Seventeen-year-old Celeste Diest took to the podium during a Lucia Mar Unified School District (LMUSD) meeting to describe her experience with transgender athletes participating in women’s sports.
“Hello. My name is Celeste Diest. I am 17-years-old, a junior, a track and field athlete at AGHS. Most importantly, I am a woman advocating for the renewal of female rights which recently has been overlooked and disregarded. I implore all of you to put an end to this current injustice,” she said. “Recently, I went into the women’s locker room to change for track practice, where I saw, at the end of my row, a biological male watching not only myself, but the other young women undress.”
She stated the experience was “beyond traumatizing.”
“I must add that he is not changing in our locker room because he’s in his track clothes, dressed and ready to go to practice at the beginning of the day. Therefore, there’s absolutely no reason for him to be in any locker room, let alone the women’s,” the student noted. “Adults like yourself make me and my peers feel like our own comfort was invalid, even though our privacy was and still is completely violated.”
Diest added that the individual’s XY chromosomes make him a male, which she asserted is “basic biology.”
After school board president Collen Martin interrupted and told the student to “wrap it up,” Diest said, “I just want to ask ‘what about us?’”
“We can not sit around and allow our rights to be given up to cater to an individual that is a man, who watches women undress and is stripping away female opportunity that once was fought for us.”
Diest urged the school board to “put effort into the restoration of our school safety.”
Upon being applauded by the audience, Martin yelled, “No!”
See the school board meeting below:
A similar event unfolded in Maine after parent Nick Blanchard was interrupted by Board Chair Martha Witham while expressing concerns about transgender athletes in girls’ sports.
