California Forces Girls Into Basketball Playoff With Boy

State basketball tournaments are underway around the country. President Donald Trump’s recent executive order is supposed to keep boys out of girls’ sports. Instead, California’s defiance will enable the rich, beautiful people of one school to unfairly dominate Christians from a small school in playoffs this Saturday — unless it’s stopped.

The president’s order would withhold and rescind “all funds from educational programs that deprive women and girls of fair athletic opportunities.” While the California Interscholastic Federation (CIF), which runs California’s postseason tournaments, appears to be a private organization, it is a typical private-public partnership that masks public authority.

Public schools join the CIF. Representatives of California’s Department of Education sit on its board by charter. School board members make up its board. Many sponsors are federal grantees. CIF received Covid money. Schools in the CIF receive federal funds for disabled students and free-reduced school lunches, among many other things. These schools are sponsoring boys to participate in girls’ sports—and state authority abets it.

Not every school in CIF receives federal funds, though. Tucked in at the border of Saint Francis Woods’ historic neighborhood and residential West Portal lies the tony San Francisco Waldorf School. This mostly white and Asian school uses the Waldorf educational style, a progressive system developed by the Austrian occultist and clairvoyant Rudolf Steiner.

Tech executives, executive vice presidents, venture capitalists, and university leaders constitute the Waldorf School’s board of trustees. The school’s website boasts an “Equity and Inclusion” page. It says the Waldorf school “strive[s] to sustain a demographic that reflects the diversity of the Bay Area.”

Sixty-three percent of Waldorf’s student body is white. Eighty-seven percent of Waldorf families live in a metro area where the minimum recommended annual family income is $240,000. Only the right kind of people can afford its $59,000-per-year tuition.

San Francisco Waldorf School also boasts a girls’ basketball team that has qualified for CIF’s North Coast Section Division 6 girls’ basketball playoffs. The team’s best player is named Henry Hanlon, who averages 20 points per game and stands head and shoulders above the girls on the court. Outkick released a video of Henry, an openly transgender athlete, jumping for a rebound with the kind of explosiveness found in the top 1 percent of women’s athletes but common among boys.

Waldorf’s opponent in the CIF playoffs is a small Christian school, Cornerstone Christian, from Antioch, California, a working-class Bay Area suburb at the edge of the East Bay. A local church runs Cornerstone. Its annual tuition is $10,000.

Cornerstone’s website doesn’t boast of a $8.2 million fundraising effort to build a gym, like Waldorf’s. There is no “Diversity and Inclusion” section on their website. Movers and shakers do not sit on Cornerstone’s board.

Yet this weekend, despite the president’s executive order, Cornerstone’s administrators, parents, and athletes must either put their daughters in jeopardy by competing against Henry and the powerful elites who run the San Francisco Waldorf School or face the wrath of the California Interscholastic Federation.

Other schools have objected to Henry’s participation. Henry also played volleyball for Waldorf. When Stone Ridge Christian School refused to play against Henry’s team, the CIF responded with chapter and verse: “Any team that withdraws from CIF playoffs is subject to sanctions at both the Section and State levels.” Alliance Defending Freedom is on the case.

Trump’s executive order gives Cornerstone a recourse Stone Ridge did not have in the fall. Investigations of California schools are underway. Speedy action from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights would protect a vulnerable school like Cornerstone from the Waldorf goliath.

Scott Yenor is senior director of state coalitions at the Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life and a professor of political science at Boise State University.