#San José State University

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Darrell Lucus at Loud, Liberal, Christian:

For the better part of 2024, San Jose State University’s volleyball team drew considerable attention over the presence of a woman on the roster suspected of being trans. Namely, senior Blaire Fleming. After gender-critical site Reduxx posted an article that purported to out Fleming in April, several teams inside and outside the Mountain West Conference forfeited their matches against the Spartans. It was generally believed that the forfeits came because of opposition to Fleming’s presence on the Spartans’ roster, though only two opponents—Boise State and Nevada—explicitly said so. The forfeits came to the open cheers of many on the right, led by Riley Gaines of OutKick. Gaines spearheaded a class action Title IX lawsuit against the NCAA seeking to have Fleming declared ineligible—a lawsuit joined by two of Fleming’s teammates. Those objecting to Fleming being on the team cite safety concerns about playing against a trans woman. But unless I missed something, no one has asked why anyone even attempted to out Fleming in the first place. The general consensus is that it is almost never acceptable to out someone who doesn’t want to be out—which is why I’m not linking to the Reduxx piece. Some have argued that virtually the only exception is if someone is actively harming the LGBTQ community, but even that argument can be highly fraught.

Now who would think it would be at all acceptable to attempt to out Fleming as trans? Well, a closer look into the background of one of Reduxx’s co-founders, Anna Slatz, the author of the piece purporting to out Fleming, reveals one possible answer. According to Slatz’s biography on Wikipedia, the Canadian native first gained attention in January 2018, when she was attending the University of New Brunswick Saint John in Canada under the name Anna De Luca. In 2018, while she was editor-in-chief of UNBSJ’s student newspaper, The Baron, she published an unedited op-ed from Michael Thurlow, leader of the neo-Nazi National Socialist Canadian Labour Revival Party. She also published an interview she’d conducted with Thurlow. Both pieces were chock full of racist and anti-Semitic rhetoric, along with paeans to Hitler. As disturbing as that was by itself, Thurlow and his minions had recently plastered UNB’s main campus in Fredericton with racist posters.

[...]

As near as I can determine, the only people to have made the connection between Reduxx and Slatz’s egregious lapse of judgment as a student are a few sporadic posters on Twitter. That’s a shame, especially given that Slatz’s tactics set off all kinds of ethical alarm bells.

Slatz and others seem to think that trans women playing women’s sports pose such an existential threat to women’s sports that it justifies outing them. Do we really want to go down this road? It’s a open invitation to harassment that could potentially put the athlete and those around her in harm’s way. That’s not just in the abstract. After Slatz ran her article, Fleming was the target of vicious harassment and abuse, and was even mentioned by Donald Trump on the campaign trail. And of course, we’re ignoring the 500-pound gorilla in the room. What if Slatz is wrong and Fleming isn’t trans? She would potentially have grounds for one whopper of a libel and defamation suit—and seeing that she is a private person, she could really draw blood. But then again, we’re talking about a woman who found it acceptable to give an unfettered platform to a Nazi. The bottom line? There was no defensible reason whatsoever for Slatz to try to out Fleming. At best, it’s a gross invasion of privacy that put Fleming and innocent third parties at undue risk of harm. At best, it’s libel and defamation of the worst type. But then again, we’re talking about a woman who found it acceptable to give an unfettered platform to a Nazi.

Anti-trans “gender critical” website Reduxx writeer Anna Slatz published a piece purporting to out alleged trans SJSU volleyball player Blaire Fleming, who is suspected of being “trans” by TERFs and right-wing reactionaries such as Riley Gaines. Slatz previously platformed neo-Nazis.

[justinssportscorner]

Erin Reed at Erin In The Morning:

Boise State University released a statement on Saturday indicating that it would forfeit its match against undefeated San Jose State University. The move comes after allegedly transgender volleyball player Blaire Fleming was outed by a Reduxx article and then targeted by her teammate Brooke Slusser, who corroborated Blaire’s outing in legal filings after Blaire spoke privately about her gender identity. Now, Slusser has joined a lawsuit with anti-trans campaigner Riley Gaines in attempting to force the NCAA to disallow transgender athletes from playing on teams of the same gender. In addition, ICONS, the anti-trans organization supporting the lawsuit, sent a letter to the Mountain West Conference’s university president outing Fleming, a move that ultimately led to Boise State’s decision to forfeit the game.

“San Jose State University (SJSU), a California state university and a member of the Mountain West Conference (MWC), along with the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), are allegedly violating federal law by enforcing the NCAA's Transgender Eligibility Policies (TEP). These policies allow Blaire Fleming, a transgender-identifying male, to compete on SJSU's women's volleyball team,” said the letter, falsely asserting that Title IX bans transgender athletes from competing.

Notably, transgender participation in sports does not violate any federal law. Title IX has been interpreted to protect transgender participation in sports, as evidenced by rulings from federal judges in the 9th Circuit area of jurisdiction, which covers states like California and Idaho. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals itself has ruled that transgender athletes can continue to participate in response to ongoing court cases. Title IX protections for trans athletes have likewise been affirmed in other circuits, such as the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, which upheld a similar ruling in West Virginia. Fleming originally played in South Carolina but was forced to transfer to California after the state threatened and then later enacted a ban on transgender athletes competing in women’s sports. Upon transferring, she became Slusser’s roommate, according to Slusser’s legal filing. In her lawsuit, Slusser claims that she was unaware Fleming was transgender, a point that challenges the argument that people “can always tell” who is transgender—a common argument against transgender inclusion. Slusser’s legal filing consistently misgenders Fleming throughout.

[...] The complaint, along with various news sites, highlights Fleming’s height of 6'1". For instance, Must Read Alaska describes Blaire as "a physically imposing transgender player" who "is 6'1" and towers over opposing teams." However, a quick glance at the San Jose State University (SJSU) website shows that 7 out of 25 players on the team are 6 feet or taller. Additionally, 11 of Boise State’s players exceed 6 feet in height, with many taller than Blaire. None of these athletes are accused of possessing an unfair advantage, despite their bodies being very similar to Blaire’s in appearance and size. There is no evidence that Blaire, or that most transgender players who have been on hormone therapy for 2+ years, retain a significant advantage over cisgender female athletes in the sport of volleyball. [...] As Slusser and ICONS' lawsuit remains unresolved, the broader landscape for transgender athletes continues to evolve, particularly in states like California, where legal protections are robust. Blaire Fleming's place on the team appears secure for now, but the future of transgender rights, including participation in sports and access to gender-affirming care, is currently in the hands of the Supreme Court, which will rule on the issue of equal protection in the coming months. The outcome of these upcoming rulings will not only impact individual athletes like Blaire but will also shape the rights and recognition of transgender people across the nation for years to come.

Boise State University cowardly forfeited a match all because San José State University had trans woman Blaire Fleming playing a women’s volleyball contest.

[capricorn-season]

[majchic]

[humanoidhistory]

Halloween at Desperados Club in Campbell, California, 1982. Photos by Ted Sahl.

(San José State University)

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Colin Wright

Published: Oct 2, 2023

On September 25, the American Anthropological Association (AAA) and the Canadian Anthropology Society (CASCA) announced that they were cancelling a panel discussion titled “Let’s Talk About Sex, Baby: Why Biological Sex Remains a Necessary Analytic Category in Anthropology,” originally scheduled as part of their annual conference in Toronto from November 15–19. The cancellation and subsequent response by the two organizations shows the extent to which gender ideology has captured academic anthropology.

The panel would have featured six female scientists, specializing in biology and anthropology, to address their profession’s growing denial of biological sex as a valid and relevant category. While terminological confusion surrounding the distinction between sex and gender roles has been a persistent issue within anthropology for decades, the total refusal of some to recognize sex as a real biological variable is a more recent phenomenon. The panel organizers, eager to facilitate an open discussion among anthropologists and entertain diverse perspectives on a contentious issue, considered the AAA/CASCA conference an optimal venue to host such a conversation.

The organizations accepted the “Let’s Talk About Sex” panel without incident on July 13, and planned to feature it alongside other panels including those on politically oriented subjects, such as “Trans Latinx Methodologies,” “Exploring Activist Anthropology,” and “Reimagining Anthropology as Restorative Justice.” Elizabeth Weiss, a professor of anthropology at San José State University, was one of the slated panelists. She had intended to discuss the significance in bio-archaeology and forensic anthropology of using skeletal remains to establish a decedent’s sex. While a 2018 article in Discover titled “Skeletal Studies Show Sex, Like Gender, Exists Along a Spectrum” reached different conclusions, Weiss planned to discuss how scientific breakthroughs have made determining the sex of skeletal remains a more exact science. Her presentation was to be moderate; she titled it “No Bones About It: Skeletons Are Binary; People May Not Be,” and conceded in her abstract the growing need in forensics to “to ensure that skeletal finds are identified by both biological sex and their gender identity” due to “the current rise in transitioning individuals and their overrepresentation as crime victims.”

Despite having already approved the panel, the presidents of the AAA (Ramona Pérez) and CASCA (Monica Heller) unexpectedly issued a joint letter on September 25 notifying the “Let’s Talk About Sex” presenters that their panel was cancelled. They claimed that the panel’s subject matter conflicted with their organizations’ values, jeopardized “the safety and dignity of our members,” and eroded the program’s “scientific integrity.” They further asserted the panel’s ideas (i.e., that sex is a real and important biological variable) would “cause harm to members represented by the Trans and LGBTQI of the anthropological community as well as the community at large.” To ensure that similar discussions would not be approved in the future, the AAA/CASCA vowed to “undertake a major review of the processes associated with vetting sessions at our annual meetings.”

The following day, the panelists issued a response letter, expressing their disappointment that the AAA and CASCA presidents had “chosen to forbid scholarly dialogue” on the topic. They rejected the “false accusation” that supporting the “continued use of biological sex categories (e.g., male and female; man and woman) is to imperil the safety of the LGBTQI community.” The panelists called “particularly egregious” the AAA/CASCA’s assertion that the panel would compromise the program’s “scientific integrity.” They noted that, ironically, the AAA/CASCA’s “decision to anathematize our panel looks very much like an anti-science response to a politicized lobbying campaign.”

I spoke with Weiss, who expressed her frustration over the canceled panel and the two presidents’ stifling of honest discussion about sex. She was concerned about the continual shifting of goalposts on the issue:

We used to say there’s sex, and gender. Sex is biological, and gender is not. Then it’s no, you can no longer talk about sex. Sex and gender are one, and separating the two makes you a transphobe, when of course it doesn’t. In anthropology and many topics, the goalposts are continuously moved. And, because of that, we need to stand up and say, “I’m not moving from my place unless there’s good scientific evidence that my place is wrong.” And I don’t think there is good scientific evidence that there are more than two sexes.

Weiss was not the only person to object. When I broke news of the cancellation on X, it immediately went viral. At the time of writing, my post has more than 2.4 million views, and the episode has ignited public outcry from individuals and academics across the political spectrum. Science writer Michael Shermer called the AAA and CASCA’s presidents’ letter “shameful” and an “utterly absurd blank slate denial of human nature.” Timur Kuran, a professor of economics and political science at Duke University, described it as “absolutely appalling.” Jeffrey Flier, the Harvard University distinguished service professor and former dean of the Harvard Medical School, viewed it as “a chilling declaration of war on scholarly controversy.” Even Elon Musk expressed his disbelief with a single word: “Wow.”

Despite the backlash, the AAA and CASCA have held firm. On September 28, the AAA posted a statement on its website titled “No Place For Transphobia in Anthropology: Session Pulled from Annual Meeting Program.” The statement reiterated the stance outlined in the initial letter, declaring the “Let’s Talk About Sex” panel an affront to its values and claiming that it endangered AAA members’ safety and lacked scientific rigor.

The AAA’s statement claimed that the now-canceled panel was at odds with their first ethical principle of professional responsibility: “Do no harm.” It likened the scuttled panel’s “gender critical scholarship” to the “race science of the late 19th and early 20th centuries,” the main goal of which was to “advance a ‘scientific’ reason to question the humanity of already marginalized groups of people.” In this instance, the AAA argued, “those who exist outside a strict and narrow sex/gender binary” are being targeted.

Weiss remains unconvinced by this moral posturing. “If the panel was so egregious,” she asked, “why had it been accepted in the first place?”

The AAA also claimed that Weiss’s panel lacked “scientific integrity,” and that she and her fellow panelists “relied on assumptions that ran contrary to the settled science in our discipline.” The panelists, the AAA argued, had committed “one of the cardinal sins of scholarship” by “assum[ing] the truth of the proposition that . . . sex and gender are simplistically binary, and that this is a fact with meaningful implications for the discipline.” In fact, the AAA claimed, the panelists’ views “contradict scientific evidence” about sex and gender, since “[a]round the world and throughout history, there have always been people whose gender roles do not align neatly with their reproductive anatomy.”

There is much to respond to in this portion of AAA’s statement. First, it’s ironic for the organization to accuse scientists of committing the “cardinal sin” of “assuming the truth” of something, and then to justify cancelling those scientists’ panel on the grounds that the panelists refuse to accept purportedly “settled science.” Second, the panel was organized to discuss biological sex (i.e., the biology of males and females), not “gender roles”; pivoting from discussions of basic biology to murkier debates about sex-related social roles and expectations is a common tactic of gender ideologues. Third, the AAA’s argument that a person’s “gender role” might not “align neatly” with his or her reproductive anatomy implies the existence of normative behaviors for members of each sex. Indeed, this is a central tenet of gender ideology that many people dispute and warrants the kind of discussion the panel intended to provide.

The AAA’s statement made another faulty allegation, this time against Weiss for using “sex identification” instead of “sex estimation” when assessing the sex of skeletal remains. The AAA claimed that Weiss’s choice of terminology was problematic and unscholarly because it assumes a “determinative” process that “is easily influenced by cognitive bias on the part of the researcher.”

Weiss, however, rejects the AAA’s notion that the term “sex determination” is outdated or improper. She emphasized that “sex determination” is frequently used in the literature, as demonstrated in numerous contemporary anthropology papers, along with “sex estimation.” Weiss said, “I tend not to use the term ‘sex estimation’ because to estimate is usually associated with a numeric value; thus, I do use the term ‘age estimation.’ But just as ‘age estimation’ does not mean that there is no actual age of an individual and that biological age changes don’t exist, ‘sex estimation’ does not mean that there isn’t a biological sex binary.” She also contested the AAA’s claim that anthropologists’ use of “sex estimation” is meant to accommodate people who identify as transgender or non-binary. Rather, she said, “sex estimation” is used when “anthropologists are not 100 [percent] sure of their accuracy for a variety of reasons, including that the remains may be fragmented.” But as these methods improve—which was a focus of her talk—such “estimations” become increasingly determinative.

After making that unfounded allegation against Weiss, the AAA further embarrasses itself by claiming that “There is no single biological standard by which all humans can be reliably sorted into a binary male/female sex classification,” and that sex and gender are “historically and geographically contextual, deeply entangled, and dynamically mutable categories.”

Each of these assertions is empirically false. An individual’s sex can be determined by observing their primary sex organs, or gonads, as these organs determine the type of gamete an individual can or would have the function to produce. The existence of a very rare subset of individuals with developmental conditions that make their sex difficult to assess does not substantiate the existence of a third sex. Sex is binary because are only two sexes, not because every human in existence is neatly classifiable. Additionally, while some organisms are capable of changing sex, humans are not among them. Therefore, the assertion that human sex is “dynamically mutable” is false.

Weiss appropriately highlights the “false equivalency” inherent in the claim that the existence of people with intersex conditions disproves the binary nature of sex. “People who are born intersex or with disorders of sex development are not nonbinary or transgender, they are individuals with medical pathologies,” she said. “We would not argue that because some people are born with polydactyly (extra fingers or toes), often seen in inbred populations, that you can’t say that humans have ten fingers and ten toes. It's an absurd conclusion.”

On September 29, the AAA posted a Letter of Support on its website, penned by anthropologists Agustin Fuentes, Kathryn Clancy, and Robin Nelson, endorsing the decision to cancel the “Let’s Talk About Sex” session. Again, the primary motivation cited was the panel’s opposition to the supposed “settled science” concerning sex. The authors disputed the panelists’ claim that the term “sex” was being supplanted by “gender” in anthropology, claiming instead that there is “massive work on these terms, and their entanglements and nuances.” They also reiterated the AAA’s false accusation that the term “sex determination” was problematic and outdated. Nonetheless, the canceled panel could have served as a prime venue to discuss these issues.

In response to these calls for censorship, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) issued an open letter to the AAA and CASCA. FIRE characterized the groups’ decision to cancel the panel as a “retreat” from their scientific mission, which “requires unwavering dedication to free inquiry and open dialogue.” It argued that this mission “cannot coexist with inherently subjective standards of ‘harm,’ ‘safety,’ and ‘dignity,’ which are inevitably used to suppress ideas that cause discomfort or conflict with certain political or ideological commitments.” FIRE implored the AAA and CASCA to “reconsider this decision and to recommit to the principles of intellectual freedom and open discourse that are essential to the organizations’ academic missions.” FIRE’s open letter has garnered signatures from nearly 100 academics, including Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker and Princeton University’s Robert P. George. FIRE invites additional academic faculty to add their names.

The initial letter and subsequent statement by the AAA/CASCA present a particularly jarring illustration of the undermining of science in the name of “social justice.” The organizations have embarrassed themselves yet lack the self-awareness to realize it. The historian of science Alice Dreger called the AAA and CASCA presidents’ use of the term “cardinal sin” appropriate “because Pérez and Heller are working from dogma so heavy it is worthy of the Vatican.” Indeed, they have fallen prey to gender ideologues, driven into a moral panic by the purported dangers of defending the existence of biological sex to people whose sex distresses them. The AAA/CASCA have determined that it is necessary not only to lie to these people about their sex but also to deceive the rest of us about longstanding, foundational, and universal truths about sex.

Science can advance only within a system and culture that values open inquiry and robust debate. The AAA and CASCA are not just barring a panel of experts with diverse and valid perspectives on biological sex from expressing their well-considered conclusions; they are denying conference attendees the opportunity to hear diverse viewpoints and partake in constructive conversations on a controversial subject. Such actions obstruct the path of scientific progress.

“When you move away from the truth, no good can come from it,” Weiss says. The AAA and CASCA would be wise to ponder that reality.

==

I miss the days when anti-science meant creationists with "Intelligent Design," flat Earthers, and Jenny McCarthy-style MMR anti-vaxers.

It's weird that archaeologists are now denying evolution and pretending not to know how babies are made. Looks like creationists aren't the only evolution-denial game in town any more.

[artmialma]

Jeff Faerber ( born in 1974)

Tibetan Flames, Japanese Waves 

He studied art at San José State University (San José, CA) and School of Visual Arts (NYC).

[miz-chase]

Sometimes I feel sad because the Temperance Brennan they depict in the tv show Bones (not the version of her in my heart) is an incredibly regressive, old fashioned kind of anthropologist

I struggle to picture her being pro rematriation of human remains and that sucks

Anyway just like…. Know that Tv show Brennan has very little to do with actual contemporary cultural anthropologists. And NAGPRA is legit and a moral calling and anyone working to hinder that work sucks shit

[macmanx]

Faculty members across the California State University system will be on strike starting Monday. The labor action follows months of fruitless contract negotiations between the CFA and CSU management.

To keep up with the rising cost of living, the CFA has sought a 12% pay raise since May 2023. The union also has other demands: raising the salary floor for the lowest-paid faculty, establishing more manageable workloads, securing more counselors for students, and expanding parental leave.

In an emailed statement, the union said it's been met with “disrespect and derision by management.” During negotiations, “CSU management has only addressed our conflict over salary; they have completely ignored the issues of workload, health and safety concerns, and parental leave,” said Chris Cox, a lecturer at San José State and CFA vice president of racial and social justice.

[rjzimmerman]

An aerial view of the controversial Yellow Pine project near Pahrump, Nev. Credit: Patrick Donnelly.

Excerpt from this story from Inside Climate News:

Local conservationist Patrick Donnelly drove east along the Loneliest Road in America, a ribbon of pavement in north central Nevada that deserves its name. Before him, sprawling in every direction, was a green-gray sagebrush basin so large you could probably plop Las Vegas in it and still have room to spare. Save for a stiff wind and the occasional cow bleat, a heavy silence sat on the valley. Not much moved aside from skittish grouse and a few scattered cars. This is a place, a big open hunk of public land, where humans haven’t made an intensive mark. 

At least not yet. In corporate conference rooms and government offices from Vegas to Washington, D.C., policymakers, executives and lobbyists are planning a very different future for valleys like this one. If their plans become reality, vast swaths of undeveloped land across Nevada could soon be crossed by towering transmission lines and studded with solar farms in the name of fighting climate change. 

The Biden administration has made an aggressive drive to permit 25 gigawatts of renewable energy on America’s federal lands by 2025, which the U.S. Department of the Interior says is enough to power 12 million homes. It surpassed that goal in April. In August this year, it also proposed a solar plan that would make more than 31 million acres of federal land across the American West available for potential solar development.

Even before Donald Trump’s victory in the November election, the Biden administration has been rushing to push through as many renewable energy projects as it can. Trump has promised to place more emphasis on oil and gas development, and at an October 2024 roundtable with Latino voters he criticized the impact that solar development has on the desert, saying “it’s all steel and glass and wires. It looks like hell. … And what it does to your desert areas or the areas that you are putting it, it’s just crazy.” Yet during Trump’s first term, his administration did approve a number of major solar projects on federal land, including the controversial Yellow Pine project near Pahrump, Nevada. And some experts doubt that he will completely roll back the ongoing renewable energy boom in the American West.

“I don’t think there is much of a difference between Trump and Biden on solar, renewables and public lands,” said Dustin Mulvaney, a professor and sustainable energy expert at San José State University. “The clean energy industry plays both sides in the election. Public lands for renewable energy has been pretty bipartisan.”

Nevada, where the federal government manages more than 80 percent of the land, is a key theater for such development—nearly 12 million acres are eligible for it under the Biden administration’s solar plan, approximately 17 percent of the state. More than one-third of the solar and wind proposals pending before the federal Bureau of Land Management nationwide, meanwhile, are located in Nevada. 

Donnelly, an environmental activist with the Center for Biological Diversity, is deeply troubled by this federally backed plan. He has spent years defending Nevada’s wild places and endangered animals from developers of all kinds—mining groups, oil and gas drillers, real estate firms and agricultural interests. But now he sees a major new threat at the hands of the renewable energy industry, whose growing power and presence was on display during his road trip. All across the state, solar farms, geothermal projects, lithium mines, transmission lines and more are being planned on undeveloped public lands. 

“We are talking about a fundamental transformation of the American West,” said Donnelly.

[mariacallous]

San José State University’s women’s volleyball season ended not with a bang but a whimper. The team lost to Colorado State University in the Mountain West Conference championship game on Nov. 30, after Boise State University’s team refused to play SJSU in a semifinal game and gave up their place in the tournament. 

It was the third time Boise State declined to play SJSU this season; four other teams also forfeited games against the Spartans, seemingly in opposition to one SJSU player who conservative media outlets have reported is transgender. The first article on the subject, published by Reduxx, which describes itself as a feminist news site, claimed that the athlete and the institution had withheld her biological sex from her teammates.

(Like many mainstream news outlets, including ESPN and The New York Times, Inside Higher Ed is declining to publish the player’s name, as she hasn’t publicly spoken about the issue and the university has never officially confirmed she is transgender.)

While not all the teams that forfeited explicitly cited the student as their reason, several members of the University of Nevada at Reno team were vocal about not wanting to play against a trans woman. They held a “Women’s Sports Are for Women Only” rally on the day they were scheduled to play SJSU, where they railed against trans-inclusive sports policies and against their institution for allegedly trying to force them to play SJSU.

“My question to the NCAA and the Mountain West Conference is, ‘How many young women will have to be beaten or see their friends beaten up … before enough is enough?’ Men do not belong in women’s sports. If you are born a male, you do not belong in women’s sports,” one UNR player said at the event, according to Nevada Sports Net.

Conservative politicians and pundits have strongly supported the boycotting teams. After Boise State’s first forfeit, Idaho governor Brad Little, who spearheaded a first-of-its-kind state law prohibiting trans athletes from playing on the team that aligns with their gender identity, celebrated the decision on X, writing, “We need to ensure player safety for all of our female athletes and continue the fight for fairness in women’s sports.”

Brooke Slusser, the Spartans’ co-captain, has also spoken out repeatedly against the teammate in question, whom she and four other players lived with in 2023. According to a recent article in The Telegraph, a U.K. newspaper, she commended the teams that had boycotted hers, saying, “It’s so admirable. As an athlete, the first thing you do is go out and play, and I think it’s amazing that these women are able to stand up for something they believe in.”

The Trans Athletics Debate

The controversy surrounding the SJSU volleyball team is the most explosive conflict over trans women’s participation in college athletics since 2022, when Penn swimmer Lia Thomas drew national scrutiny after winning the NCAA women’s 500-meter freestyle championship. Though the debate has been quieter in the intervening years, it has continued to rage in legislatures and board meetings around the country, especially as the vitriol against trans people in general has grown, leading to bans on trans people using restrooms that align with their gender identity and on trans youth’s access to gender-affirming medical care.

Currently, 22 states have passed bans or restrictions on trans athletes at the postsecondary level, while a few more have instituted bans only for grades K-12 or 5-12. Athletic associations, the governing bodies for college sports—of which the NCAA is the biggest by far—have also grappled with questions about whether to exclude trans women from women’s teams. (In general, it’s less controversial for trans men to play on men’s teams. While most of these laws prohibit trans athletes from playing on their preferred teams across the board, a handful allow trans men to play on men’s teams but disallow trans women from playing on women’s teams.)

It’s a relatively recent issue; Idaho was the first state to pass a trans athlete ban in 2020, although a federal judge issued an injunction shortly after it was passed, blocking it from being enforced for years. Since then, transgender people’s rights have become a political flash point, with sports often serving as a proxy for broader conservative antipathy toward the trans community.

“The issue of sports was something that conservative anti-trans forces latched onto as a real winning issue,” said G. Samantha Rosenthal, an associate professor of history at Roanoke College who has written about how the definitions of sex and gender have changed over time. “My understanding is the sports issue is seen by anti-trans opponents as the most persuasive one for broad sympathy.”

Indeed, on the campaign trail, President-elect Trump mentioned trans people on several occasions, including making a specific reference to SJSU in October.

“Women playing men … we stop it. We stop it. We absolutely stop it. You can’t have it,” he said during a town hall on the Fox News Channel show The Faulkner Focus, according to the Los Angeles Times. “You just ban it. The president bans it. You just don’t let it happen.”

Governing Bodies Adjust Rules

Until 2022, NCAA rules stated that trans women could not play on women’s teams unless they’d been on feminizing hormone therapy for at least a year.

But in 2022, the NCAA decided that trans athletes would follow the rules set by their sport’s national or international governing body, which would determine whether a trans woman could play on a women’s sports team by, in most cases, ensuring her testosterone levels were below a certain threshold.

“The resulting sport-by-sport approach preserves opportunity for transgender student-athletes while balancing fairness, inclusion and safety for all who compete,” the NCAA policy states.

The NCAA has faced backlash from both sides for this approach. Anti-trans advocates argue that a blanket ban is the only way to prevent the harms they say come from trans women playing on women’s sports teams, including cis women athletes losing opportunities to trans women, competing against athletes they believe have a natural advantage and sharing locker rooms and other close quarters with trans women.

“There is no human on earth that changes sex; it’s not possible. So, you have women being told, ‘You must undress next to a man,’” Kim Jones, the co-founder of the Independent Council on Women’s Sports, told Inside Higher Ed.

The two-and-a-half-year-old organization is currently funding a large class action lawsuit against the NCAA, demanding that the governing body change its rules to prevent trans women from competing in women’s sports. The lawsuit argues that the association’s transgender athlete policy violates Title IX; if athletes assigned male at birth are allowed to play on women’s sports teams and win competitions, they say, women are not truly being given equal access to sports as promised under Title IX.

Activists for trans athletes’ rights, meanwhile, argue that the NCAA changed its policy to give jurisdiction to individual sports’ governing bodies in response to political pressure. A group of hundreds of current and former collegiate and professional athletes sent a letter to the NCAA earlier this year encouraging the organization to stand by its trans athletes and ignore calls to disallow them from playing on the team they identify with.

“As athletes, we know firsthand that sport has the power to change lives,” the letter said. “Allowing transgender athletes within the NCAA to participate in the sports they love as who they truly are alongside their teammates fulfills the true spirit of Olympism we all ascribe to. Sport should never be for a select few. We call on you to be on the right side of history and affirm that sport is truly for us all. Do not ban transgender women from NCAA women’s sports.”

One small governing body, the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics, which includes 241 colleges, changed its policy earlier this year to mandate that only students whose “biological sex” is female may play on women’s teams. While some celebrated the decision, it prompted at least one institution, California State University Maritime Academy, to leave the association altogether.

In a statement, Cal Maritime interim president Michael J. Dumont said the NAIA’s stance contradicted statewide and institutional nondiscrimination policies.

Fairness and Safety

Arguments over trans women in sports have long centered on the complex question of whether trans women athletes have natural advantages over cis women. Experts say very little research exists on the topic; Anna Posbergh, an assistant professor in the Department of Sport Management at Florida State University, said she knows of only two studies that specifically looked at trans women athletes, both of which were completed by researcher Joanna Harper. The more recent study, which was commissioned by the International Olympic Committee and published in April, indicated that trans women maintained certain advantages over cis women, such as grip strength, but demonstrated worse lung function and lower-body power, though the sample size was relatively small.

Posbergh noted that the evidence that opponents of trans women athletes often cite to prove their performance advantages is often misconstrued or taken out of context, and usually drawn from research that does not focus on athletes specifically.

“They’ve gone into the medical research and found one sentence,” she said. “There is barely any research that concretely says that trans women maintain their performative advantage after transitioning.”

But the narrative surrounding trans women in sports has also changed significantly in the two years since Thomas made headlines. At that time, the primary question seemed to be whether it was fair for trans women to compete against cis women. Now anti-trans activists seem more focused on issues of safety and comfort than fairness; a lawsuit against the Mountain West Conference, filed by Slusser and several other athletes who competed against the allegedly trans SJSU player, argued, among other things, that the player could have injured them on the court.

In the lawsuit, which was also backed by Jones’s organization, one of the plaintiffs said they and their teammates worried that “all it would take for them to have to retire and perhaps be permanently injured would be for a single” attack—the term in volleyball for a hit intended to score a point—by the allegedly trans athlete “to hit them in the head.”

(The lawsuit sought an emergency injunction to change the conference’s rules on trans players just before last month’s tournament began, in an effort to prevent the SJSU player from participating. A federal judge denied the request, arguing that the conference’s trans player policy had been consistent for two years, so there were no grounds for plaintiffs to file for emergency relief so close to the beginning of the tournament.)

Volleyball injuries—and sports injuries broadly—are common; from 2013 to 2022, young people between 10 and 19 sustained about 56,400 head and neck injuries playing volleyball, according to recent research. But the only indication that the allegedly trans SJSU player has directly caused injury came from the original Reduxx article, which cited an anonymous teammate’s mother who claimed her daughter has sustained “more physical injuries and strains than she ever had before in her volleyball career, and was constantly icing and rubbing her arms after blocking shots” from the player.

“When we think about sport, sport is an incredibly violent act to begin with,” Posbergh said. “Just look at the NFL—every week you have concussions.”

In their efforts to pass trans athlete bans, legislators have also shifted their rhetoric to talk more about safety. Alabama senator Tommy Tuberville, a former Auburn University football coach and the author of a federal bill that would prevent certain sports governing bodies from permitting individuals assigned male at birth to participate in women’s sports, said in a press conference last February that current regulations endanger women.

“So now, people are going to pay to watch men punch women for sport,” Tuberville is quoted as saying in 1819 News, a conservative news outlet covering the state of Alabama. “It’s disgusting, but that’s where we are as a society now.”

Tuberville’s legislation, which hasn’t progressed out of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, is one of three recent federal bills proposed to end trans women’s athletic participation. In 2023, the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act and the Save Women’s Sports Act, both of which aimed to prevent all schools and postsecondary institutions that receive federal funding from allowing individuals assigned male at birth to play on women’s teams, were introduced; the former passed the House but never progressed further, and the latter did not make it out of committee.

The appetite for federal anti-trans legislation is growing slowly but surely—and is likely to gain momentum under a Republican trifecta after Trump is inaugurated next month. At the same time, state-level legislation continues to find success, with both Ohio and New Hampshire passing restrictive trans athlete bills in 2024, though New Hampshire’s law is for grades 5-12 only.

At least one more state is likely to pass a ban next year: Georgia, which was the site of the NCAA swimming championship meet where Thomas won nearly three years ago. The state’s lieutenant governor, Burt Jones, is committed to getting the legislation passed.

“Protecting women’s sports and their rights will remain a priority in the Georgia Senate as we head into the 2025 Legislative Session,” the lieutenant governor told Inside Higher Ed in an emailed statement. “The Senate continues to lead on efforts to protect women’s sports and all of the work they put into competing and becoming elite athletes."

The governing board of the state’s public university system has also taken a hard stance against trans athletes; earlier this year, the University System of Georgia Board of Regents unanimously passed a resolution asking the NCAA to change its policies to prevent trans women from playing on women’s teams.

Changing Perceptions

Jones, of the Independent Council on Women’s Sports, said that anti-trans activists’ repeated legislative wins haven’t been the only shift she’s seen in recent years. She also believes the public has grown more antagonistic towards trans athletes as people have become increasingly aware of “the silencing, the abuse, the gross inequality, the trampling on the beauty and awesomeness for women in sports” that she says comes from allowing trans women in women’s sports.

“It’s all about visibility. The mainstream media was not willing to talk about this and so many women were suffering in silence,” she said, noting that she always uses male pronouns to refer to trans women athletes. “As soon as I say, ‘He doesn’t belong in the locker room with the women,’ everyone is outraged.”

Indeed, a Gallup poll from 2023 showed that the share of Americans who believed trans people should be allowed to play on teams that aligned with their gender identity dropped eight percentage points since 2021, to 26 percent.

At the same time, research has shown the importance of access to sports for transgender college students; a study conducted by the American College Health Association in the 2019–20 academic year indicated that trans athletes are generally less depressed, less prone to suicidal thoughts and self-harm, and experience higher rates of psychological well-being than nonathlete trans students.

Posbergh said she believes that at the elite level, there is a need for reasonable regulations around when trans women can play women’s sports. In her view, that should be decided on a sport-by-sport basis, and predicated on whether the athlete’s performance falls within a range similar to the way cis women perform in that sport.

But for college and school-aged athletes? “There is no argument to keep trans women out. At those levels, the purpose of sport and what fairness is is engaging in activities that are good for your mental health, your physical health, your emotional health,” she said. “It’s only the international level we should really be having contention at.”

Still, the debate is certain to persist, even as it takes its toll on players and their teams.

“This has been one of the most difficult seasons I’ve ever experienced, and I know this is true as well for many of our players and the staff who have been supporting us all along,” SJSU women’s volleyball coach Todd Kress said in a statement released after the team’s tournament loss. “Maintaining our focus on the court and ensuring the overall safety and well-being of my players amid the external noise have been my priorities.”

[dertaglichedan]

Judge makes ruling in case that decides fate of San Jose State’s transgender volleyball controversy

A federal judge ruled Monday that a member of the San Jose State women’s volleyball team, who’s been at the center of a transgender controversy, can participate in the Mountain West Conference tournament that begins Wednesday, according to The New York Times.

Judge S. Kato Crews, an appointee of President Biden to the U.S. District Court in Colorado, made the decision amid a national transgender controversy over Blaire Fleming, a redshirt senior who joined the Spartans in 2022.

“San José State University will continue to support its student-athletes and reject discrimination in all forms,” the university said in a statement to OutKick after the ruling. “All San José State University student-athletes are eligible to participate in their sports under NCAA and Mountain West Conference rules. 

[justinssportscorner]

Erin Reed at Erin In The Morning:

San Jose State University is heading to the Women’s Volleyball Final after the 10th Circuit Court denied an appeal to ban the team from competing over allegations that it has a transgender player. Boise State, which had already forfeited a regular-season match against San Jose State under political pressure, doubled down by refusing to take the court in the semifinals. Boise State’s forfeit decision earlier in the year came after several Idaho state representatives pressured the school through email. Notably, the athlete at the center of the controversy has never publicly stated her gender identity or her assigned sex at birth. Despite this, she has been the target of anti-trans rhetoric throughout the season, with opponents using her alleged identity to fuel calls for bans. A complaint filed by Brooke Slusser, her teammate who she roomed with for over a year, highlights the athlete’s height of 6'1". Some conservative leaning papers have latched onto this: Must Read Alaska describes the athlete as "a physically imposing transgender player" who "is 6'1" and towers over opposing teams." However, a quick glance at the San Jose State University (SJSU) website shows that 7 out of 25 players on the team are 6 feet or taller. Additionally, 11 of Boise State’s players exceed 6 feet in height, with many taller than the athlete.

Anti-trans extremists who sought to hurt the San José State University (SJSU) women’s volleyball team for fielding a player who is allegedly trans lost their ballot to DQ SJSU. Several Mountain West teams forfeited, aided in part to right-wing outrage farmer Riley Gaines’s crusade against trans existence.

[dhaaruni]

“It is my understanding that none of these players [were] told before coming to SJSU that Fleming’s natal sex is male, or that there was any player with a male birth sex on the team.”

This whole story makes me feel gross

[catdotjpeg]

On February 27, over 100 people gathered at a candlelight vigil in San Jose to honor the life and sacrifice of Aaron Bushnell.

[...]

On the front steps of San Jose's Martin Luther King Library, community members laid out candles, flowers, Palestinian and Yemeni flags, and a sign reading “Rest in power and peace, Aaron Bushnell.” Members of the public were invited to speak in an impromptu open-mic program. People from a wide variety of backgrounds shared the impact that Bushnell's act of protest had on them, including veterans, students, healthcare workers and journalists. Harry Adams, a U.S. Air Force veteran who served during the Vietnam War, spoke about Bushnell's courage in refusing to be complicit in this ongoing atrocity. Adams has spent the last several decades of his life advocating for peace alongside other veterans. Bojana Cvijic, a journalist who was previously a writer for San José State University student newspaper Spartan Daily, strongly criticized the mainstream corporate media for their obfuscation of Bushnell's act of protest. Many news outlets have omitted any mention of the genocide in Gaza from their headlines about Bushnell's death. Tarentz Charite from Students for a Democratic Society encouraged the crowd to continue to protest against the genocide, saying, “We are not complicit in a system of death if we fight for a system of life. We are not complacent in a system of oppression if we fight for freedom.” The vigil was called by San Jose Against War, a new grassroots anti-war organization in San Jose.

-- "San Jose anti-war activists hold vigil for Aaron Bushnell" from Fight Back! News, 29 Feb 2024

[humanoidhistory]

Halloween at Desperados Club in Campbell, California, 1982. Photo by Ted Sahl.

(San José State University)