California Department of Education halted fitness testing, in part, because it was not inclusive of gender diverse kids

"Sex is a significant factor in health and fitness. It is important for gender-questioning children to be taught this so that they can understand and monitor their own health needs."

• Transgender and nonbinary students wonder which scores will apply to them and are faced with a situation that triggers stressful and disenfranchisement with/from true self.

• If a student is physically one gender but identifies as another, they might have trouble passing.

• Uncomfortable for these students- very emotional-tears/anger, lost.

• Students with binders on could not do the running portion. I gave them the option to walk, but this still caused them worry.

• They were unsure of which category to go for and typically just chose the easier (female) test.

• Very uncomfortable helping students decide if they are male or female "on that day." Some students going through gender change while others looking for easier test standards.

• For born as female students that identify as male, cannot perform at the same level as born as male students

Above are some of the many concerns test administrators, usually PE or classroom teachers, encountered when assessing the fitness of students whose identity did not match their sex. Let those sink in, and we’ll revisit them later.

In 2022, the California Department of Education stopped administering the Fitnessgram fitness test to kids kindergarten through 12th grade. Fitnessgram measures such things as aerobic capacity, body composition, strength, endurance, and flexibility, and had been used since 1996. One of the problems the Department of Education advisory council, that included “experts in fitness, adaptive PE, gender identity, and body image,” had is that Fitnessgram standards are binary, one for males and one for females. This, the advisory council said, is not inclusive of transgender, nonbinary, and genderfluid students.

According to the article in Outside, the California Department of Education asked Cooper Institute, that developed Fitnessgram, to provide performance standards for trans and nonbinary students. Cooper Institute “wouldn’t” create trans or nonbinary standards, but instead suggested it was most accurate to use the child’s sex at birth. Cooper did add that parents, students, or teachers could choose a sex they felt was most appropriate if using birth sex was too stressful.

That “wouldn’t” is doing a lot of work. It’s not that Cooper Institute didn’t have the ability to patronize the D of E and make up some sham nonbinary fitness standards. They refused. Cooper has built a reputation as a leader in sport science and physiology, and to their credit, they’re holding the line on biological truths. Basic uncontroversial tenets like, we move with our bodies, not identities. Bodies come in two flavors—male and female—that affect physical performance. And your sex at birth will not change, so it’s the best indicator of physical performance.

Using biology rather than ideology for Fitnessgram standards was the first, middle, and last thing Cooper Institute had to say on that topic. To the California Department of Education, to Outside, and to me, as they didn’t respond to my calls and emails. Sex at birth is their answer to fitness standards, and I respect, even admire that, when the pressure is immense, even in science, to bend to ideology.

California, on the other hand, is teaching kids gender ideology as fact. It’s difficult to imagine another ideology that is given such open access to young children, indeed pushed by the Department of Education. The problem is not the binary nature of the Fitnessgram standards, but rather what happens when gender ideology runs up against objective reality—sex matters in human performance. California looked at this impasse, biological truth or ideology, and chose to drop biological truth in favor of an ideology that has no basis in reality. Gender ideology is the sacred cow: though it’s been shown to be psychologically harmful to tell children they can be the opposite sex, or both, or neither, the Department of Education will sacrifice nearly any fact-based program to preserve this unethical experiment on children.

While institutionalized lying is doing irreparable harm to kids in every aspect of their development, I’m trying to stay in my lane. The rejection of the unchanging reality of sex disproportionately impacts girls’ right to single-sex spaces and girls’ sports. Boys are being taught they can identify into girls’ sports, and girls are misled by being told they can compete in boys’ sports as if they were a boy. Ignoring sex-based reality does not make it go away. It merely makes kids ill-prepared for life in the real world. Which, I think, is the purpose of education.

Let’s look at what’s going on in California schools.

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“We’re focused on making sure schools are safe and inclusive for all kids,” Cheryl Cotton, California’s deputy superintendent of public instruction, told Outside magazine.

As to safety, Maya Forstater, chief executive officer of the UK-based charity Sex Matters, told The Telegraph, “The Department for Education needs to say there is no way to keep children safe in schools while you are pretending that a boy is a girl, or that a girl is a boy. You are putting children through a psychological experiment with no clinical oversight. The whole thing is a fantasy being sold to children by adults who should know better.”

Forstater was commenting on a scathing report about “gender affirming care” revealed recently after a four-year investigation by pediatrician Hilary Cass. The Cass review points to a concerning “school to gender clinic pipeline” that sets kids on a path to medicalization and surgery. For young children, the [Cass] review strongly discourages social transition, noting that “sex of rearing” may profoundly alter a child’s developmental trajectory, with long-ranging consequences.

Ironically, the California Department of Education’s focus on safety and inclusion is centered around aggressively affirming gender identity, which includes social transition, puberty blockers, wrong-sex hormones, and sometimes lopping off healthy body parts. Recent exposes about the lack of evidence for these experimental treatments and potential for serious lifelong harms including psychosocial anxiety, cognitive decline, osteoporosis, and sterility have caused some European countries to halt their use on minors. The U.S. is going full steam ahead.

The Outside article also claimed that “American culture has changed. Instead of physical measurement, many educators and politicians have become more concerned with inclusivity and kids’ mental health.”

That’s true—”experts” are hyper-focused on inclusivity and mental health, and that has not been a good thing. Never have kids had access to so much therapy and such emphasis on mental health. As journalist and author of Bad Therapy, Abigail Shrier points out, when you apply a fix to a perceived problem, you expect to see incidence of that problem decrease. That’s how you know it’s working. Yet the California Department of Education’s 2021 Health Education Framework section on kindergarten through grade 3 mentioned that 17% of this age cohort are overweight or obese, and that 10% to 20% have serious mental conditions. Those are shocking stats. Even as students have never been less healthy, mentally or physically, California decided to do away with fitness testing and double down on mental health, though data indicates the recent focus on mental health is actually making kids’ mental health worse.

As we will see from boots on the ground—teachers—immediately and aggressively affirming kids who say they are the opposite sex or nonbinary or genderfluid seems to be undermining their mental health. And in a perpetuating cycle, the Cass review recognized that poor mental health of Generation Z is likely at the root of the current phenomenon of trans identification.

As part of the California Healthy Youth Act, California schools must provide LBGTQ-inclusive sexual health and HIV prevention education. This information must be “medically accurate and inclusive,” the toolkit emphasizes:

“Instruction must affirmatively recognize that people have different sexual orientations and, when discussing or providing examples of relationships and couples, must be inclusive of same-sex relationships. It must also teach students about gender, gender expression, gender identity, and explore the harm of negative gender stereotypes. This means that schools must teach about sexual orientation and transgender, cisgender, and non-binary gender identities.”

By including transgender, cisgender, and non-binary identities in the “must be taught” category, the Department of Education has already decided that these are medically accurate terms and ideas, though they are not scientifically defined, stable, or verifiable. The words “biological sex” never appear anywhere in this toolkit. It should come as no surprise that this toolkit was written by the ACLU California. So, a lobby group, rather than medical or scientific experts, crafted this curriculum.

Broader California Health Education Initiatives do reference the objective biological realities of sex, defining health education as “education regarding human development and sexuality, including education on pregnancy, contraception, and sexually transmitted infections.” But clearly, they’re skipping some chapters in human development that talk about the medically accurate facts that humans are a sexually dimorphic species, that one’s sex does not change regardless of gender identity, and that sex has huge impact on a range of factors, including sports performance.

Sport science, fitness, physiology—this was always going to be the place that laid bare the lie of gender ideology. There is probably no segment of science that’s as thoroughly documented, so rigorously researched, and so closely followed by the public.

Greg Brown, a professor of exercise science at the University of Nebraska, Kearney, found that sex differences in athletic performance exist even before puberty. These sex differences, small (2%-3%) in the early grades, increasing dramatically in high school years, justify having different male and female standards in fitness tests. These standards, Brown said, are backed up by decades of data. On the other hand, what the California Department of Education was asking Cooper Institute to do—create trans and nonbinary fitness standards—would be “nearly impossible,” he said, “The concept of trans or nonbinary children is very new, so there’s no data to draw on to make standards. You’d have to analyze data going forward. Even identifying how many trans or nonbinary kids there are is difficult—the Williams Institute at UCLA says something like .6%, but there are some school districts that say 20% of their students are trans or nonbinary. Then you have the small percent of those children who are on puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones. That makes it practically impossible to have decent data to create trans or nonbinary fitness standards. And that’s before you consider that gender identity doesn’t affect physical performance.” (More on that in a minute).

“They [CA Department of Education] have these ideals like wanting fitness to be inclusive or monitoring individual fitness year over year, but you still need standards for that,” Brown said. “I’m reminded of the saying, the path to hell is paved with good intentions. California looked at what every other state is doing and, hey, they all have sex-based fitness standards. There must be a reason for that. The reality is, you can’t make an ‘inclusive’ fitness program, so they end up with nothing.”

Remember when Cooper Institute told the Department of Education that birth sex was the most accurate scale on which to measure fitness, and refused to create a nonbinary standard? Dr John Armstrong, Professor Alice Sullivan, and George Perry conducted a study that substantiates why Cooper refused to invent nonbinary standards. They found that identifying as nonbinary does not erase sex differences found in the open category of mass participation running events. So, males in the nonbinary category were on average faster than females, just as males in the open category are faster than females. “Our study tested whether sex or gender identity was a better predictor of sports performance for non-binary athletes, and found that sex was an excellent predictor, but found no statistically significant effects of gender identity,” Armstrong wrote in an email. In other words, there’s no need for nonbinary standards.

Because they are starting with the false premises of gender ideology—that humans can change sex, and gender identity is a real factor in physical performance—the Department of Education insists that sex-based standards are not inclusive enough in measures of fitness. Armstrong disagrees, and further stresses the importance of teaching gender diverse kids that, regardless of their gender identity, their sex matters.

“Almost all humans, including those who are non binary and the vast majority of those with differences of sexual development are unambiguously male or female, thus sex categories are already highly inclusive,” he wrote. “Sex is a significant factor in health and fitness. It is important for gender-questioning children to be taught this so that they can understand and monitor their own health needs.” 

The Boston Marathon said they don’t yet have enough data to create nonbinary qualifying times for their historic race, so they use the women’s standard. For the last two years, people who claim to be nonbinary can qualify using the women’s standard, which is 30 minutes slower than men’s. That means males who entered in the nonbinary category, were able to qualify with a substantially slower time than if they’d entered as open men. As we know, a nonbinary identity does not affect physical performance. Nonbinary males are every bit as male as those in the open male category—they’re just given an advantage based on their special identity.

Using the women’s standard for all nonbinary entrants disadvantages males who enter in the open male category and women regardless of how they identify. The only ones who gain an advantage here, for whom entering is easier, are males who identify as trans or nonbinary. And as we’ll see when we revisit the California comments, kids learned this grift very early on.

While the California advisory council identified all kinds of problems with Fitnessgram, they refused to consider that their sacred cow, gender ideology, may be the problem.

Let’s go back to the Fitnessgram administrators’ comments with regard to trans, nonbinary, or genderfluid students. The Department of Education took these comments as a directive, that Fitnessgram was not inclusive of gender diverse students. But another reading could show that it’s their own dogged commitment to teaching an ideology as fact that is failing these students.

For example, Transgender and nonbinary students wonder which scores will apply to them and are faced with a situation that triggers stressful and disenfranchisement with/from true self. Students have not been taught the difference between sex and gender identity. They’ve not been taught that sex is unchanging. They’ve been taught they can change genders, but can see that their physical body has not changed. Is their “true self” their identity or their body? Kids have not completely swallowed the gender identity koolaid, they still question obvious inconsistencies like this, but trusted adults keep telling them their physical reality doesn’t matter. They can see that it does, e.g. they can see that most of the boys run faster and can do more pushups. Does this sound like a recipe for stress? Is it ethical? Did the fitness test cause the stress, or simply point out the inconsistencies in gender ideology?

If a student is physically one gender but identifies as another, they might have trouble passing. Here, the test administrator doesn’t know the difference between sex and gender, but does understand that fitness standards are sex-dependent. This adult seems to acknowledge students have been fed the lie that their physical ability changes with identity.

Uncomfortable for these students- very emotional-tears/anger, lost. If this is the reaction to having to choose between male and female fitness scores, I shudder to think what will happen when this child sallies forth into the world and has to live and work among people who have every right to not accept his identity. Or what happens when he buys a Garmin fitness tracker (not inclusive). This child is not prepared to live in the world where gravity is a thing.

Students with binders on could not do the running portion. I gave them the option to walk, but this still caused them worry. Okay, well, this is just sad. And wrong. I can’t imagine anyone reading this and thinking it was the fitness test that had failed, instead of every single adult who told these girls that being boys would solve their problems. And that their bodies were wrong.

They were unsure of which category to go for and typically just chose the easier (female) test. Kids know how to play this game, and to them, it is a game. Deeply held belief? Maybe when it’s convenient. In this case, both kids and test administrator are crystal clear about sex differences in sports/fitness. Makes you wonder if boys who compete in girls’ sports are doing so due to their firmly held belief that they are girls, or are adult ideologues using gender questioning kids to push their agenda?

Very uncomfortable helping students decide if they are male or female "on that day." Some students going through gender change while others looking for easier test standards. “On that day?” Clearly, students don’t think of gender identity as either permanent or deeply held. Students are not clear about the difference between sex and gender identity, but can see the unchanging nature of their physical body, and its effect on performance (they know female are “easier” standards). The test administrator is put in a terrible position—he could be accused of grooming or sexual harassment by “helping a student decide if they are male or female.” This was one of many administrator comments that treated gender change as a normal part of childhood.

For born as female students that identify as male, cannot perform at the same level as born as male students. The test administrator fully acknowledges the truth—that sex matters in physical performance, not identity. Why hasn’t that truth been taught to the students? Instead, these girls get the message they are not fit boys, that they’ve fallen short. Why is gender ideology never questioned?

So far, the California Department of Education is still trying to make the real world accommodate a fiction, and children are worse off for it. Physically and mentally.

P.S. Ghaa! That was such a downer ending, I wanted to suggest a way forward that’s feasible, factual, and respectful. If California taught kids that even if their gender identity changed, their sex did not, and that sex is the determinant of physical performance (Cooper Inst, Armstrong, et al), then male and female standards would include every student on the planet, and there would be no stressing about which standard to use. If it’s being taught that sex does not change and is the biggest determinant of performance, then there would also be no basis for boys, regardless of how they identify, to compete in girls’ sports. There is foundational knowledge, facts we all agree on. This doesn’t tell kids they aren’t trans or nonbinary, but that with regard to physical activity (sports, fitness testing) birth sex is it. Firm, factual, makes sense, no fuss no muss—kids like that. They don’t like being lied to.