President Donald Trump’s executive order banning transgender athletes from women’s sports has once again put California in his crosshairs, with leaders of scholastic sports teams saying they will defy his directive and follow state law.
California, which has been a persistent thorn in the Republican president’s side, will follow existing state rules, which allow transgender student-athletes to play on teams corresponding with their gender identity.
The state law “provides students with the opportunity to belong, connect, and compete in education-based experiences in compliance with California law,” according to a statement from the Sacramento-based California Interscholastic Federation.
Trump signed the executive order titled “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports,” which directs agencies to withdraw federal funding for schools that refused to comply. The order, signed Wednesday on National Girls and Women in Sports Day, delivered on a promise the president made on the campaign trail. Trump is relying on a revised reading of federal civil rights laws, specifically Title IX, and said schools that do not follow his directive will lose their federal funding.
He also used the event to slam former President Joe Biden, who had repealed Trump’s antitransgender stance when he took office in 2021. Trump said Biden “caved to woke activists who wanted biological males to be treated as women in workplace showers, competitive sports, prisons, and rape shelters.”
The conflict with state law is likely to end up in court. If the courts find in favor of Trump, his order would not only apply to public schools and universities but also to private colleges that accept federal grants for research.
A day after Trump signed the order, the NCAA announced that transgender athletes would be barred from participating in all women’s college sports.
“We strongly believe that clear, consistent and uniform eligibility standards would best serve today’s student-athletes instead of a patchwork of conflicting state laws and court decisions,” NCAA President Charlie Baker said in a statement. “To that end, President Trump’s order provides a clear, national standard.”
The NCAA’s previous policy on transgender athletes left the decision up to each sport’s national governing body. Volleyball, for example, allowed a transgender athlete to compete as a woman even with high testosterone levels while rowing’s limit was one-fourth of volleyball’s.
Trump’s executive order came on the heels of a lawsuit filed by the families of two high school girls in California over the state law that allows transgender athletes to compete in girls’ sports. The lawsuit, filed in November 2024 by Ryan Starling, the father of Taylor Starling, and Daniel and Cynthia Slavin, the parents of Kaitlyn Slavin, targeted the Riverside Unified School District.
The plaintiffs alleged that a transgender athlete at the school had ousted the girls from their spots on the cross-country team. They also claimed that when the girls protested what they believed was an unfair policy by wearing T-shirts that said “Save Girls’ Sports,” school officials compared their actions to wearing a swastika in front of a Jewish student.
The lawsuit was expanded last month to include state agencies, California Attorney General Rob Bonta, and California State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond.
David Cruz, a University of Southern California law professor who has studied transgender issues, told the San Francisco Chronicle that he did not “know any legal authority that would let Donald Trump unilaterally forbid transgender girls and women from playing in sex-segregated women’s sports.”
He added that some federal courts have interpreted Title IX in ways that contradict Trump’s view and said he knew of nothing in the law that would allow the president to “order schools, recreational leagues, or other sponsors of sports to simply cease allowing those transgender athletes to compete consistent with their gender identity.”
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While the fights play out in court, California Republicans are trying to pass state legislation that is essentially a carbon copy of the federal order.
A bill announced by Assemblywoman Kate Sanchez was introduced in January, though it is unlikely to pass. Democrats hold a supermajority in the state legislature.