Some of my most enduring memories of autumn revolve around competing in high school sports. Having been a runner during my boyhood, I had a natural interest in a news item last week from Camus, Washington, where that city’s high school girls' cross-country team walked off the course in protest for having to compete against a boy.
The male runner reportedly subscribes to transgender ideology and began the 2026 season on the Camus High School boys' team, finishing in 76th place in a September 5 junior varsity race. After this less-than-stellar performance, he switched to the girls' varsity team, which considerably improved his fortunes; he placed 1st in a September 29 girls' cross-country meet against rival Union High School, beating 45 young women in the process.
As a high schooler, I ran varsity cross country for four years. I never won a race, and my best time in the three-mile event was 15:48. I still remember that meet, in which we ran along the shores of Lake Nokomis in Minneapolis. It was a good day; my normal three-mile time was about 16:30. And despite never placing first, being able to do something athletic helped manage my adolescent insecurities. Running was the only sport I was marginally good at, so that's what I did. I wasn’t great, but I was okay.
Today, a growing number of boys and young men are demanding to compete against girls and women in sports. And to the best of our knowledge, none of them have genitalia inconsistent with their chromosomal sex, so they are mercifully spared the suffering of clinical transgenderism.
We can appreciate that the Camus boy wanted to rank higher as a cross-country runner. I did, so I ran about 1,000 miles every summer to get in shape for the autumn start of the season. I tried to improve by running more; the Washington state runner chose a different path. It then occurred to me that had transgender ideology been a thing back in the day, I could have not only won a race, but become a Minnesota state high school girls' cross country champion.
My team didn’t qualify for the state championship event while I was a student, but if I had run that race as a senior, my best time would have placed me in the top 15. A time of 15:48 over three miles works out to a pace of 5:16 a mile, and my normal race time averaged 5:30 a mile.
However, had I run in the girls' championship meet, I would have finished in first place, and not by a little. Girls ran two-mile cross country courses back then, and the winning time in that race was 12:04.6, resulting in a pace of about 6:02 a mile. The girl who ran to a state championship was Leslie Seymour from Regina High School in Minneapolis.
I never met Leslie Seymour, but I know cross country runners and guarantee you she worked extremely hard for her success. She made sacrifices in her day-to-day life. She suffered cramps and aching muscles, maybe shin splints. She ran to exhaustion in blazing sun, cold rain, and probably some early-season snow. Leslie prioritized her sport, discovered endurance she didn’t know she had, and became a champion.
Had I taken the approach of the Washington state boy and run in the girls' race that year, I would have stolen that championship from Leslie, likely finishing well ahead of her. In a two-mile race, a difference of 60 seconds between first and second place is not simply a big win; it’s a humiliation.
The desire of any confused, insecure teenager, myself included, to be good at something is normal and understandable. It’s important to cultivate a kid’s sense of self-esteem and achievement, which helps them after outgrowing adolescence. But there is no truth in pretending to be something we’re not, and whatever self-esteem results from this pretension is false and fleeting.
Camus School Superintendent John Anzalone touched on this when asked about the controversy. “It's always hard to see your own kids or any kids in the middle of something like this,” said Anzalone. “And that's probably been the most heartbreaking for me, is to see certain students really kind of in the middle of this, right? They're kids.”
What Anzalone failed to note is that it is grownups embracing a warped ideology who have put our kids in the heartbreaking middle of all this, and they did it in pursuit of policies promoted by socialist and other far-left politicians. They’re willing to sacrifice our children to advance an evil, destructive agenda. The Camus boy has been deceived by adults into pretending he’s a girl, and they’re doing a grotesque disservice to him. Teenagers need honesty and truth to survive adolescence, not lies.