Former Hempfield athlete laments Trump’s executive order of transgender ban in women’s, girls sports

• By Mike Gross/LNP | LancasterOnline

“The war on women’s sports is over,’’ President Donald Trump said Wednesday.

He had just signed an executive order intended to ban transgender athletes from participating in women’s and girls’ sports. A large group of young athletes crowded around him and applauded when he finished applying his elaborate signature.

Jenna Yaeger wasn’t applauding. She wasn’t surprised, either.

“It seems like trans people have been targeted a lot,” Yaeger, now 19 and a student at the University of Delaware, said Wednesday. “You could almost say it’s like scapegoating us and trying to pin the blame for a lot of issues on one small subset of the population.”

In fall 2020, Yaeger competed on the boys cross country team at Hempfield. In spring 2021, she joined the girls track team as a transgender female.

And entered the eye of a storm of controversy.

Complaints from Yaeger’s teammates led to a debate that included two emotional school-board meetings that packed Hempfield’s auditorium and ended Yaeger’s track career — by her choice.

It coincided with the Hempfield School District’s partnership with the Independence Law Center, a Harrisburg-based firm associated with Christian evangelical movement politics.

Hempfield is one of three Lancaster County school districts, with Penn Manor and Elizabethtown, that have policies on transgender athletes, all with guidance from Independence Law Center.

The Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic Association (PIAA) and the Lancaster-Lebanon League have no guidelines or policy on transgender athletes.

The conflict may be just beginning, as the executive order’s impact and interpretation will be hammered out in courts, legislatures and, perhaps, in gyms and on playing fields.

Trump signed the order on National Girls & Women in Sports Day — not a coincidence. It is part of an ongoing attempt by the Trump administration to define gender as strictly male or female, as assigned at birth.

A related order, issued the day Trump took office last month, is intended to apply to passports and other official documents and could impact where prisoners are assigned in federal facilities.

Wednesday’s order includes language that could withhold federal funds from schools that do not comply, and could bring those schools into violation of Title IX, which prohibits sexual discrimination in schools.

Carl Charles, an attorney for Lambda Legal, an LGBTQ+ legal advocacy organization, told NBC News the order “takes aim at K-12 and college athletes, a vanishingly small subset of people who on the whole, outside of a few sensationalized examples, have been participating in school sports programs for decades with absolutely no issues.”

According to a Trump spokesman, the order could prohibit transgender athletes from coming to America for international competition by investigating them for fraud. The 2028 Summer Olympics are scheduled to be held in Los Angeles.

“Female athletes have been forced on to the front lines,” Trump said without evidence or attribution, “as men claiming to be girls have stolen more than 3,500 victories and invaded more than 11,000 competitions designed for women.”

Trump mentioned the specific example of Algerian boxer Imane Khelif, who won a welterweight gold medal in the Paris Olympics last summer, including a bout in which Italian boxer Angela Carini quit in tears just 46 seconds into the fight.

Trump called Khelif a man, although she is a woman and not transgender.

At the college level, ESPN cited an NCAA source saying Wednesday the governing body did not oppose the order and welcomed the guidance.

On one hand, there are sincere concerns about competitive balance. On the other is a sincere belief in the physical, mental and emotional value of sports participation.

Wednesday’s order comes down strongly in favor of the first concern. Others passionately defend the second.

“We advocate for supporting transgender youth,” Parker Webb, founder and executive director of Lancaster County Chooses Love, said Wednesday. “And if you look at every medical establishment, every psychiatric establishment, every legitimate establishment involved in medicine and mental health care will tell you that gender affirming care is life-saving.”

Yaeger said she prefers not to think about it.

“I try not to think about high school, to be honest,” Yaeger said. “I mean, it was probably the worst time of my life, so I prefer not to revisit it.”