VANCOUVER, British Columbia (AP) — For Bennet Miemban-Ganata, owner of a popular Filipino restaurant in Vancouver, the arrival of spring means a season of fiestas, bringing both good business and celebrations of culture.
From Filipino Restaurant Month in April to Filipino Heritage Month in June, there would be colorful clothes, folk dances and traditional food like crispy lumpia, marinated and grilled pork belly, and beef stew. And of course, there would be togetherness for Vancouver's rapidly growing Filipino community.
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April Palma, center, helps a customer at Plato Filipino restaurant in Vancouver, British Columbia, Monday, April 28, 2025. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson)
Wendell Gomez, left, places a candle at a memorial for victims after a vehicle drove into a crowd during a Filipino heritage festival in Vancouver, British Columbia, Monday, April 28, 2025. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson)
Art hangs on a wall at Plato Filipino restaurant in Vancouver, British Columbia, Monday, April 28, 2025. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson)
Renzo Javier, second from right, and John Eranzo, right, chat outside Plato Filipino restaurant in Vancouver, British Columbia, Monday, April 28, 2025. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson)
An attendee reacts at a memorial for victims after a vehicle drove into a crowd during a Filipino heritage festival in Vancouver, British Columbia, Monday, April 28, 2025. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson)
People shop at Sari-Sari Filipino Convenience Store in Vancouver, British Columbia, Monday, April 28, 2025. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson)
All that made Saturday night's vehicle-ramming attack on a large crowd at a Filipino block party all the more devastating.
“We felt ... the whole day that it’s a fun celebration, that people are happy being together,” Miemban-Ganata said as she fought back tears Monday during an interview at her restaurant, Plato Filipino. “We were just there to have fun, to know that we have each other in a foreign land.”
A black Audi SUV barreled down a closed, food-truck-lined street and struck people attending the Lapu Lapu Day festival, which celebrates Datu Lapu-Lapu, an Indigenous chieftain who stood up to Spanish explorers in the 16th century.
Eleven people were killed, including a 5-year-old girl and her parents. Thirty-two people were hurt. Seven were in critical condition and three were in serious condition at hospitals on Monday, Vancouver Police Department spokesperson Steve Addison said.
Authorities quickly ruled out terrorism. The driver, 30-year-old Kai-Ji Adam Lo, faces multiple counts of second-degree murder, police said, and he had a history of mental illness that had prompted law enforcement responses, including one the day before the attack. His brother was the victim of a homicide in 2024, and Lo wrote in an online fundraising appeal that he was devastated by that killing.
The festival is a testament to the growing presence of the Filipino community in the Vancouver area. Filipino-owned shops and restaurants, like Plato Filipino, have proliferated, especially in South Vancouver. Miemban-Ganata said her restaurant serves as a gathering place, one where people feel comfortable enough to leave their kids when they’re pinched for child care.
Over the weekend, British Columbia Premier David Eby vowed not to let the tragedy define the celebration and urged people to channel their rage into helping those affected.
“I don’t think there is a British Columbian that hasn’t been touched in some way by the Filipino community,” he said. “This is a community that gives and gives and yesterday was a celebration of their culture.”
Filipino immigration to Canada was heavily restricted until the 1960s, when Filipino immigrants began arriving to help offset labor shortages in Canada’s health care, garment and other industries, according to a Canadian Historical Association report. Now many work in finance, caregiving, real estate and other sectors.
Filipinos are the third-largest Asian immigrant population in Canada with nearly 1 million residents, and more than one-third arrived in the previous decade, according to the 2021 census. And roughly 175,000 live in British Columbia, mostly in the Vancouver area, where they make up a little more more than 5% of the population.
The community's growth helped prompt the formation in 2023 of Filipino BC, a nonprofit that seeks to foster Filipino Canadian heritage. Filipino BC has advocated for a Filipino cultural center and organized the first Lapu Lapu Day celebration last year. The festival is already so popular that it has attracted attendees from Seattle and Toronto, said RJ Aquino, chair of the organization's board.
“It's really a festival designed to celebrate and share our culture,” Aquino said. “Everybody also just loves having a big party.”
Aquino grew up in the Philippines and moved briefly to the U.S. as a teenager before settling in the Vancouver area in the 1990s. The Filipino community was small then — “It really did feel like everybody knew each other,” he said — and even now it's not uncommon to meet a stranger and learn that they're related through an aunt or uncle.
As he stood before a memorial of flowers and a white cross, he called the weekend "the highest of highs and the lowest of lows.” He had left the festival to have dinner with his family when he received a call about the attack and raced back.
The community's “first imperative,” he said, was “to just be present with each other and make sure we don't feel alone.” The city of Vancouver and Province of British Columbia had been active in offering support services, he noted.
“The Filipino community knows how to be resilient,” Aquino said. “How that manifests this time around — from a tragedy we've never experienced, on a scale like this — we're going to see how it plays out, and I'm going to make sure we come out of this stronger.”
Johnson reported from Seattle.
April Palma, center, helps a customer at Plato Filipino restaurant in Vancouver, British Columbia, Monday, April 28, 2025. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson)
Wendell Gomez, left, places a candle at a memorial for victims after a vehicle drove into a crowd during a Filipino heritage festival in Vancouver, British Columbia, Monday, April 28, 2025. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson)
Art hangs on a wall at Plato Filipino restaurant in Vancouver, British Columbia, Monday, April 28, 2025. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson)
Renzo Javier, second from right, and John Eranzo, right, chat outside Plato Filipino restaurant in Vancouver, British Columbia, Monday, April 28, 2025. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson)
An attendee reacts at a memorial for victims after a vehicle drove into a crowd during a Filipino heritage festival in Vancouver, British Columbia, Monday, April 28, 2025. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson)
People shop at Sari-Sari Filipino Convenience Store in Vancouver, British Columbia, Monday, April 28, 2025. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson)
WASHINGTON (AP) — Becky Pepper-Jackson finished third in the discus throw in West Virginia last year though she was in just her first year of high school. Now a 15-year-old sophomore, Pepper-Jackson is aware that her upcoming season could be her last.
West Virginia has banned transgender girls like Pepper-Jackson from competing in girls and women's sports, and is among the more than two dozen states with similar laws. Though the West Virginia law has been blocked by lower courts, the outcome could be different at the conservative-dominated Supreme Court, which has allowed multiple restrictions on transgender people to be enforced in the past year.
The justices are hearing arguments Tuesday in two cases over whether the sports bans violate the Constitution or the landmark federal law known as Title IX that prohibits sex discrimination in education. The second case comes from Idaho, where college student Lindsay Hecox challenged that state's law.
Decisions are expected by early summer.
President Donald Trump's Republican administration has targeted transgender Americans from the first day of his second term, including ousting transgender people from the military and declaring that gender is immutable and determined at birth.
Pepper-Jackson has become the face of the nationwide battle over the participation of transgender girls in athletics that has played out at both the state and federal levels as Republicans have leveraged the issue as a fight for athletic fairness for women and girls.
“I think it’s something that needs to be done,” Pepper-Jackson said in an interview with The Associated Press that was conducted over Zoom. “It’s something I’m here to do because ... this is important to me. I know it’s important to other people. So, like, I’m here for it.”
She sat alongside her mother, Heather Jackson, on a sofa in their home just outside Bridgeport, a rural West Virginia community about 40 miles southwest of Morgantown, to talk about a legal fight that began when she was a middle schooler who finished near the back of the pack in cross-country races.
Pepper-Jackson has grown into a competitive discus and shot put thrower. In addition to the bronze medal in the discus, she finished eighth among shot putters.
She attributes her success to hard work, practicing at school and in her backyard, and lifting weights. Pepper-Jackson has been taking puberty-blocking medication and has publicly identified as a girl since she was in the third grade, though the Supreme Court's decision in June upholding state bans on gender-affirming medical treatment for minors has forced her to go out of state for care.
Her very improvement as an athlete has been cited as a reason she should not be allowed to compete against girls.
“There are immutable physical and biological characteristic differences between men and women that make men bigger, stronger, and faster than women. And if we allow biological males to play sports against biological females, those differences will erode the ability and the places for women in these sports which we have fought so hard for over the last 50 years,” West Virginia's attorney general, JB McCuskey, said in an AP interview. McCuskey said he is not aware of any other transgender athlete in the state who has competed or is trying to compete in girls or women’s sports.
Despite the small numbers of transgender athletes, the issue has taken on outsize importance. The NCAA and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committees banned transgender women from women's sports after Trump signed an executive order aimed at barring their participation.
The public generally is supportive of the limits. An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll conducted in October 2025 found that about 6 in 10 U.S. adults “strongly” or “somewhat” favored requiring transgender children and teenagers to only compete on sports teams that match the sex they were assigned at birth, not the gender they identify with, while about 2 in 10 were “strongly” or “somewhat” opposed and about one-quarter did not have an opinion.
About 2.1 million adults, or 0.8%, and 724,000 people age 13 to 17, or 3.3%, identify as transgender in the U.S., according to the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law.
Those allied with the administration on the issue paint it in broader terms than just sports, pointing to state laws, Trump administration policies and court rulings against transgender people.
"I think there are cultural, political, legal headwinds all supporting this notion that it’s just a lie that a man can be a woman," said John Bursch, a lawyer with the conservative Christian law firm Alliance Defending Freedom that has led the legal campaign against transgender people. “And if we want a society that respects women and girls, then we need to come to terms with that truth. And the sooner that we do that, the better it will be for women everywhere, whether that be in high school sports teams, high school locker rooms and showers, abused women’s shelters, women’s prisons.”
But Heather Jackson offered different terms to describe the effort to keep her daughter off West Virginia's playing fields.
“Hatred. It’s nothing but hatred,” she said. "This community is the community du jour. We have a long history of isolating marginalized parts of the community.”
Pepper-Jackson has seen some of the uglier side of the debate on display, including when a competitor wore a T-shirt at the championship meet that said, “Men Don't Belong in Women's Sports.”
“I wish these people would educate themselves. Just so they would know that I’m just there to have a good time. That’s it. But it just, it hurts sometimes, like, it gets to me sometimes, but I try to brush it off,” she said.
One schoolmate, identified as A.C. in court papers, said Pepper-Jackson has herself used graphic language in sexually bullying her teammates.
Asked whether she said any of what is alleged, Pepper-Jackson said, “I did not. And the school ruled that there was no evidence to prove that it was true.”
The legal fight will turn on whether the Constitution's equal protection clause or the Title IX anti-discrimination law protects transgender people.
The court ruled in 2020 that workplace discrimination against transgender people is sex discrimination, but refused to extend the logic of that decision to the case over health care for transgender minors.
The court has been deluged by dueling legal briefs from Republican- and Democratic-led states, members of Congress, athletes, doctors, scientists and scholars.
The outcome also could influence separate legal efforts seeking to bar transgender athletes in states that have continued to allow them to compete.
If Pepper-Jackson is forced to stop competing, she said she will still be able to lift weights and continue playing trumpet in the school concert and jazz bands.
“It will hurt a lot, and I know it will, but that’s what I’ll have to do,” she said.
Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
Becky Pepper-Jackson poses for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
The Supreme Court stands is Washington, Friday, Jan. 9, 2026. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
FILE - Protestors hold signs during a rally at the state capitol in Charleston, W.Va., on March 9, 2023. (AP Photo/Chris Jackson, file)
