EXCLUSIVE: Dan Slavin, a development subcontractor in California, has parented his daughter Kaitlyn via an revel in nobody of their society anticipated this faculty era.
Over the summer time, they were given word of honour Martin Luther King High College, the place Kaitlyn competes in pass nation, can be getting a pristine switch pupil who can be competing on Kaitlyn’s group. That pupil was once a transgender athlete.
Slavin says he and alternative folks contacted the college about it instantly.
“We went in there with concerns about safety and locker room issues,” Slavin advised Fox Information Virtual. “They were very tight-lipped and quiet. They understood our concerns and said they were working on putting things in place for our children’s safety, but not much. They just kind of sat there.”
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Slavin, a California local who additionally competed in pass nation, in addition to observe and basketball, in highschool, sought after his daughter to compete in sports activities to have the benefit of courses in paintings ethic and teamwork.
However the concept of Kaitlyn having to proportion a reserve room and garden with a organic male made him “concerned.”
California surrounding legislation protects the inclusion of transgender athletes in women and girls’s sports activities and calls for crowd faculties to conform to those protections. California Gov. Gavin Newsom has been a staunch protector of those insurance policies all the way through his tenure and vetoed a invoice that will require faculties to inform athletes and their households when a transgender athlete is on their group.
Newsom signed 9 LGBTQ+ rights expenses into legislation inside an issue of days in 2023, and this era he signed the Assistance Instructional Age and Educators for As of late’s Adolescence Occupation (SAFETY Occupation) into legislation, which bans lecturers from notifying scholars and fogeys of a transgender pupil’s organic intercourse.
“I’d love to sit down and have lunch with him to talk to him about this and see how that goes,” Slavin stated. “I would probably just tell him that I get you want everybody to feel included, but you’re missing out on how many people it’s actually affecting and hurting.”
Slavin, his daughter and alternative ladies at the group realized how the ones regulations impact feminine athletes upcoming the transgender athlete transferred in. Kaitlyn’s teammate and co-captain, Taylor, misplaced her varsity spot to that athlete this season.
“It’s been tough on her. She’s been there with her teammates and her teammate’s in tears,” Slavin stated. “She’s been trying to balance out how to still love all people but also how to raise awareness.
“There isn’t a hateful bone in her slight frame.”
So Kaitlyn, Taylor and some of their other teammates decided to stand up against it as many other young female athletes across the country have this year. They did it by creating custom T-shirts that said “Save Girls Sports.”
But when they showed up to the high school wearing those shirts, administrators allegedly scolded them over it and compared the shirts to swastikas, according to a lawsuit filed against the school by the families of the two girls.
“I didn’t even understand how to digest that immediately,” Slavin said. “There have been negative phrases. I nonetheless can’t even digest it this hour. It’s unfathomable. It’s peculiar. It’s bizarre. I’m positive there have been higher illustrations they may utility in lieu of that one.”
The attorney representing Kaitlyn and Taylor in the lawsuit, Julianne Fleischer, told Fox News Digital the rhetoric from school administrators is “extremely unhealthy.”
“If in case you have adults that evaluate a message ‘Save Girls Sports’ that promotes equality, equity, usual sense; if you have adults that evaluate that message to a swastika, which represents the genocide of tens of millions of Jews, in point of fact, there are not any phrases. I don’t understand how you reply to that,” Fleischer said.
The administration’s comparison and the subsequent lawsuit prompted other students to get involved.
Hundreds of students at Martin Luther King High School began to wear the T-shirts every Wednesday. The school responded by enacting a dress code that resulted in many of those students being sent to detention. But that didn’t stop them. The students kept wearing the shirts weekly.
The school recently stopped enforcing its dress code on the shirts. Slavin said he saw around 400 students wearing them at Martin Luther King High School, and sources have told Fox News the surrounding schools of Arlington High School, Riverside Polytechnical High School and Romona High School have also seen their students wearing them.
For Slavin, who has seen his daughter win titles and MVP awards in her youth sports career, this movement is his proudest moment as the father of an athlete. But it’s also come with some blowback from transgender inclusion activists on social media.
“The message will get conflicted as an assault on family, and it’s now not about that in any respect. We would like all family to really feel love, all family to really feel integrated, however some family simply don’t see the usual sense facet of it,” Slavin said.
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But Slavin said that won’t stop him and his family from continuing their activism on this issue. The Riverside Unified School District is holding a board meeting next Thursday, and parents are expected to attend and speak out against policies that have enabled transgender inclusion in girls’ sports.
Beyond that, Slavin said his family may even use it as a new platform for political activism in the 2026 California gubernatorial election if the issue hasn’t been resolved.
“If not anything adjustments right here within the upcoming couple of years, it completely must be a part of the upcoming election,” he said.
“I need to see insurance policies trade,” Slavin added. “I hold announcing the machine is damaged, and it’s doing extra hurt than excellent. And I need to see family remember that and admit that. Occasionally, we manufacture errors, and it’s OK to confess that, however we wish to manufacture adjustments and pull out of the ones errors we manufacture.”