CA Preemptively Sues Justice Department
Anticipating reprisal from the federal government for refusing to blanket ban trans athletes in California, Attorney General Rob Bonta’s office announced that they were filing suit against the Department of Justice to prevent them from freezing federal funds intended for the state.
by Alyssa Steinsiek
The fed threatened to withdraw federal funding from the state of California unless they banned transgender girls from competing in school sports statewide. The deadline for California to capitulate was Monday, June 9. Instead of acquiescing to potentially unconstitutional demands from the Trump administration, California Attorney General Rob Bonta filed suit against the Justice Department.
I reported on California’s beef with the fed over trans teen track star AB Hernandez last week. To keep it short and sweet, Donald Trump continues to be chronically mad over trans girls competing in sports, and he’s threatening to issue fines or even freeze federal funds intended for the state of California. The last time his administration pulled this stunt was to castigate Maine Governor Janet Mills for publicly embarrassing him; for this crime, Donald Trump punished and starved vulnerable low-income children. When Maine sued, the fed agreed to restore funding if the suit was dropped.
The federal government has not officially issued sanctions against the state of California yet, and so the Monday lawsuit is a “pre-enforcement” suit, filed “in anticipation of imminent legal retaliation against California’s school systems,” according to Bonta’s office.
“The President and his Administration are demanding that California school districts break the law and violate the Constitution or face legal retaliation. They’re demanding that our schools discriminate against the students in their care and deny their constitutionally protected rights,” said Bonta in a press release. “As we’ve proven time and again in court, just because the President disagrees with a law, that doesn’t make it any less of one.”
The Justice Department’s Assistant Attorney General, Harmeet Dhillon, sent California public schools a threatening letter on June 2, insisting that allowing transgender girls to compete in school sports would be a violation of the Fourth Amendment’s “Equal Protections Clause,” even though many courts across the nation have made rulings that suggest, shockingly, equal protection applies to transgender people too.
Bear in mind that the Assistant Attorney General recently lost a whopping 70% of her Civil Rights Division staff in what NPR described as a “mass exodus” over Dhillon’s intent to reshape the office into a cudgel that will enforce Trump’s executive orders, regardless of whether or not they violate Americans’ civil liberties.
The supervising body that oversees California public school athletic competitions, California Interscholastic Federation (CIF), altered their participation rules ahead of the state competitions that Hernandez took place in. Perhaps hoping to stay the Justice Department’s hand, CIF decreed that transgender girls would be allowed to participate, but that any cisgender competitors behind them would move up one placement rank when the competition was over.
Unfortunately for Trump and his transphobic lackeys, the competition didn’t play out as they’d hoped. Instead, Hernandez shared the podium with her cisgender competitors, who proudly declared it “an honor” to stand alongside her.
"I wasn't expecting any of it to be honest. I was just expecting to go out there and compete alone, but the support was amazing," Hernandez said of the support she received from her fellow athletes at the competition. "They really made my experience perfect. I will forever be grateful for them because they helped me get through the weekend … I did what I wanted to do. My performance was all I wanted to be good. So all this backlash… I performed my best so that's all I cared about."
Harmeet Dhillon’s demands of California public schools carry no legal weight. Many courts, including the federal 9th Circuit Court of Appeals whose jurisdiction includes most of the American west, have already agreed that it is the exclusion transgender students from competition and not their inclusion that constitutes a violation of equal rights guaranteed by the constitution.
Trump’s Justice Department has already lost this fight in Maine, and I’m looking forward to seeing them lose it in California, and—if we’re lucky—the Supreme Court.
Alyssa Steinsiek is a trans woman journalist who reports on news relevant to the queer community and occasionally posts on BlueSky.
