San Jose State University’s women’s volleyball team is set to play in the Mountain West Tournament Championship Match tomorrow after their opposition in the semifinal, Boise State, forfeited their match, which was supposed to be played today. The San Jose Spartans have faced four forfeited games this year due to the presence of a transgender player on the team’s roster, and the player herself was the subject of federal case from other players and coaches seeking to ban her from the upcoming match.
The lawsuit was filed earlier this month by the Spartans’ co-captain, Brooke Slusser, and the team’s assistant coach, Melissa Batie-Smoose, along with ten other female volleyball players, most from the Spartans’ opposition. Naming a slew of officials as defendants – from the team’s head coach and school administrators to the California State University system’s board of trustees – they alleged that the trans player’s presence violates Title IX rights to gender equity at federally funded institutions, and sought an injunction to keep her from playing. The request was rejected by federal judge S. Kato Crews on Monday, and again on appeal a day later.
Slusser, a senior from Denton, Texas, repeatedly misgendered her teammate in comments she gave recently to the New York Times. “Imagining myself with kids and seeing if they had to play against a man or playing on a team with a man and knowing that I had the place to make a change for that, I couldn’t live with myself,” she said. Slusser also to the paper that she felt that this fight was “God’s plan” for her. Batie-Smoose, Slusser’s coplaintiff, has also called the player a “man,” and has accused her of concealing her level of play, telling the Times that “ever since this came out, he’s not been playing at the same level, like, he’s dialing it back a bit.”
Beyond the assistant coach’s characterization of the transgender player’s ability, there is no evidence proffered in the Times piece to suggest that the player has been competing at a level that might raise concerns about fair play. The player’s identity remains concealed, and the paper does not even obliquely assert that any of their statistics (successful/attempted points, blocks, serves etc.) are outside the norm for the general level of play. Indeed, the University of Wyoming’s athletic director indicated that she was “not the best or most dominant hitter” and that his team felt safe playing her.
The trans woman playing with the Spartans has been there since 2022, and the teams boycotting them now played them during those seasons without complaint. The Spartans have a mixed record over those two seasons, reaching the Mountain West Tournament Championship in 2022, where they lost against Utah State, only to have a losing record (13-18 overall, 4-14 in conference) and miss out on the championship in 2023. Boise State, the team that boycotted the game they were supposed to play today, lost to them in 2022 and beat them last year.
