March 10 2026, 08:15 
California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) recently defended his overall support of trans rights but said he cannot see a way for trans women to fairly compete on women’s sports teams.
In an interview with Katie Couric, the veteran journalist asked Newsom what he’d say to folks who believe he continues to throw trans people under the bus, both for his stance on trans athletes and for his call to the Democratic party to stop focusing so much on trans issues.
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Newsom replied by pointing to the many pieces of pro-trans legislation he has signed and claimed he has signed more than any other elected official in the country. “Period. Full stop. And I can back that up,” he said. He touted the fact that he has a trans godson and said he spoke up for trans folks years before the movement for trans rights had entered the mainstream.
He said he still holds those beliefs and is “doubling down on all of that and the grace that people just want to survive and just want to live their lives out loud.”
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But he also said he still “cannot back up an argument in favor” of trans women participating “in a competitive sports environment” after “having experienced multiple occasions two years in a row in track championships in California” where he claimed “people were displaced” and they “couldnt square the circle of how to make this fair.”
“I don’t think it is on the sports side,” he said.
The most recent trans athlete controversy in California centered on trans high school student-athlete AB Hernandez, who beat a cisgender female athlete to win a place to compete in the state finals for the long-jump championship.
Donald Trump called Hernandez’s participation “not fair and totally demeaning to women and girls” and threatened to permanently end federal funding to the state and to empower local cops to stop her from competing unless the state complied with his executive order seeking to ban trans athletes from competing on teams matching their gender identity.
In response, the California Interscholastic Federation (CIF), the governing body overseeing the state’s high school sports programs, announced a pilot program that would allow “any biological female” student athlete who “would have” qualified for finals — if Hernandez hadn’t beat them — to compete in the 2025 CIF State Track and Field Championships.
Yet, not only are there a minuscule number of trans athletes competing across the country on any level, but studies also show that they don’t actually have any advantage. A major analysis recently published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, for example, found that, after one to three years of hormone therapy, trans and cis women have comparable levels of athletic fitness.
Newsom has shocked many in the Democratic Party by siding with the conservatives on this particular matter. He made waves when he sat down with the late right-wing activist Charlie Kirk and agreed it is “deeply unfair” to allow transgender female athletes to compete against cisgender girls and women. He also agreed that Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign ad criticizing then-Vice President Kamala Harris’ support of taxpayer-funded gender-affirming surgeries for trans inmates was “devastating” on her presidential bid.
And just last month, Newsom told CNN’s Dana Bash that Democrats will continue to struggle unless they become more “culturally normal,” which appeared to be a euphemism for ignoring LGBTQ+ people’s needs.
During the interview, Newsom reaffirmed his vacillating stances on trans and queer issues. He touted his ahead-of-his-time fight for marriage equality as mayor of San Francisco, saying it was the “right thing to do” but also naming it as one of the cultural issues he “fell prey” to and saying, “I understand the critique” other Democrats had of him at the time.
Newsom then responded to a question from Bash about what Democrats need to do to win.
“From the prism of purely politics, there’s no doubt that the Democratic party needs to be – dare I say – more culturally normal,” he said. “I believe that, less prone to spending disproportionate amounts of time on pronouns, identity politics, more focused on tabletop issues, things that really matter, the stacking of stress in terms of the electricity bills and childcare costs and health care and obviously housing costs and how easily we get trapped in that, how I’ve fallen prey to that. I mean here I was way out front on marriage equality.”
“But I think if you can’t hold the line on competitive sports… competitive, medal sports, if we can’t find that nuance, I think we’re going to lose a lot of people. We’re not going to get invited to larger conversations. So I do think we have to be more sensitive in that respect.”
The notion that Democrats are obsessed with so-called identity politics at the expense of kitchen table issues is not reflected in the data. In the 2024 elections, Republicans invested about $215 million into airing anti-trans TV ads that repeated claims about Democrats wanting “boys to play girls’ sports” and supporting taxpayer-funded gender-affirming surgeries for inmates. One ad — aired repeatedly during football games to reach male voters and suburban women — showed pictures of Harris next to a drag queen, a trans woman, and a nonbinary person; and ended with the tagline, “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.”
Democrats, on the other hand, largely avoided engaging with this issue to the point where trans advocates voiced worry that the party was ignoring the community. Democrats only spent $9 million to refute the GOP’s anti-trans attacks, rebuffing the idea that Democrats lost for embracing trans issues too tightly. Additionally, numerous trans and nonbinary candidates won historic races on Election Day, rebuffing the idea that voters are transphobic.
The Democratic National Convention didn’t even have a transgender speaker and only mentioned trans issues once during a speech by Human Rights Campaign (HRC) President Kelley Robinson. In one of her first TV interviews, Kamala Harris briefly said that the Constitution requires the government to provide medically necessary care, including gender-affirming care, to all inmates.
Newsom did sign a group of pro-LGBTQ+ bills last year. However, he has faced anger from some trans community members for vetoing a bill to help provide hormone replacement therapy medications to patients at a time when hospitals and clinics are restricting such care.
He did sign the “Youth Sports for All Act,” though, which directs a commission to improve access to sports for all groups, regardless of race, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, income, or geographic location.”
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