Trans athlete volleyball controversy ends with California playoff loss

A nationally controversial season got here to an finish Wednesday evening for a California highschool ladies volleyball staff.

Jurupa Valley Excessive Faculty misplaced their first spherical playoff match to Valencia Excessive Faculty in straight units. The loss probably ended trans athlete AB Hernandez’s highschool volleyball profession.

Jurupa Valley’s 2025 season was overshadowed by a nationwide controversy surrounding Hernandez. The staff noticed 10 video games forfeited from the staff’s schedule, and a lawsuit was filed towards the college district by two present and one former teammates of Hernandez.

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Transgender participant AB Hernandez, 4, of Jurupa Valley seems to be on throughout a ladies highschool volleyball match towards Norte Vista at Norte Vista Excessive Faculty on October 16, 2025 in Riverside, California. (Kirby Lee/Getty Photographs)

Nonetheless, Hernandez and different JVHS gamers continued their season and completed as co-champions of the River Valley League, incomes a playoff recreation towards Valencia. But it surely wasn’t a typical highschool playoff recreation.

A number of sources, together with board member Leandra Blades of the Placentia-Yorba Linda Unified Faculty District, the place Valencia Excessive Faculty is situated, confirmed to Fox Information Digital that not less than one in all Valencia’s gamers didn’t come to the court docket Wednesday to keep away from a confrontation with Hernandez.

Subsequent up within the stands have been a number of feminine sports activities activists, led by Sophia Lorey, director of California Household Council Outreach. The activists included native teenage ladies, a few of whom have fought alongside or towards Hernandez previously.

Protesters from ‘Save Ladies’ Sports activities’ collect at a California highschool volleyball recreation involving a trans athlete on October 22, 2025. (Courtesy of Sophia Lorey)

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Lorey offered movies to Fox Information Digital of different spectators on the recreation harassing the women in attendance who have been there with Lorey.

And regardless of all of the pomp and circumstance, it wasn’t even Hernandez’s first playoff volleyball match. Hernandez had competed for Jurupa Valley every of the previous three years and likewise went to the postseason in 2024.

However the added nationwide consideration and controversy befell the staff this 12 months after Hernandez discovered himself on the middle of a political battle between President Donald Trump and California Gov. Gavin Newsom on the finish of the spring athletics season.

Hernandez ran to the women state finals in lengthy leap, triple leap and excessive leap, prompting Trump to ship out a Reality Social submit within the days main as much as the occasion warning Newsom and the state towards permitting a trans athlete to compete within the ladies’ occasions. Trump signed an government order in February banning colleges from permitting organic males to take part in ladies’ sports activities, however the California Interscholastic Federation (CIF) has persistently defied this.

As an alternative, the CIF modified its guidelines to provide each feminine athlete who competed in the identical occasions as Hernandez a spot within the competitors or a spot larger on the medal podium in the event that they completed behind a organic male athlete.

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Hernandez went on to take first place within the excessive leap and triple leap, and second place within the lengthy leap.

The rule change resulted in Hernandez sharing podium spots with feminine athletes who completed behind the trans athlete within the state finals.

The U.S. Division of Justice then filed a lawsuit a month later in July towards the CIF and the California Division of Schooling for refusing to alter their transgender insurance policies to adjust to Trump’s Holding Males Out of Girls’s Sports activities government order.

Newsom’s workplace beforehand offered an announcement to Fox Information Digital deferring accountability for the state of affairs to the CIF, CDE and the state legislature.

“CIF is an unbiased, nonprofit group that regulates highschool sports activities. The California Division of Schooling is a separate constitutional company. Neither falls below the governor’s authority. CIF and the CDE have said that they observe present state regulation — a regulation handed and signed by Governor Jerry Brown (not Newsom) in 2013 and according to 21 different states. To enact the regulation change, the legislature must ship the governor a invoice. They didn’t try this,” the assertion stated.

The California State Legislature takes place on April 1 two accounts blocked that will overturn the present regulation that enables males in ladies’ sports activities. Each Democrat voted towards it, with Assemblymember Rick Chavez Zbur arguing that one of many payments “actually jogs my memory of what occurred in Nazi Germany within the Thirties.” We’re shifting in the direction of autocracy on this nation. In Nazi Germany, transgender folks have been persecuted and excluded from public life.’

Zbur stated this whereas within the presence of a descendant of a Holocaust survivor, who was pressured to excuse herself from the room, in line with Republican Assemblymember Kate Sanchez.

“She acquired up and left as a result of she was so disgusted by the comparability,” Sanchez instructed Fox Information Digital.

No coverage adjustments have been carried out. So Hernandez was allowed to compete as a woman, develop into a nationwide spectacle after which play a ultimate season of highschool volleyball, prompting protests from opponents and teammates alike.

Two senior gamers from Jurupa Valley, McPherson and Hadeel Hazameh, stepped away from the staff this season in protest towards the trans athlete.

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McPherson and Hazameh have accomplished that too has filed a lawsuit towards the Jurupa Unified Faculty District, citing their expertise enjoying and sharing a locker room with Hernandez the previous three seasons. McPherson’s older sister and former JVHS ladies volleyball participant Madison McPherson is the third plaintiff in that lawsuit.

With the autumn sports activities season coming to an finish, Hernandez continues to be eligible to compete in one other ladies observe and subject season within the spring.

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