Ada Gallagher was an artsy kid who joined the track team at Portland’s McDaniel High School at the urging of her friends. It turns out, not only was she was good at running, she also enjoyed it. Last year, Ada won first place in the 200-meter race at the Class 6A state track meet.
Earlier this year, Fox News posted a video of her performance in a 400-meter race at a meet. The national attention came because Ada is transgender athlete in girls sports, a member of a very small but controversial population.
In February, President Donald Trump issued an executive order titled “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports” that aimed to ban transgender women from competing in girls and women’s sports. After Ada’s win in the 400, the Trump administration launched an investigation into Portland Public Schools and the Oregon School Activities Association for allegedly violating Title IX.
Bill Oram, sports reporter at The Oregonian/OregonLive, and Ada Gallagher join us to talk about what it has been like to be at the center of national attention, and why she and her family are choosing to leave the country.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. Ada Gallagher was an artsy kid who joined the track team at Portland’s McDaniel High School at the urging of her friends. It turns out she enjoyed running and she was good at it, really good. Last year she won the Class 6A state championship in the 200-meter. She also attracted an enormous outpouring of internet hate because Ada is a member of a very small population that’s become a lightning rod. She’s a transgender female athlete.
Because of this onslaught of negative attention, Ada and her mother plan to move to Canada before she starts her senior year of high school. Ada joins us now, along with Bill Oram. He is the sports columnist at The Oregonian. He’s been writing about Ada’s story for more than a year now. Welcome to you both.
Ada Gallagher: Hi, y’all.
Bill Oram: Thanks, Dave.
Miller: Ada, am I right that today is your last day of your junior year at McDaniel?
Gallagher: Yep, that’s correct.
Miller: Congratulations.
Gallagher: Thank you.
Miller: But does that also mean it’s your last day at McDaniel?
Gallagher: I believe so, yeah.
Miller: How are you feeling today?
Gallagher: I’ve been mostly thinking about this.
Miller: About this interview?
Gallagher: Yeah. But I don’t know. I like a lot of my teachers and I hope none of them are gone today so I can say bye to all of them, but I don’t know. It’s like the official end of my time with McDaniel and that’s just quite scary.
Miller: How did you decide to join the track team?
Gallagher: As you said, a lot of my friends encouraged me to do so. My friend Matilda does track, my friend Lily Mae does track, Princess, all these people that I know at McDaniel. And I like to just run. I’m a very physical person, outside of track and field. So I just thought it would be fun.
Miller: How quickly did you realize that you enjoyed it?
Gallagher: Probably in the first few weeks. I mean, the first week and stuff is like conditioning, and that’s not very fun, but getting to know everyone and getting to know the coaches and things like that. I think, mainly getting to know the people.
Miller: What does it feel like to run?
Gallagher: I think it feels free. Like I feel nothing’s gonna stop me from doing that and that like no matter what, whether I lose, fall, whatever, that I’ll have people to support me afterwards.
Miller: Bill, why did you decide to first write about Ada a year ago?
Oram: I think a year ago, I was struck by the intensity of the backlash that a teenager, a 15-year-old high school sophomore, was experiencing for simply participating and for following state and OSAA guidelines. One thing that always struck out to me was Ada was not … This is what the OSAA states a transgender athlete will do, you participate on the team that aligns with your consistently stated gender.
Miller: Adults had come up with these rules.
Oram: Correct.
Miller: A teenager was following them.
Oram: Correct.
Miller: And then some adults all over the world were screaming hateful things.
Oram: And I found the backlash to be so knee jerk and not at all considerate of the human on the other side of it. We saw Piers Morgan write a column in the New York Post. I found some of the other heated online commentary to be just, frankly, despicable. So I wrote about that a year ago. And then coming into this season, mindful that Ada was going to be running track again as a junior and was potentially in for a similar, frankly, onslaught, I wanted to connect with her and her family and see how they were feeling about things.
And then, if Ada was open to telling her story and if she was open to talking about some of these things we’re talking about today, because I felt that it was important to represent her beyond a trans athlete. She is a multi-dimensional person with interests, passions, hobbies and life experience, lived experience, that goes so much deeper than these two facts that the world learned about her, that she runs track and that she is a member of the trans community.
Miller: Ada, how did you decide that Bill was someone you could trust?
Gallagher: Well, first of all, I just really enjoyed the article from last year. And Bill didn’t just connect to me. I think my mom connected to you. I think she reached out to Bill. And we had this little track event at the end of the season and Bill’s invited. We got to chat a bit. And also, when coming to me to talk about the article that he wrote this year, I just really appreciated the points that he wanted to hit and the talking point, yeah.
Miller: Do you remember the first time you heard someone booing you at a track meet?
Gallagher: It was State.
Miller: That was all the way, at the end of last year’s season. And that was the first time?
Gallagher: Yeah, first time I’d heard anything.
Miller: What was it like?
Gallagher: It was scary. I expected potentially backlash from winning districts. I had received negative articles and social media stuff, but I didn’t expect something to that extent.
Miller: And maybe that was the difference between being in person? I mean, an actual person not that far from you was expressing themselves that way, as opposed to some anonymous person online?
Gallagher: Yeah, it was really scary, especially since I’d been walking around that meet the day before, and earlier in that day, had received nothing, like no one came out and talked to me. I didn’t see any clothing that had, like some people have made clothing that disagrees with my existence in sports. But yeah, I had received no negative talk in person until after that 200-meter.
Miller: How had you been dealing with all of the online hate, the viral videos, headlines or stories in various media? Did you read it? Did you try to ignore it? How did you navigate that?
Gallagher: In the beginning, I read it. I had just come back from Outdoor School, that was the day I did the first meet last year. And then someone texted me saying I was on the news. I googled myself and I was like, oh jeez, I am. And I read a bunch of stuff about it on social media articles. I think now I kind of just either don’t read it or I’m not very serious about it.
Miller: Bill, can you tell us what you’ve observed at Ada’s meets that you’ve gone to, either this season or last season?
Oram: Well, I can only speak to the one I attended this year. It was unfortunately a little anticlimactic because Ada had a hip injury that sort of resurfaced during that meet. So what I would say is tell you a little bit about the experience of her mom, Carolyn, who was going into this meet at Roosevelt High School. Roosevelt has a tremendous sprinter on their team who had actually finished second to Ada last year. So this was going to be the first time they had raced against one another since State.
Miller: And had a really fast time this year.
Oram: Mmhmm. Which Ada was excited about and had said, I can’t run fast unless someone else is running fast too.
Miller: Am I right, do I remember correctly that her time this year was faster than your championship last year?
Gallagher: Yeah, it was so fast.
Miller: So she was serious competition.
Oram: Yeah, so it was going to be a big test. But there were a lot of nerves because on Carolyn’s part, on Ada’s part … Carolyn described not sleeping the night before and just having so much anxiety because she didn’t know what Ada was in for. And she’ll hear comments at meets. Like Ada said, I mean, people aren’t coming up to her and saying to her face, you shouldn’t be here. It’s not like that. It’s comments among themselves in the crowd. It’s the booing at state. It’s much more under the surface, typically.
And so Carolyn had said – and this is in the story that I wrote a couple weeks ago – I will be so happy if all this anxiety ends up being kind of unfulfilled and for nothing because it means nothing happened. And ultimately, nothing did happen because there was only one race in which Ada and, I’m going to call her her rival, Astor Jones, who’s just a tremendous sprinter at Roosevelt, competed against one another. It was in the 4x100m relay. Ada’s team ended up getting disqualified, very anticlimactic.
So the anxiety did end up being for nothing, but just the amount of tension that they felt going in because there’s such uncertainty about what could transpire. Ada had security at the meet, including an employee of McDaniel High School who, as far as I could tell, essentially his entire job was to keep an eye on Ada and make sure that everything was under control. And it was, but I mean, you’re watching essentially security shadow her movements as she just is walking back and forth waiting for her races to start. A very unique experience.
Miller: Bill, in that first column you wrote last year, you wrote this: “I value sports deeply and believe in the role of competition in the development of youth as much as anyone, but I can’t help wonder if we are overvaluing the sanctity of competition at a cost of the sanctity of participation and inclusion.”
“I don’t know the answer,” you wrote. “I just know that Piers freakin’ Morgan and the credence of the internet aren’t going to be the ones to give it to us.”
That was a year ago. Do you have more clarity yourself about how you think about all these complex issues of competition, of participation, of inclusion?
Oram: I think it’s just a tremendous question, Dave. And I think that this is why this has become such a lightning rod issue, is because it’s very difficult to find a satisfying answer to the question of who do you protect, right? I mean, you have this marginalized community that is among the most persecuted and at risk in our society. It represents very few people. And then there is this belief that by allowing trans athletes to participate, that it is jeopardizing the experience or the sanctity of the female athlete experience.
Miller: Cisgender female athletes.
Oram: Yeah, correct. And so it is kind of the perfect wedge issue and I think is why it has become among the most talked about divisive issues in the country, because I think it’s very hard to find a satisfying answer. I think where I have landed personally is I think that at the high school level, the participatory sports level, inclusion and participation probably need to reign supreme.
And this is a question that the OSAA, that the governor, that the school boards, that the courts have considered in great detail and on numerous occasions. Where they have landed, where the Ninth Circuit has landed repeatedly is on inclusion. And I think again, especially at the high school level, that not only is it what I think is probably the logical and most fair outcome, it is the law.
Miller: Ada, was there a final straw for you, a moment when you and your family decided that you did not want to stay in the U.S. any longer, or was it more just a bunch of moments that added up?
Gallagher: Probably a combination. The election of our current president and knowing how he feels about me personally as well as just transgender people as a whole, knowing that he is in power, definitely encouraged the thought of moving to Canada.
Miller: Can I ask you, is it only that he’s in power or … I mean, how much do you think about the fact that he was very explicit in messaging about transgender people and those messages seem to have struck a chord among many voters? I guess what I’m saying is it’s not just him. He wasn’t subtle about demonizing trans people, and in that demonization, it seems to have struck, for some people, a positive chord.
Gallagher: Yeah, as you said, not just with him. I feel less safe knowing that so many people came to support him when one of the tallest talking points is about trans athletes, like about me. I’m one of the few trans high school athletes. There’s like three on the West Coast and I was the main target last year.
Oram: And I would just like to highlight something that Ada said in the piece that I wrote a couple of weeks ago, where she said, essentially, that by being vocally opposed to her participation, you are essentially green lighting general feelings of trans hate, that it validates those people who don’t think … By vocally saying she shouldn’t be competing, it gives gasoline and oxygen to the people who maybe haven’t said out loud before that they honestly don’t think that trans people should exist. And I think that is such a poignant point and was expressed beautifully by Ada. I was really glad that we were able to include that perspective in the story.
Miller: Ada, do you have a sense from your own experience or what you’ve heard of how different your life might be in Canada, when it comes to this aspect of who you are?
Gallagher: Well, I know legally I’ll be more protected there, so that’s just a sense of security I’ll have. As well as just, that’s not like a big talking point. The political figures in Canada aren’t bringing up trans athletes to get more votes.
Miller: Do you feel like you’re being forced to leave your home?
Gallagher: I wouldn’t say forced, but I’d say just … Yeah, like I’m being put up against a wall of either have your rights taken away and live here, or do something I have an option to do, which is leave and have all my rights.
Miller: How are you preparing to leave?
Gallagher: Writing letters to friends, emotionally just thinking about where I’ll go to school there. I’m in contact with some schools there. Yeah, it’s a lot of just emotional stuff.
Miller: Just before I say goodbye, it’s notable that when Bill first wrote about you, he didn’t use your name. He did use your name for the long profile more recently and now here you are on this statewide public radio show with your first and last name. How have you decided that you wanted to tell your story?
Gallagher: I’m not really sure. I mean, personally, I don’t see myself as this big, crazy person that has done a bunch of strong things or whatever, but some people do. And I’ve gotten messages from people telling me how I changed their perspective on things, or how they just felt so bad and about how I’ve been treated by the media. And I think if I can make people feel a bit more empathy in this world, that’s just nice.
Miller: Ada, thanks very much for coming in. Bill as well.
Gallagher: Of course.
Miller: And Ada, a lot of us are gonna miss you.
Gallagher: I’ll miss Oregon too.
Miller: That’s Ada Gallagher. She just finished her junior year at McDaniel’s. Bill Oram is a sports columnist at The Oregonian.
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