Patrick Evans has coached girls’ soccer for 28 seasons at several school districts.
But while he was teaching at Fresno Unified School District, Evans told Independent Women’s Forum, administrators verbally threatened its coaches with losing their positions if they did not allow biological males to play on girls’ and women’s sports teams.
Evans, who’s also an English teacher, said that it didn’t feel it was fair for the district to make him choose between sacrificing his morals to affirm biological falsehoods and sticking to his principles but losing his job.
“Either overtly or subtly, woke teachers in Fresno Unified are supported by woke administrators who preach and teach their political views,” Evans said. “Free thinking and critical thinking that’s contrary to political doctrine is not allowed without firm, if not harsh, challenge or rebuke.”
In addition to teaching and coaching girls’ soccer, Evans has decades of experience coaching female powerlifters, and has also coached “across the aisle” for men’s baseball and football. He’s a resident of Fresno, California—one of the state’s largest cities. Despite historically having a more conservative identity, the region is now becoming a hub for liberal ideologies.
Evans also recently taught and coached at Clovis Unified School District and Central Unified School District in Fresno County, where he said that administrators are very careful to not put their stances on the women’s sports issue in writing, but they make their positions clearly known.
“Multiple school districts in the San Joaquin Valley, from Bakersfield to Modesto, have indicated biological males identifying as females will be allowed to participate in female sports,” Evans said.
What’s more, it appears that traditionally sex-segregated spaces are now open to students of the opposite biological sex. For example, Evans heard that Clovis Unified recently installed tampon dispensers in all boy’s restrooms at $500.00 each. He said:
“The districts have to ultimately fall in line behind the governor, and most district administrations are very pro-trans athletes. As teachers and coaches, the latter especially, obviously, care about every student and have compassion towards a trans kid as much as a kid who isn’t. But we’re adamant about the female sports arena remaining a world where males can’t be intrusive and damaging.”
According to Evans, the state of education in California is “chaos.”
Evans juxtaposed his experiences as a public school coach and educator in California with his time teaching abroad in China in 2021, noting that it’s not just progressive gender ideology that is dictating class curriculum and conduct—the trans agenda, he said, is only the tip of the iceberg.
During his time abroad, Evans witnessed firsthand how, in dictatorial nations, political propaganda eliminates freedoms and whips the everyday person into obedience toward a certain ideology. Evans said that freedom of thought in China is at a bare minimum, but upon his return to the United States and diving back into public education, he feels that “tragically, it’s become so here.”
Evans voluntarily left Fresno Unified instead of changing his behavior, self-censoring his personal convictions, and being complicit in the erasure of single-sex sports. Though he understands the woke issue to be endemic to most California school districts, Evans was able to find a new job at a district that has not yet bent the knee.
“In no way am I going to sacrifice my principles or morality. Yes, I don’t want to be fired, as coaching is my passion and love,” he said. “Yet, most of us, at some point, choose our principles. Even at the loss of all else.”
