once and for all the ridiculous notion that there is an army of LeBron James’ out there who fake transgenderism so that they can dominate in women’s sports. There may be measures we may need to derive to ensure that competition involving transgender females remains fair, but AB Hernandez in no way provides an example of an athlete whose gender identity gives her an unfair advantage. Some, however, may argue that it gives her a slight advantage. Such an argument would force us down a rabbit hole that would result in the racial resegregation of all our sports.

“Ban the Wakandans!”

A pretty good example of an oxymoron would be the expression “White NFL cornerback.” It is pretty good but not perfect. Of the 64 starting cornerbacks in the NFL, there are only two expected White starters for the upcoming season: Riley Moss and Cooper De Jean. Jason Sehorn was the last white cornerback of note who played for any length of time, from 1994-2023. The position of cornerback requires a combination of speed, strength, and agility that can be attributed distinctly to athletes of African origin. But not just any Africans. Jon Entine got into some trouble pointing such things out in his controversial book published in 2000, Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We’re Afraid to Talk About It. Entine argued that skin color was not the issue but the fact that so many of the running and jumping world records are held by males and females whose genetics trace them to the specific region in and around Nigeria. His point was that millennia of evolutionary biology provided these peoples with certain athletic advantages in certain specific sports.

Kenyans, for the most part, do not share these types of athletic advantages with the Nigerians. They rather dominate in distance running. Kenyan males have won 21 of the last 25 Boston Marathons. Their females have won 11 of the last 14. Unfortunately for the Kenyans, winning marathons does not have the same prestige as winning soccer matches. In soccer, they rarely beat the Nigerians. And as for real football of the American variety, let’s not even think about the ridiculous portion of the Samoan population that makes it to the NFL. Samoa: the land where Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson is not very exceptional!

So, should any white person give up the dream of starting as a cornerback in the NFL? Should any non-Kenyan distance runner abandon the hope of ever winning the Boston Marathon? Is that what sport is really about?

A Shrinking Performance Gap

The gap between women’s and men’s sports performance is shrinking, and it is not impossible to imagine a time in the future when the gender distinction becomes irrelevant. The definitive event for speed, the 100-meter race, provides an intriguing example of how the gap is closing.

It is intriguing because it is one of the few measurable events where the gap is closing more slowly than in some others. Still, it is closing. In running events, the greater the distance, the faster the gap is closing. The women’s 100-meter world record in 1970 was 11 seconds, whereas the men’s was 10.04. Today, the women’s record is 10.49 and the men’s is 9.58. The 2025 women’s world record holder is only .45 seconds behind the 1970 men’s world record holder. Moreover, women have shaved .05 seconds off the current gap with the men since 1970.

We all wish AB Hernandez every success in her track career and hope that she performs her best as she represents Jurupa Valley High School at the CIF State Finals in Clovis on May 30-31. We hope that Governor Newsom will take the time to learn more about her story and do what is necessary to protect her privacy against the harassment and bullying of people like Sonja Shaw and Charlie Kirk.

We also hope that the governor will help public schools in Orange County thwart attacks on them by the various charter school interests operating through the Orange County Board of Education. These dishonest officials deliberately use litigation to drain public funds out of the classroom and into the courtroom. The board agenda proposed by Sonja Shaw’s friend Leandra Blades will elicit just such frivolous litigation. This needs to stop. Todd Spitzer has refused to investigate the corruption of the OCBE or the local boards whose members collude with the OCBE. Perhaps the governor can investigate this instead of providing platforms to voices that are destroying the nation.

After the powerful and deeply moving statements by Nereyda and her daughter, trustee Todd Frazier proved once again why he has no business sitting on a school board. His inane response?  “I would not want my son competing against my daughter.” What a characteristically ignorant, irrelevant, and self-serving declaration. The question, Trustee Frazier, is whether your daughter has the character, courage, and ability to compete against AB Hernandez.