FFS Friday: Celeste Duyst

June 27, 2025

FFS (Female Free Speech) Friday honors women and girls who are speaking out about the harms that “gender identity” poses to women and girls as a sex class. FFS Friday posts are free and shareable.

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Today’s FFS Friday celebrates Celeste Duyst, a female athlete who has been explaining to her school and the California Interscholastic Federation (and anyone else who will listen) why male athletes do not belong in sports intended to be exclusively for women and girls.

On June 20, Celeste Duyst spoke to the California Interscholastic Federation about her experiences having to share sports and locker rooms with a male student because of the CIF’s policy (which the Department of Education has now found violates Title IX) allowing male athletes to compete in sports intended for women and girls throughout California. A video of her speech is here.

This is what she said:

Hello. My name is Celeste Duyst. I am a varsity level athlete at Arroyo Grande High School.

I’m here today because athletes like myself have endured humiliation through the intrusion of our privacy.

Many continue to change for their sports with a boy in the locker room that is specifically designated for women. The watchful eyes of the transgender athlete has robbed us of our dignity. It has brought myself to tears, and others have resorted to changing in their cars. Our basic female rights are slowly being demolished.

We are not only supposed to change with a biological boy, but are expected to compete against him. The unfair physiological advantage he has and that other transgender athletes possess is abolishing women’s sports.

Just because this doesn’t affect you, that doesn’t make it right, and it should not undermine the facts. There is a boy who has an anatomic advantage that women do not have. He watches women change. He competes in women’s sports. When and how is this okay?

I urge all of you to acknowledge that if you continue to allow boys in women’s sports, you are saying to all girls that you do not value safety and you do not value women.

Please carefully consider the removal of men in girls’ sports and vulnerable spaces. Thank you.

This has been going on with the CIF for years. A few days after Celeste spoke, the group Women Are Real posted a short video of a CIF meeting, during which a woman said the following:

The girls have their own category for their own safety, and so that they can learn leadership, and so they can have all the benefits of sports. Boys can have that in their own category. I don’t care what they look like or who they say they are. They’re boys. They’re male.

WAKE UP.

I’m sick of coming here, I’m sick of getting blank stares. I’m sick of you doing this to girls.

In the video, members of the CIF can be seen just staring at her blankly while she spoke. Women Are Real said on X, “I don’t understand how the leaders at @CIFState can sit through over 2 years of these speeches and not act.” And yet that is exactly what’s happening.

Well, the CIF is facing a reckoning, in the form of a Department of Education finding that it’s in violation of Title IX. But it shouldn’t have gotten that far. CIF should have listened to all the women and girls who have been telling them these things for years.

Celeste, you should not have to be doing this. You should be enjoying school and sports, without having to deal with a boy in your sports and locker room. None of you should have to be dealing with this. The adults should have stood up and protected all of you years ago. But I’m glad you’re doing it, and I thank you. Today’s FFS Friday is for you.