Trans athlete volleyball controversy ends with California playoff loss

A nationally competitive season for a California high school girls volleyball team ended Wednesday night.

Jurupa Valley High School lost its first-round state playoff match against Valencia High School in straight sets. This defeat likely marked the end of transgender athlete AB Hernandez’s high school volleyball career.

Jurupa Valley’s 2025 season has been overshadowed by the national controversy centered on Hernandez. The team saw 10 games forfeited outside the team’s schedule, and a lawsuit was filed against the school district by two current and one former teammates of Hernandez.

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Still, Hernandez and other JVHS players continued their season and finished as co-champions of the River Valley League, winning a playoff game against Valencia. But this wasn’t your typical high school playoff game.

Multiple sources, including Leandra Blades, a board trustee at the Placentia-Yorba Linda Unified School District, where Valencia High is located, confirmed to Fox News Digital that at least one of Valencia’s players did not take the field Wednesday to avoid confronting Hernandez.

Later, many female sports activists were present in the stands, led by California Family Council Outreach Director Sophia Lorey. The activists included local teenage girls, some of whom had run for or against Hernandez in the past.

‘Save the Girls’ Sports’ protesters gather at a high school volleyball game attended by a transgender athlete in California on October 22, 2025. (Courtesy of Sophia Lorey)

Lorey provided Fox News Digital with videos showing other spectators at the game cornering girls who were there with Lorey.

And for all the pomp and circumstance, this wasn’t even Hernandez’s first playoff volleyball match. Hernandez has competed for Jurupa Valley the past three years and made the postseason in 2024.

But this year, the team has received more national attention and controversy after Hernandez was thrust into the center of a political dispute between President Donald Trump and California Gov. Gavin Newsom at the end of the spring track and field season.

Hernandez’s run to the girls state finals in the long jump, triple jump and high jump prompted Trump to send out a Truth Social post in the days before the event warning Newsom and the state against allowing transgender athletes to compete in girls events. Trump signed an executive order in February banning schools from allowing biological boys to play girls’ sports, but the California Interscholastic Federation (CIF) has persistently opposed the decision.

Instead, the CIF changed its rules to reward any female athlete competing in the same events as Hernandez with a spot in the competition or one spot higher on the medal podium if they finish behind a biological male athlete.

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Hernandez placed first in the high jump and triple jump, and second in the long jump.

The rule change resulted in Hernandez sharing the podium spots with female athletes who finished behind the transgender athlete at the state finals.

The U.S. Department of Justice then filed a lawsuit a month later in July against CIF and the California Department of Education for refusing to enforce transgender policies in compliance with Trump’s “Exclusion of Men from Women’s Sports” executive order.

Newsom’s office provided in advance A statement to Fox News Digital deferring responsibility for the situation to the CIF, CDE and the state legislature.

“CIF is an independent, nonprofit organization that governs high school sports. The California Department of Education is a separate constitutional office. Neither is under the Governor’s authority. CIF and CDE have stated that they comply with existing state law passed in 2013 and signed by Governor Jerry Brown (not Newsom) in concert with 21 other states. To change the law, the legislature must send a bill to the Governor,” the statement said. It is necessary. They didn’t.”

California state legislature on April 1 blocked two invoices This would reverse the current law that allows boys to participate in girls’ sports. Assemblyman Rick Chavez Zbur said one of the bills “really reminds me of what happened in Nazi Germany in the 1930s. We’re moving towards autocracy in this country. In Nazi Germany, transgender people were persecuted and barred from public life.”

Zbur said this while in the presence of a descendant of a Holocaust survivor who had to excuse herself from the chamber, according to GOP Assembly member Kate Sanchez.

“He stood up and left because he was so disgusted by that comparison,” Sanchez told Fox News Digital.

No policy changes were made. Thus, Hernandez was allowed to compete as a girl, become a national showcase, and then play her final high school volleyball season, prompting protests from rivals and teammates alike.

Jurupa Valley’s two seniors, McPherson and Hadeel Hazameh, walked away He protested the transgender athlete from the team this season.

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McPherson and Hazameh too filed a lawsuit against Jurupa Unified School District, citing their experience playing and sharing the locker room with Hernandez over the previous three seasons. McPherson’s older sister and former JVHS girls volleyball player Madison McPherson is the third plaintiff in this lawsuit.

With the fall sports season concluded, Hernandez became eligible to compete in one more girls track and field season in the spring.

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