By Juliet Macur
After months at the center of a debate over a transgender woman’s right to compete on a women’s team, San Jose State University lost its conference championship volleyball game Saturday, bringing a close to a roller-coaster season upended by an issue that has transcended sports.
On a court not far from the Las Vegas Strip, the Spartans fell to Colorado State University in the Mountain West Conference Tournament, failing to advance to next month’s NCAA Tournament, where the spotlight on the Spartans would have grown even brighter.
The Spartans lost to Colorado State, the tournament favorite, three sets to one. The team had reached the final without having played a single game in the tournament: It had a first-round bye, and then had been scheduled to play Boise State in the semifinal, but, for the third time this season, Boise State boycotted the game in protest over the Spartans’ transgender player.
That player — who had been on the team for three seasons without complaints, until this year — did not publicly speak after the game, and has not all season. The New York Times is not naming her because she has not publicly confirmed her identity. The university also has not confirmed whether the volleyball team has a transgender player, citing educational privacy laws.
Along with Boise State, four other teams this season forfeited matches against the Spartans because of the player, putting San Jose State front and center in one the most contentious issues in American life — one that brought people, both for and against the transgender player, to the Spartans’ games and uncommon attention to women’s college volleyball.
But the final Saturday went on peacefully. Fans cheered every player as she was introduced, and no one interrupted the game with a protest. And in the Spartans’ last game together — and the final college game for the seniors — the players acted as if the controversy did not exist.
Between points, they high-fived, directing and encouraging each other as the game progressed. After they lost they hugged each other. Some players climbed into the stands, which were sparsely filled with about 100 fans, to take photos with friends and family.
Todd Kress, the Spartans’ coach, said in an emailed statement that he was proud of his players for staying together through such a challenging season and that they “put their love for the game above all else to play as a team each and every match.”
Jennifer and Brett Reeves, the parents of Spartans player Randilyn Reeves, said the season had been overwhelming for the athletes who just wanted to play volleyball, especially when they saw banners with “hateful words” at some games.
Brett Reeves called it “a little overblown” that some people claimed it was dangerous to have the transgender player on the team because she would hurt others with powerful shots. He said that “safety is an issue on any given night, any given day in practices or in games.” In the final, the transgender player did not lead the championship match in kills — shots that are not returnable and result in a point.
Jennifer Reeves said her daughter supported the transgender player “as a person, as a human being and as a teammate.” Still, Jennifer Reeves added that she doesn’t “necessarily agree with men in women’s sports. But because it’s legal for the NCAA, until that law has changed, our daughter just wants to play volleyball.”
Before one of the games this week, two women stood outside the arena protesting the inclusion of the transgender player. One held a sign that said “Protect women’s sports.” The other wore a red hat that said “Make Women Female Again” in the style of President-elect Donald Trump’s MAGA hats, and said that the issue of transgender women playing “shouldn’t be political. It shouldn’t be partisan.”
But on Saturday, there were no visible protesters outside the arena in the minutes before the final.
The Spartans’ loss Saturday ended the team’s turmoil for now. But the clash over the ability of transgender women to play on women’s teams is far from over.
Cases involving the question of transgender women’s rights in sports are being litigated in courts across the country, especially after 25 states barred transgender athletes from competing on teams consistent with their gender identity, according to the Movement Advancement Project, an LGBTQ+ advocacy group that tracks legislation. Some of those laws have been blocked while lawsuits against them make their way through the courts.
In recent years, courts mostly have sided with the transgender athletes and have upheld their eligibility to play. But more cases have popped up, including one in August, when a federal judge in Virginia temporarily stopped Hanover County Public Schools from barring a transgender middle school student from trying out for, and playing on, a girls’ team.
Another case was filed in March by a group of swimmers and athletes in other sports who sued the NCAA for discriminating against women by allowing transgender swimmer Lia Thomas to compete in the national championships in 2022.
And lawsuits involving transgender minors in Idaho and West Virginia could very well end up at the Supreme Court.
In an interview this month, Brooke Slusser, a captain of the Spartans’ team, said she felt betrayed by her transgender teammate and the university when a conservative website published an article in April about the player’s identity, surprising some of her teammates. She said she did not “think it’s fair that a man is allowed to play.”
She felt that it was so unfair that this month, she and the Spartans’ assistant coach filed a lawsuit to oust the transgender woman from the Spartans’ team, saying that her inclusion violated Title IX rights for gender equity in federally funded institutions.
They and 10 other current and former volleyball players in the Mountain West Conference sued the conference, San Jose State’s head coach and others. It was Slusser’s hope that the player would be off the team in time for the tournament, so that teams would not forfeit games against the Spartans. Making the final without playing because of those forfeits would not have been fair to any of the teams, she said.
But a federal judge this week rejected their lawsuit, clearing the player to compete with her team. On Tuesday, another judge rejected the plaintiffs’ appeal.
Judge S. Kato Crews, an appointee of President Joe Biden to the U.S. District Court in Colorado, provided the first ruling, saying that legal precedents had established that transgender individuals were protected by Title IX and the 14th Amendment, so the player had a right to compete for San Jose State. The defendants did not dispute that the Spartans had a transgender athlete on their team, the lawsuit said.
Crews also wrote that the plaintiffs were not likely to win their case because they had asked for the judge to “rush to litigate these complex issues” when they had ample time to do so before the tournament, since the player had been on the team for several seasons.
Bill Bock, a lawyer for Slusser and the other plaintiffs, said Friday that the plaintiffs were proceeding with their lawsuit against the conference and San Jose State.
He said they were seeking damages for what they say is a failure to follow Title IX, the Equal Protection Clause and the First Amendment, and that they were asking the court to stop the defendants from “further implementing the policies that allow males to compete in women’s sports.”
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