On Saturday, the San Jose State women's volleyball season came to an end, as the Spartans were beaten in four sets by the Colorado State Rams in the Mountain West Conference championship. A top seed comfortably prevailing over a second seed in a small conference tournament final is not a particularly remarkable or noteworthy outcome, but SJSU's tournament run gained national attention thanks to the hard work of people who hate sports almost as much as they hate transgender people.
Last week, ESPN's Katie Barnes published a long and deeply reported story about SJSU's volleyball season, which I highly recommend you read. The short version is that earlier this year, an anti-trans activist group called Independent Council on Women's Sports (ICONS) and professional bigot Riley Gaines trained their sights on SJSU's volleyball team, claiming that the team has a transgender player. (The player in question has not been named in non-reactionary media coverage.) In March, ICONS and Gaines filed a lawsuit against the NCAA seeking to overturn the policies that allow transgender athletes to play sports. In September, SJSU co-captain Brooke Slusser joined the lawsuit, claiming that the presence of a transgender player on her team posed a safety risk to her teammates and opponents.
From there, everything went to shit: On six occasions during the regular season, SJSU opponents chose to forfeit matches. One of those teams, Boise State, which forfeited against SJSU twice in the regular season, also forfeited its MWC conference tournament semifinal against SJSU, which allowed the Spartans to advance to Saturday's final. Meanwhile Gaines, Slusser, and other anti-trans activists continued to whip up a hateful campaign against one of SJSU's players. ICONS put on a rally in Reno after the University of Nevada's volleyball team forfeited a match against SJSU. Nevada captain Sia Liilii spoke at the rally, saying, though tears, "I never expected to be blindsided, having to compete against a male athlete. When the news broke, I was stunned, as many of my teammates were. This is not what we signed up for."
Slusser is a real piece of work. Not satisfied with attempting to banish a teammate from public life, Slusser filed a second lawsuit (also sponsored by ICONS), in which she and one of her assistant coaches, Melissa Batie-Smoose, alleged that the player they say is transgender met with players from the CSU volleyball team the night before a regular-season match between the two schools, where they came up with a plan to throw the match and "physically retaliate" against Slusser. The Rams won that match, on Oct. 3, in straight sets. The MWC conducted an investigation into Slusser and Batie-Smoose's claims, and found no evidence of collusion or misconduct.
Slusser is a useful character in this saga, if only because she neatly demonstrates what these crusades against transgender athletes are actually about. Those who want to ban transgender people from competition will often talk about how they are motivated by fairness, or a desire to "protect women," but what actually drives them is revulsion and fixation. The teammate Slusser has targeted has been on SJSU's volleyball team for three seasons (and was not previously the subject of any forfeits). According to ESPN, she does not rank in the top 10 in the MWC or in the top 150 in the NCAA in hitting percentage. The Spartans went 8-7 in non-forfeited matches in the regular season. In the lawsuit filed against the NCAA, Slusser, who transferred to SJSU from Alabama at the start of the 2023 season, admits that her teammate's gender identity was not anything she thought about during her first season with the team. It wasn't until the end of the 2023 season, when she heard two other SJSU students refer to the player as a "dude" and a "guy," that it became an issue for her. Through her lawsuits and public statements, you can track Slusser's fixation taking hold. Throughout the season she made appearances on right-wing news programs, where she consistently referred to her teammate as a "man" and made outlandish claims about the danger she posed. Slusser spun up a new reality in which her teammate, who was just doing the same things she'd been doing the previous two seasons, was ruining the sport and specifically targeting Slusser. When the Spartans won, it was only because of this player; when they lost, it was only because she colluded with the opposing team.
There is an instructive irony to be found in the fits thrown by people like Slusser and Gaines, and in the tears cried by people like Sia Liilii, who misunderstand sports as something that should comfort before it challenges. These people demand that we reimagine sports not as a place where bonds are forged, obstacles are overcome, and the best versions of ourselves are uncovered, but where losers are encouraged to pretend to be victims, where anything that causes them discomfort must be banished, and where the concept of fairness only exists to serve one's own ends. Their desire is to project their psychological hangups outward, and to ask the rest of us to jam something as big and beautiful and inclusive as sports into a small box built by small-hearted and small-minded people. They demand that we deny things we know are true: That trans people are not dangerous, that "fairness" is something fixated upon only by those who can't hack it, and that the outcome of a team sport is never, ever decided by one player. They demand all of this because they want to use sports as a cudgel to enforce their personal bigotry on others, and they are not strong enough to swing it themselves.
