Taylor Starling still remembers the day her life changed.
On Oct. 22, she was dropped from the varsity cross-country team down to the junior varsity squad at Martin Luther King High School in Riverside, California.
Her spot was taken by a trans athlete.
“I felt angry when I was removed from my varsity team because I knew the requirements were changed for him because he is transgender. I felt like my sacrifice, hard work, and dedication didn’t matter to my school administrators because I am a girl. It was easy for them to push me aside and that hurt,” Starling told Fox News Digital.
“As far as coping with it, my family and friends have been very supportive. I also know that everything happens for a reason and God has a plan for me. I always try to find the good when things are hard and keep going.”
Now, just five months and two weeks later, at 16 years old, she has much more on her plate than just practice and homework.
She spoke at the California Capitol building in Sacramento in support of two state bills to ban trans athletes from girls’ sports, braving pro-trans protesters rallying against the bills.
Her lawsuit against her school district and California Attorney General Rob Bonta has its first court date of May 15. She is the centerpiece of a monthslong movement within her school and community in which students show up every Wednesday wearing “Save Girls Sports” T-shirts, overpowering administrative efforts to prevent it.
However, it has not been all wins for her and her family.
Her testimony could not convince the Democrat majority to support the two bills to ban trans athletes. Her mother, a local public school teacher, faces the uncertainty of her school and others across California potentially losing federal funding as the state refuses to comply with President Donald Trump’s executive order to keep males out of girls’ sports.
In March, Starling had to watch her sister, Abby Starling, lose a 200m race to the same trans athlete that took her varsity spot in the fall.
Additionally, the attention she has received for her activism over the last few months has come with some harder moments.
“Social media is pretty bad,” her father, Ryan Starling, told Fox News Digital. “You have 99 positive comments, and then you get that one comment that has called her a bigot, has called her the ‘C’ word, has called her all kinds of names.”
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Her family was prepared for the backlash when they signed up for the fight, as they were warned by their attorney, Robert Tyler.
“When we took this case on, we had a real heart-to-heart,” Tyler told Fox News Digital. “I asked Taylor and Kaitlyn ‘are you prepared to deal with this? Are you going to be able to walk through the hallways in her school and dislike you, call you names, and call you out?’ And they were.”
The family entered the trans athlete culture war in November, when they filed a lawsuit against the Riverside Unified School District alongside her friend and teammate Kaitlyn Slavin. They later expanded the lawsuit to include Bonta in February, in protest of the current laws in California that enable trans inclusion.
It is a lawsuit that Tyler and the families involved hope sets a new precedent for gender eligibility in the state once it goes to trial on May 15, as the state legislature and Gov. Gavin Newsom refuse to bring changes, risking federal funding cuts to the state.
In California, a law called AB 1266 has been in effect since 2014, giving California students at scholastic and collegiate levels the right to “participate in sex-segregated school programs and activities, including athletic teams and competitions, and use facilities consistent with his or her gender identity, irrespective of the gender listed on the pupil’s records.”
This law and the state’s devotion to carrying it out has already prompted pushback from the Trump administration. Education Secretary Linda McMahon sent a formal warning at the end of March to Newsom and the rest of the state, suggesting federal funding may be cut to the state if it continues to enable trans inclusion in girls’ sports.
The Starlings and other California families are witnessing in real time a potential model for what could soon happen to them playing out across the country in Maine. That state has taken the stage as “ground zero” in the trans athlete conflict, as its reluctance to comply with Trump has already resulted in a funding freeze from the USDA last week, and more potential sanctions this week.
“Good,” Ryan Starling said in response to seeing the situation in Maine, knowing the same could soon play out in his state. “That’s the only thing they answer to, is when their funding is cut and when it actually affects their pocketbooks, that’s the only thing that will get it to change.
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“Unfortunately, it might have a little bit of a tough road on some of the teachers, but our teachers are resilient.”
Taylor Starling did her part to help avoid this when she lobbied in Sacramento last week, delivering her story in support of the bills AB 89 and AB 844. Both bills would have banned trans athletes from girls’ sports across the state and put California in compliance with Trump’s executive order.
Instead, the bills failed to pass, and Democrat Assemblymember Rick Zbur compared them to Nazi Germany practices. For Taylor Starling, it was a comparison she was able to stomach more than the others in the room because, according to her lawsuit, the school administrators at Martin Luther King High compared her “Save Girls Sports” T-shirts to swastikas back in November.
“I’ve already been called that by the athletic director, so by now, I’m kind of used to it. But it was a shock to everyone else, because he was also calling everyone else Nazis. So I think that caused a big reaction from everybody and they were more willing to speak up against that,” she said.
“It was very sad to see Democrat leadership in California was unable to stand up for us girls and the rights that we deserve.”
So, Taylor and her father had to leave Sacramento and go back home to Riverside without any progress in significant legislative change.
Now they look ahead to their first court date.
Tyler said that in this case, they are seeking to have the court review the current California law that enables trans inclusion in girls’ sports, and potentially rule that the law is a violation of Title IX.
“We want to challenge that and argue that it is simply a violation of Title IX, that it’s unlawful, and we’re hoping that the court will look at that and throw it out,” Tyler said. “We want this case to stand for the proposition that it’s time to take our schools back, it’s time to take our girls’ sports back, it’s time to take back common sense.”
The Starling family, the Slavin family and Tyler will look to take a step toward achieving a landmark ruling on the issue on May 15.
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