About a dozen high school girls calmly walked out of a cross-country race rather than compete with a transgender runner in Washington State on Tuesday.
The group of girls from the Camas High School cross-country team gathered together to mount a protest against their school for allowing a boy to switch from the boys’ cross-country team to the girls’ team right in the middle of the season.
After the teams lined up to start the race and the whistle blew at Tuesday’s event, many of the Camas High girls walked off the course in protest.
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Fox News added that the boy who quit the boys’ team and turned up among the girls ranked 76th in the boys’ JV race, but in his first girls’ race he won first place.
Fox News reported that student Holly Burns was one of the leaders who organized the protest walkout. Her parents also approved her actions.
“She wanted to kind of play it safe, so we, we weren’t going to push it. We just kind of let her kind of feel it out. We told her that. We supported her whichever decision she tries to make,” father Kevin Burns told Fox News.
“The more I heard about her friends wanting to do something, the more I heard about her team wanting to do something; we definitely were in support of that,” he added. “We told her, do what you think is best.”
“I don’t see how it’s OK to discriminate against my daughter and the daughters of everyone else that is trying to fairly compete,” the father exclaimed.
Holly’s mother, Sarah, said she was shocked to learn that a boy was transferring into the Camas girls’ cross-country team.
“You hear about it, but you just never think it’s going to be on your kid’s small cross-country team,” she said.
The family also said school officials told them they couldn’t hold up their protest signs during the race.
“They said that we’re not allowed to hold up signs at this event today,” Mr. Burns said. “I questioned them if that was constitutionally legal, if we could express ourselves by just holding a sign. And we kind of went back and forth about public versus private property. And in the end, it didn’t seem like they really had a grasp on what they could tell us to do or not.
“So I just went ahead and held up my sign, and they had several security guards following me and pestering me and telling me that I would have to leave. And I just said, no, I’m not going to leave,” he said.
The school said it follows Washington State’s education rules for transgender athletes, in place since 2007.
Meanwhile, the girls on the Camas team and their parents vow to keep protesting the school’s decision to allow a boy to race among the girls.
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