A school official for Irving Independent School District in Texas was caught on video advising an undercover journalist posing as a parent to change their child’s birth certificate so they could participate in girls’ sports.
The official, believed to be the district’s executive director of campus operations Reny Lizardo, said, “Could you legally change the gender on a birth certificate? I don’t know enough about that subject. If you can get that done, and you turn us a birth certificate that says ‘this gender,’ that’s the gender we go with.”
“It’s not illegal if you don’t get caught, right?” he added in the video obtained by Accuracy in Media. “If no one knew, then we’re good.”
“If a parent found out or a student found out and said, ‘Wait a second. This person isn’t this gender,’ and they, like, sued the district, we’d be in trouble,” Lizardo explained. “But we can also say, ‘We didn’t know’ … So, there’s a plausible deniability, I guess.”
When confronted about his statements, Lizardo denied having such a conversation.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott (R) said the official “should be fired on the spot.”
“Both criminal & civil investigations must be taken against both the Administrator & Irving ISD,” Abbott wrote on X. “Has Irving ISD and its employees been involved in a fraudulent breach of state laws & a cover up? We must get the facts.”
Earlier this month, the House of Representatives passed the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act of 2025.
HR 28 is designed to “amend the Education Amendments of 1972 to provide that for purposes of determining compliance with title IX of such Act in athletics, sex shall be recognized based solely on a person’s reproductive biology and genetics at birth.”
At the state level, California Assemblymember Kate Sanchez (R) introduced a bill prohibiting biological men from competing in girls’ sports.
AB 89, the Protect Girls’ Sports Act, would force the California Interscholastic Federation to “amend its constitution, bylaws, and policies to prohibit a pupil whose sex was assigned male at birth from participating on a girls’ interscholastic sports team.”
