In March of this year, Gavin Newsom avowed on his podcast that it was “deeply unfair” for transgender girls to compete in girls’ sports. When asked by the conservative activist Charlie Kirk whether Newsom supported trans women in women’s sports, the California Governor said: “I think it’s an issue of fairness. I completely agree with you on that […] it’s deeply unfair. We’ve got to own that. We’ve got to acknowledge it.”

Now, Newsom has the opportunity to depict what fairness might look like. Yesterday a high school junior and trans girl named AB Hernandez finished first in the triple and high jump, and second in the long jump, at the California State Track & Field Championships.

Unlike in many sports across the country where biological men are competing against women, from Ultimate Frisbee to cycling, this meet allowed the females who came in second to Hernandez — Kira Grant Hatcher, Lelani Laruelle, Jillene Wetteland and Brooke White — to crowd onto the podium with Hernandez. This compromise was devised by the meet’s organizers, in hopes of deterring President Donald Trump from cutting the state’s federal funding if Hernandez competed.

Newsom hasn’t yet weighed in on the case, but he could and should. He has the opportunity to lead the way toward a better policy than the strange spectre of biological girls and trans girls sharing a platform, in part because Democrats have shirked their own responsibility to do so, leaving a vacuum for Newsom to fill. Even those Democrats who previously expressed concern about males competing against females, like Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton, couldn’t muster the courage to support the GOP-crafted “Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act”, which would have prohibited “school athletic programs from allowing individuals whose biological sex at birth was male to participate in programs that are for women or girls”. Some have tried to wriggle out of taking a hard stance, insisting that athletic organizations decide what to do, but in many cases, those organizations continue to favor “trans inclusivity” over fairness to girls and women, and over biological reality.

Perhaps one reason for Democrats’ hesitancy is that these completely reasonable ideas about sex and gender have been labeled “Right-coded.” Asserting the reality of biological sex aligns everyday Americans with Trump, whose first executive order in his second term noted: “The erasure of sex in language and policy has a corrosive impact not just on women but on the validity of the entire American system.”

When Newsom upheld the importance of sex-segregated sports on his podcast, some progressives and liberals reported “shock” at his mild-mannered assertion, seeing any pushback or questioning of “trans-inclusivity” not only as heresy, but hatred.

Politicians have to be strong enough in their convictions to shrug off those assertions, and stand up not only for what’s fair, but what’s true. Sex is binary and, in humans, dimorphic. Despite the existence of rare intersex conditions, there are only two reproductive categories, male and female, and they are biologically different.

This is not a fringe position. By some accounts, nearly 80% of Americans, and 67% of Democrats, are in favor of what would be termed by the trans lobby as “gender-critical” policies. Only immoral people want to see transgender girls and women — that is, males who identify as female — discriminated against in housing or employment, as the Supreme Court’s Bostock case rendered illegal.

But most also understand that sex is real and immutable, no matter how someone identifies, and no matter how they alter their bodies. They may want all Americans to be able to live with dignity, but not see dividing sports and spaces based on the reality of sex as a form of discrimination. We can have compassion for trans girls, and respect their right to look and identify as they wish, without rewriting reality to accommodate them.

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Lisa Selin Davis is the author of Tomboy. She writes at Broadview on Substack.

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China is trying to catch up with America on artificial intelligence. The Wall Street Journal has reported that Zhipu AI — one of China’s six “AI tiger” LLMs — has released a new model that can rival leading US systems, including Anthropic’s Mythos, in cybersecurity tasks such as pinpointing security bugs. While this marks a milestone in China’s drive to catch up with Western AI capabilities, strong performance on a single benchmark does not mean it has taken the lead. Chinese models still lag behind their Western counterparts in broader capabilities, such as autonomous operation. Skepticism is therefore warranted before resorting to hysterical conclusions, but complacency about the geopolitical implications of China’s AI advances would be an even greater mistake.

On the infrastructure side, Chinese AI is still constrained by access to advanced chips, with American labs way ahead in computing capacity as well as investment. Analysis from earlier this year suggests that Chinese models are likely to be at least a few months behind those in the US. But they are still continuing to make progress, or that the geopolitical importance of AI will be decided only by whose LLM has ventured deeper into the technological frontier. The practical applications of AI, countries’ to capture foreign markets, and the application of AI into the real economy will matter just as much.

Here, China may hold an advantage. As with its dominance across many critical supply chains, Beijing may not need to produce the most advanced AI systems — only those that are affordable and widely deployable. In doing so, it could consolidate global influence by supplying functional, low-cost AI at scale.

Beijing seems to be pursuing exactly that path, developing an AI “open-source” strategy that offers affordable, widely available AI models for companies and individuals to use and modify as they wish. The production of the DeepSeek AI model, which matched the performance of Silicon Valley tools such as ChatGPT at a fraction of the cost for users, created goodwill among Chinese models with developers.

The four most popular models on OpenRouter, an AI hardware platform for developers, are now all Chinese. The goal for China is not only to win the frontier-model race, but to make its systems the default layer of AI adoption across industries and global markets. For most economies, the choice is increasingly between an affordable tool they can deploy now and a more robust one that may be out of reach.

And while the countries adopting Chinese models may be exposed to political pressure and cyber threats from Beijing, safer and more capable alternatives matter little if they are unaffordable. American AI companies are already under pressure to monetize products whose operating costs are rising. If Chinese open-source models become the cheap default for startups, universities, governments and businesses across the developing world, then America’s AI lead will be eroded from below.

Perhaps more concerning for America in the long run is how AI can give Chinese manufacturing even more strength, through the ongoing integration of AI as a general-purpose technology. China’s new Five-Year Plan mentioned AI more than 50 times and includes an “AI+” action plan aimed at spreading AI across the economy.

Beijing has been pioneering automation of its critical infrastructure for years, with promising recent results in increasing warplane production capacity. In that regard, China’s open-model strategy and manufacturing dominance will reinforce each other. Cheap, adaptable models accelerate deployment across the real economy while those deployments generate real-world data and use cases that can feed back into further model improvement.

The United States should not dismiss the importance of its lead in the AI race. That lead worries Beijing, not least because a more automated Chinese economy would also become more vulnerable to AI-generated cyber threats. But nor should Washington assume that China cannot catch up with American capabilities over time.

This AI competition represents part of a broader struggle over tech supply chains and geopolitical influence. Decisions over whether to adopt US or Chinese models could produce a more fragmented global reality, with different regions relying on different cloud providers, chips and security structures. The result will likely be a global economy which is divided into competing spheres, rather than one which produces a single winner.

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Miquel Vila is a political and geopolitical risk consultant focusing on industrial strategy, critical infrastructure and global supply chains.

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