The Department of Justice filed a landmark lawsuit against the California Department of Education and the California Interscholastic Federation, the governing body for the state’s high school sports, for violating Title IX by forcing biological girls to compete against biological males in athletic competition.
The lawsuit alleges that California’s policies “eviscerate equal athletic opportunities for girls” and create “a hostile educational environment that denies girls educational opportunities.” The federal government is seeking a court order to block California’s policy immediately and has signaled it may withhold billions of dollars in federal education funding if the state refuses to comply.
The case is now being pursued under Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, who assumed the role after Trump replaced Pam Bondi in April 2026.
When the lawsuit was filed in July 2025, then-Attorney General Pam Bondi was unsparing in her condemnation of California’s policy. “The Governor of California has previously admitted that it is deeply unfair to force women and girls to compete with men and boys in competitive sports,” she said.
“But not only is it deeply unfair, it is also illegal under federal law. This Department of Justice will continue its fight to protect equal opportunities for women and girls in sports.” She then turned to the rest of the country with a warning that every state defying common sense and federal law should hear plainly: “If you do not comply, you’re next. We will protect girls in girls sports.”
The lawsuit has been years in the making, driven by a controversy that has played out in painful public view on California’s track and field circuit. For two consecutive years, a biological male student competing on the girls’ circuit has dominated female competitors in jumping events at the state championship level, winning the high jump, long jump, and triple jump while biological girls who trained their entire athletic careers for these moments were pushed off the podium they earned. The image of a female runner-up standing on the gold medal podium last year, where she technically should have finished first, went viral and became a defining symbol of what happens when activist ideology overrides basic fairness in competitive athletics.
California’s response to the mounting outrage was not to protect its girls. It was to create a patch. The California Interscholastic Federation quietly introduced a pilot policy allowing additional biological female athletes to qualify and receive duplicate medals in events where a transgender athlete competed. The girls displaced from first place were handed consolation hardware. The underlying policy remained untouched. As Sophia Lorey, a former NCAA soccer player and outreach director for Save Girls Sports, put it plainly: “If they have to create special exceptions and backdoor rule changes to placate frustrated athletes, that’s not equality, that’s a confession. Girls’ sports should be for girls, full stop.”
The lawsuit points directly to what is at stake beyond the medal stand. Girls across California, the federal government argues, are being displaced from podiums, denied awards, and missing out on critical visibility for college scholarships and recognition they rightfully earned through years of training and sacrifice. They are also, the lawsuit notes, required to share intimate spaces such as locker rooms with biological males, an invasion of privacy that no girl or her parents should be forced to accept.
California’s law permitting biological males to compete in girls’ sports based on gender identity has been on the books since 2013, making it one of the most entrenched and aggressive such policies in the country. Governor Gavin Newsom has presided over it without apology. His office’s response to the federal lawsuit was to accuse the Trump administration of cynical distraction tactics. This from a governor who once admitted publicly that forcing girls to compete against biological males is, in his own words, deeply unfair, and then did precisely nothing to stop it.
The numbers make the politics of this issue clear. A recent poll found that roughly seven in ten American adults believe transgender female athletes should not be allowed to compete in girls’ and women’s sports at the high school, college, or professional level. That view is shared by approximately nine in ten Republicans and even roughly half of Democrats. The radical gender ideology being enforced in California’s public schools is not a mainstream position. It is an activist agenda being imposed on girls and their families by a government that long ago stopped listening to them.
President Trump signed an executive order in February 2025 aimed at barring biological males from competing on female sports teams at any institution receiving federal funding. California’s educational establishment responded by announcing it would follow state law rather than the president’s order. That defiance is now being answered in federal court.
The lawsuit is more than a legal filing. It is a declaration that the federal government under Donald Trump will stand between girls and the ideological agenda that has spent years systematically dismantling the protections Title IX was designed to guarantee them. Title IX was passed in 1972 to ensure that biological females had equal opportunities in education and athletics. Using that same law to now force girls to lose to biological males is a perversion of everything it was meant to protect.
