Thanks a Lot, Gavin Newsom

The president of the United States just put an anti-trans bullseye on a high school junior with the governor of California's help.

Michael Buckner/Variety via Getty Images

I’ve always been a little uncomfortable around the type of person who really really cares about high school athletics. I’m not talking about a proud parent or an invested member of a close-knit school community; I mean the random, grown-ass adults who spend an inordinate amount of their limited time on this earth focused on the athletic achievements (and bodies) of children. That high school sports sit at the cutting edge of this country’s rapidly accelerating anti-trans movement is hardly surprising, then, since so much of that enterprise is already predicated on the examination and policing of other people’s bodies.

Given President Donald Trump’s legally established pattern of sexual assault—itself a form of exerting control over another person’s body—it’s also no surprise that he has embraced the anti-trans obsession over high school sports. This morning, Trump threatened to turn California’s Interscholastic Federation 2025 Track and Field Championship into a literal federal case over the participation of a single trans athlete, a high school junior, whose “ILLEGAL” participation is “NOT FAIR” and “TOTALLY DEMEANING TO WOMEN AND GIRLS,” according to a typically stupid Trump post.

That Trump here is being both grotesquely bigoted and bizarrely fixated on a local high school athlete is pretty par for the course from a guy who has, for decades, been, well… a gross bigot with a bizarre fixation on issues well outside his immediate sphere of understanding. Lecherous segregationist gonna try to segregate lecherously, I suppose. What’s important here is not simply that Trump is once again making a personal attack on a member of an already-marginalized community. It’s also this line: “The Governor, himself, said it is ‘UNFAIR.’”

That, of course, is a reference to California Gov. Gavin Newsom—Democrat, rumored frontrunner to challenge the Republican nominee (Trump? Vance? Donj?) for the White House in 2028, and someone who has now helped Trump turbo-charge his anti-trans campaign.