Man questions 9-year-old girl's gender at Canada school track meet
Heidi Starr’s 9-year-old daughter last week was moments away from making the shot-put throws that would determine whether she advanced to the next level of competition. Then, a 67-year-old man took to the field and stood at the top of the throwing circle, stopping the elementary school track-and-field event in British Columbia, Starr said.
The man accused the 9-year-old of being a boy or transgender and demanded Starr, 47, provide a birth certificate proving her daughter was a girl, she told The Washington Post, adding that the man’s wife called her and her ex-wife — the girl’s other mother — “genital mutilators.”
The disruption sent shock waves through the city of Kelowna, the province of British Columbia, Canada as a whole and beyond. Kelowna’s mayor called the incident “heartbreaking.” The head of the provincial government, equivalent to the governor of a U.S. state, described the incident as “awful” and the man’s alleged behavior as the “kind of hate [that] is not acceptable or welcome in British Columbia.”
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“Let’s keep calling out transphobia when we see it. Hate hurts everyone. And let’s stand with this girl and everyone who is targeted just for being themselves,” Premier David Eby said Tuesday on social media.
The incident comes as conservative politicians and activists have pushed bans on transgender athletes from competing in girls’ and women’s sports. Certain sports’ international governing bodies have also announced some bans.
The man accused of haranguing Starr’s daughter, Josef Tesar, spoke with The Post in a conversation alongside his son, who is also named Josef Tesar. The two conceded that the elder Tesar had asked the volunteer running the shot-put competition if Starr’s daughter was a boy, but he denied accusing her of being transgender. Tesar, whose granddaughter was competing in the event, accused Starr and her ex-wife of misrepresenting what he considered a good-natured question.
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The two declined to discuss allegations about Tesar’s wife, who did not respond to a request for comment from The Post. In an interview with the local outlet Castanet News, she denied calling Starr and her ex-wife “genital mutilators” but said she might have used profanity during the argument.
Kevin Kaardal, superintendent for Central Okanagan Public Schools, contradicted Tesar’s account. After interviewing witnesses, district officials determined that Tesar asked an “absolutely inappropriate” question challenging a 9-year-old’s gender, he told The Post. Tesar and his wife then failed to follow the organizer’s orders to leave and forced officials to move the shot-put event because of their “harassment and intimidation,” he said.
“He interfered,” Kaardal added. “He had no right to do that.”
Organizers ejected the Tesars from the competition, and officials are working on banning them from all district events, he said.
On June 8, most of the district track-and-field finals at the Apple Bowl went as expected, he added. Starr’s daughter, who was sporting a short pixie haircut, had qualified to compete in two events: discus and shot put. Discus was the first field event of the meet at 10 a.m. She got second place.
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For the next four hours or so, Starr’s daughter showed off her second-place ribbon, rooted for teammates, celebrated with them when they qualified and consoled them when they didn’t.
Then, around 2 p.m., she readied to compete in shot put, the final field event of the meet. At 2:15, as the girl ahead of her was about to throw, Tesar interrupted the event by taking the field and blocking shot-putters from throwing, Starr said.
Tesar addressed the volunteer overseeing the event but loudly enough so Starr could hear from 15 to 20 feet away. He asked if the event was girls-only, Starr said. When she replied that it was for fourth-grade girls, Tesar allegedly asked why boys were throwing, pointing at Starr’s daughter and another girl.
That’s when Starr intervened, saying something like, “Excuse me, you’re pointing at my daughter, who is a girl.”
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No, the man said, according to Starr, adding: “She’s a boy.” He allegedly added that the other girl was too, causing her to run away. Starr insisted that her 9-year-old was a cisgender girl, leading the man to hold his hands up to make air quotes while saying, “all right, a ‘girl,’” according to Starr. Tesar allegedly said that, if their daughter wasn’t a boy, she was “obviously trans.”
“This event is for real girls,” he said, according to Starr.
Josef Tesar persisted, demanding proof that their daughter was a girl, specifically a birth certificate, Starr said.
Starr recalled replying: “That’s entirely inappropriate.”
Tesar’s son said his father asked for the birth certificate offhandedly as a way to defuse the situation. Plus, the son added, carrying around a birth certificate was commonplace when his father competed as an Olympic-caliber wrestler in the 1980s.
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When Tesar asked for the birth certificate, Starr said, that’s when she realized she was getting “incredibly upset.” She asked the volunteer where she could get support and was directed to the event organizer’s tent across the field. Without any security, the organizers gathered some of the more “assertive” parents to talk to Tesar, she said. They asked him to leave, Kaardal said. As he and his wife refused, the shot-put event was moved to the other side of the field, according to the principal, who said organizers ultimately escorted the Tesars off the property.
Starr filed a complaint with the local detachment of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. In a statement, a spokesperson confirmed police had received “a number of messages from concerned citizens” and launched an investigation. Police declined to release more information but, in a statement, said they “share everyone’s grave concerns with discriminatory behaviour.”
The disruption had immediate effects, Starr said.
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“It rocked our entire family,” she added, the most profound effect afflicting her daughter. “She was shaking and crying and beside herself that whole day, in and out of tears the whole night until bedtime.”
But, Starr added, they’ve been inundated with and buoyed by messages of love from across North America. Starr said she believes that will help transform an “incredibly traumatic” event into one that’s empowering.
The incident didn’t happen in a vacuum, but is rather “a direct result of the propaganda and dehumanizing anti-queer, anti-trans and anti-anything [that’s] non-heterosexual, non-cisgendered,” Starr said. But her daughter and other children should not be targets of that rhetoric, she said.
“It was disgusting,” she said.
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