AB Hernandez won the high jump and the triple jump at the CIF State Track and Field Championships in Clovis, California, finishing third in the long jump. She graduated from Jurupa Valley High School on the Wednesday of the same week. When asked about the protesters who turned up at Veterans Memorial Stadium to demonstrate against her competing, she said: "I just laughed. I don't care."

That is the sentence I keep coming back to. Not because it is defiant in a showy way, but because it sounds like someone who has found, through sport, exactly the thing sport is supposed to give you: clarity, focus, and a sense of yourself that other people's noise cannot reach. "Track is a very singular sport," she said. "It teaches you to rely on yourself. Once you're on the track, you just stay focused on the track." She sounds, to me, like someone who has learned that lesson thoroughly.

What she actually did on the track

In the high jump, Hernandez cleared 5 feet 10 inches to win. Lelani Laruelle of Monta Vista High School, who cleared 5-8, was also credited with a first-place finish under the CIF's specific policy for these events. In the triple jump, Hernandez leaped 42 feet 8 and three-quarter inches; Daniela Hughes of Los Altos High School was credited alongside her at first, with a jump of 41-1. In the long jump, Hernandez opened with 20-2 and a quarter, finishing third behind Ellie McCuskey-Hay and Gianna Gonzalez, both of whom jumped 20-3 and a half.

These are not modest performances. They are the results of a young person who trains hard, competes seriously, and has now won state titles in two consecutive years. Last year she won the triple jump and high jump and finished second in the long jump. This is a very good athlete at the height of her high school career.

The policy, and what it actually does

The CIF policy applied specifically to the three events Hernandez competed in: the long jump, triple jump, and high jump. Under it, a transgender athlete who places receives a medal but does not displace cisgender competitors in the official standings. In practice, that means multiple athletes are credited with the same position. It is a considered attempt to be inclusive while also protecting the competitive record of other athletes. You can debate its elegance, but it is not the erasure of girls' sport that the protest signs were claiming.

What it is, plainly, is a school system trying to let a child compete while the adults around her argue about whether she should exist in that space at all.

The political machinery pointed at one teenager

In the week of Hernandez's graduation and her state championships, California's two major Republican gubernatorial candidates both issued statements against her competing. One of them, Steve Hilton, turned up in Clovis on the Friday before the meet and stood beside signs reading "Girls' Sports Girls Only." He came to a high school athletics championship to make a point about a specific teenager. That is the level of attention being directed at a young person who just wants to jump.

The U.S. Justice Department has sued California, arguing that allowing transgender athletes to compete against girls violates Title IX and putting billions of dollars in federal education funding at risk. A school system is being told it may lose funding because it let a child take part in sport. The harm being invoked, the thing supposedly serious enough to warrant a federal lawsuit, is that Hernandez competed and won.

Democratic gubernatorial candidate Tom Steyer released a video of a prior conversation he had with her, telling her he was proud of her for competing. His framing was right, even if the timing had the feel of a campaign move. He pointed to something real: nearly half of trans young people attempt suicide. Cutting them off from team sport, from the belonging and structure and self-knowledge it can offer, is not a neutral act. It is a decision with consequences, and those consequences fall entirely on the young people themselves.

The logic of punishing inclusion

Here is the thing that the federal lawsuit makes impossible to ignore. When a government threatens to withdraw education funding from a school because it included a trans child, it has made a choice about where the harm in this debate sits. It has decided that the harm is inclusion. That Hernandez running and jumping is the problem that needs correcting, and that the correction is worth billions of dollars of leverage.

That logic does not hold up. The harm in this debate is not a teenager winning a high jump, but a teenager having to run past protesters to get to the start line — two years of political statements, federal litigation, and gubernatorial candidates showing up at her athletic meet, all aimed at communicating to her that her presence is unwelcome and her victories illegitimate. She has handled all of it with more composure than most adults manage in far less hostile circumstances.

The CIF's approach, crediting multiple athletes in the same position rather than excluding anyone, is imperfect but it is trying to hold something together. A world in which the federal government sues a state for that attempt is a world that has got the problem the wrong way round.

What she said, and what it means

Hernandez graduated on Wednesday and won twice on Saturday. She is eighteen, she is finished with high school, and she said of the people who came to protest her: "I don't care." That is not bravado. It is someone who found, through years of training for a very demanding set of disciplines, that her sense of herself does not depend on their approval. That is a hard thing to find. Most people spend decades looking for it.

I hope she carries it with her. And I hope the people in positions of power, the ones with the statements and the lawsuits and the campaign signs, eventually find the grace to ask themselves what they were actually afraid of.

If there is a news story you would like me to cover then just let Sammy know.

Dr Helen Webberley is a gender specialist, medical educator, and advocate, and the founder of GenderGP. She writes about gender identity, trans healthcare, and the lives of trans people and their families.