Two Oregon highschool athletes refused to share the rostrum with a transgender competitor on the state’s monitor and subject championships, footage reveals.
The feminine college students — Tigard Excessive Faculty’s Alexa Anderson and Sherwood Excessive Faculty’s Reese Eckard — stepped down from the excessive leap podium because the winners of the competitors had been being introduced throughout the Eugene stadium Saturday night time.
Anderson and Eckard had completed in third and fourth place, whereas Ida B. Wells Excessive Faculty’s trans scholar Lia Rose tied for fifth.
Rose had competed in boys’ monitor and subject divisions as just lately as 2024 and 2023, in keeping with Fox Information.
Crowds had been cheering for the athletes all through the ceremony, and it stays unclear how the viewers reacted to the protest.
A race official confirmed up shortly after Anderson and Eckard stepped down and ushered them away as they stood with their backs to the rostrum.
It stays unclear if their standing on the competitors was affected by the transfer.
However the incident shortly gained consideration on-line, particularly after ladies’s sports activities advocate Riley Gaines — who’s staunchly against transgender athletes competing in ladies’s sports activities — posted footage from it on X.
“Watch this. Two female athletes in Oregon refused to stand on the podium because a boy was awarded a place,” Gaines wrote.
“Girls have had enough,” she added.
The video was additionally picked up by different accounts — together with “Libs of TikTok” — which praised the athletes’ act of defiance.
It was simply the newest incident the place ladies’s athletes have protested towards transgender rivals of their division.
In April, ladies’s fencer Stephanie Turner took a knee moderately than competing with a trans particular person throughout a Maryland match, and was placed on a year-long probation by USA Fencing for the transfer.
And in Could, 16-year-old excessive schooler Reese Hogan completed second to a trans athlete in California’s CIF Southern Part Finals triple leap competitors — however stepped as much as the primary place spot on the rostrum after her competitor stepped down.
