Mick Hartley

Jonathan Kay has a long piece at Quillette on the women's college volleyball farce now playing out over in the western US. San José State University (SJSU) has a trans player – ie a man claiming to be a woman – on their team, and as a result five teams have now forfeited their games.

The “injustice” at issue can be sourced to a single SJSU player—Blaire Fleming—who is at or near the top of the SJSU Spartans’ leader board in sets played, “kills” (winning offensive shots that are unreturnable by the opposing team), and blocks. The team’s web site also informs us that Fleming is a public-relations major who “would like to work in the fashion or art industry,” and “likes cooking and trying new restaurants.”

What the site does not mention is that this San José State Women’s volleyball star is not biologically female. Rather, Fleming is a biologically male athlete who chooses to self-identify as a woman for legal and social purposes. However, in keeping with all the other farcical aspects of this saga, SJSU athletics officials have been required to pretend that this fact is somehow less important to the volleyball community than Fleming’s artistic inclinations and culinary interests.

This pretence is rooted in the official policies of SJSU’s Athletics Department, which demand that the asserted female gender identity of trans women such as Fleming be taken as trumping human biology. This explains why, when the above-described farce finally ended on 26 October, it was UNR, which fields an all-female volleyball team, that was required to forfeit—and not SJSU, which doesn’t.

It gets worse. A member of the SJSU staff, Melissa Batie-Smoose, who worked as deputy coach under head coach Tod Kress, has now spoken out, to Kay, about the pressures in place to ensure that the male in question – so vital to SJSU's success – should be given preferential treatment, while any doubters should be silenced. 

Over a three-decade career as a coach and recruiter in women’s volleyball, Batie-Smoose had seen few women who possessed anything close to Fleming’s level of raw physical power. Fleming was relatively undisciplined and sometimes listless, Batie-Smoose reports, but what “stood out was spiking the [ball] and blocking on the front row, due to Fleming’s leaping ability and hitting power, which far exceeded that of any player in the [Mountain West] Conference.”.

Kress’s original impressions of Fleming aren’t known to us, as he declined repeated Quillette interview requests. But by Batie-Smoose’s account, Kress originally seemed to share her concerns as to whether it was appropriate for biologically male volleyball players to compete on women’s teams. His attitude reportedly changed in abrupt fashion, however, when Kress was given strict orders on the subject from the school’s Athletics Department.

In this regard, a name that comes up often in the Title IX Complaint is Laura Alexander, an Assistant Director of Student Wellness at SJSU with jurisdiction over the school’s volleyball program. According to Batie-Smoose, Kress told her that Alexander had said anyone opposed to Fleming’s inclusion on the women’s team should leave SJSU and seek “therapy.”

Batie-Smoose reports that Kress began bending over backwards to accommodate Fleming, who reportedly often took liberties with the team’s dress code and practice schedule, as well as the baseline behavioural standards that Kress applied to the rest of the team. This claimed double standard is one of the major themes of Batie-Smoose’s Complaint.

In one detailed case study she puts forward, Batie-Smoose contrasts the allegedly lax treatment afforded to Fleming with the far stricter standards imposed on a promising female recruit who was competing for Fleming’s position. Kress allegedly refused to renew the recruit’s scholarship. Being unable to pay her tuition out of pocket, the recruit was effectively pushed out of the program, and now plays in another state.

The climate that Batie-Smoose describes is one of fear and self-censorship. Until Slusser finally went public with her concerns in recent weeks, everyone involved with the SJSU women’s volleyball team seems to have been scared to even mention the fact that Fleming is transgender—despite also being required to pretend that Fleming’s biologically male status is athletically inconsequential….

Read on as the complications pile up and, predictably enough, it all goes legal.