You know, up until this last week, I was very proud of the governor of my state, Gavin Newsom. He has long held a place of the highest honor and regard in the gay community for being the first politician, in the entire country, to use his considerable authority as the then-mayor of San Francisco to bring equal rights for the LGBTQ+ community one step closer to reality by granting marriage licenses to same-sex couples in that city. The year was 2004; he didn’t wait for the state legislature to pass a bill greenlighting it, as a Democrat he was criticized by party grandees, as well as a young Barack Obama, running for the Senate from Illinois at the time, who infamously refused to be photographed with him, and the California Supreme Court ultimately annulled the marriages he had authorized, ruling they conflicted with state law.
Still, he had taken a principled, courageous stand. In the end, his foresight was confirmed and underscored when the same California Supreme Court, in 2008, struck down the state’s same-sex marriage ban, and while Proposition 8, a subsequent, voter-backed state constitutional amendment outlawing gay marriage, first passed, it was later invalidated by a federal appeals court in a decision that ultimately made its way in 2015, eleven years after Newsom had first granted same-sex marriage licenses, to the United States Supreme Court where in Obergefell v. Hodges the justices ruled that same-sex couples have the right to marry in all 50 states (the ruling also and importantly requires states to recognize same-sex marriages that were legally performed in other states, thus making gay marriage the law of the land even if any given state doesn’t explicitly allow it). All because then-Mayor Newsom stood with us and did the right thing. That remains a profile in courage.
Here in California we have known Gavin Newsom wants to be president for a while. In a televised debate on Fox news moderated by conservative gadfly Sean Hannity, Governor Newsom famously took on another governor with the Oval Office in his sights, Florida Republican Ron DeSantis, before he was knocked out in the primaries during the last presidential election cycle. Newsom was an outspoken surrogate for Biden and then for Harris in 2024 who articulately pressed the liberal-progressive agenda and defended their administration. He’s even earned a nickname from the Mussolini of Mar-a-Lago: Governor “Newscum.”
Unfortunately, last week he debuted a podcast, and the first guest on his podcast? Charlie Kirk, a Christian nationalist and founder of the conservative activist group Turning Point USA. Okay, Newsom is known for taking the fight to the belly of the beast; maybe this is just another example of him standing up to bigots and not shying away from engaging with Right-wing nutjobs and hate mongers. But just like a kid finding out that Santa isn’t real, we’ve had our eyes opened – our trust, our belief that we had an articulate, a courageous, a fair-minded, a sane advocate in high office seeking the highest office was dashed against the rocky cliffs of California’s northern coast.
And who did Messieurs Newsom and Kirk target? On whom did they find common ground and common cause? Transgender athletes.
It’s ludicrous. Take any cause célèbre for American bigots, and you’ll find they misrepresent the problem, or even that it is a problem. Those crowing about this issue would have you believe there’s a trans athlete on every girls’ team of every sport played. But for some of us, facts matter. Consider this:
Newsweek also spoke to Gillian Branstetter, a spokesperson for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), who told Newsweek that Save Women’s Sports, a leading voice in the bid to ban transgender athletes from competing in girls’ sports, identified only five transgender athletes competing on girls’ teams in school sports for grades K through 12.
Yes, that’s right. Not 5000, not 500, not even 50 – just five trans student-athletes. All of this legislation, work, lobbying and anger – is aimed at preventing a tiny handful of young people from playing school sports.
And the New York Times reported that out of more than 500,000 college athletes in the NCAA, there are fewer than 10 who identify as trans. So this trans boogeyman in girls’ sports the Right is warning about amounts to little more than 15 athletes in a country that has 340,110,988 people in it.
There’s another number I’d like you to consider – three. Just fifty years ago, there were “three-articles-of-clothing” laws which said if you wore three articles of clothing that were indicative of the opposite gender, the police could stop you, arrest you… take away your liberty, your freedom. It was those laws that led to the police raiding a gay bar in NYC in 1969 kicking off the Stonewall Riots. I have never worn three articles of clothing that were indicative of the opposite gender (fact check: okay, there was that one time), but I stand shoulder to shoulder, epaulet to epaulet, with those who do, whether they are kids or adults, whether they are playing sports, doing drag, or just going about their daily lives.
It would appear Governor Newsom no longer stands with us.
