Net gain for female athletes

In a few months, the Supreme Court will rule on whether state laws aimed at keeping male athletes out of girls’ and women’s sports pass constitutional and legal muster.

Multiple justices who heard oral arguments on the issue in mid-January appeared to signal that the answer is “yes.” Still, as female athletes nationwide await an official ruling, the Trump administration has already handed them a substantial victory.

The U.S. Department of Education announced in late January its finding that San Jose State University’s women’s volleyball program denied educational opportunities to women—and thereby violated federal law—by including Brayden (aka Blaire) Fleming, a male player who self-identified as transgender, on its roster for three seasons.

“SJSU caused significant harm to female athletes by allowing a male to compete on the women’s volleyball team—creating unfairness in competition, compromising safety, and denying women equal opportunities in athletics, including scholarships and playing time,” Kimberly Richey, the department’s assistant secretary for civil rights, said in a statement provided to Fox News.

“Even worse, when female athletes spoke out, SJSU retaliated—ignoring sex-discrimination claims while subjecting one female SJSU athlete to a Title IX complaint for allegedly ‘misgendering’ the male athlete competing on a women’s team. This is unacceptable.”

The harm extended beyond San Jose State: Four Mountain West Conference opponents—Boise State, Nevada, Utah State, and Wyoming—forfeited matches to the Spartans in 2024 due to fairness and safety concerns. Boise State, in fact, declined to face SJSU three times—the last of them in the semifinals of the MWC’s postseason tournament. That enabled SJSU, which had a first-round bye, to reach the tourney final without playing a match.

San Jose State went 21-9 with Fleming in 2022 and 14-7 with him in 2024, when the 6-foot-1 outside hitter was an All-MWC honorable mention. Half of the Spartans’ 2024 victories came by forfeit. The team was 13-16 with an all-female roster in 2025.

The Education Department also lambasted SJSU over mishandling setter Brooke Slusser’s complaint that Fleming had conspired with Colorado State’s Malaya Jones to have Jones spike the ball in Slusser’s face during a regular-season match. Slusser had openly expressed her unhappiness with SJSU’s coaches for steering her into a housing arrangement with Fleming before she’d learned Fleming was male and later accommodating Fleming’s request to room with her on road trips.

Not only did San Jose State fail to investigate the matter, the university sought to punish Slusser for “misgendering” Fleming in online videos and interviews. And Slusser wasn’t the only person involved with the volleyball program who experienced retaliation for speaking out. SJSU suspended former associate head coach Melissa Batie-Smoose for the same.

The Education Department gave San Jose State 10 days to agree to rectify its violations of federal law or face “imminent enforcement action.” The department demanded that SJSU publicly declare its intent to adopt biology-based definitions of “male” and “female,” acknowledge that a human’s sex is unchangeable, and maintain sex-segregated sports teams and changing facilities. The department also ordered SJSU to issue personalized apologies to women who played volleyball for SJSU from 2022 to 2024 as well as to women who played for teams that forfeited to the Spartans due to Fleming’s presence on the court.

Last year the Education Department slapped the University of Pennsylvania with similar sanctions for letting Will (aka Lia) Thomas compete—and win an NCAA title in the 500-yard freestyle —as a member of the Ivy League school’s women’s swim team during the 2021-22 school year. Penn’s athletic department would have lost at least $175 million in federal funding if it hadn’t agreed to the Trump administration’s terms.

With San Jose State, I think the Trump administration should go even further and should make a public example of athletic director Jeff Konya and volleyball coach Todd Kress by requiring their immediate firing. Fleming transferred to SJSU from Coastal Carolina on their watch. In granting Fleming a roster spot, they not only let him displace girls deserving of college volleyball scholarships, they prioritized a delusional male’s feelings over his female teammates’ discomfort. They also placed female athletes at other schools between the rock of facing a terrifying, potentially disfiguring 80-mph spike from Fleming, and the hard place of forfeiting in the name of fairness and safety.

Kress even seems to have gone to great lengths to conceal Fleming’s male status: Both Slusser and Batie-Smoose have claimed that they did not learn about Fleming’s gender identity until after they arrived at SJSU. The coach even allegedly threatened to fire Batie-Smoose if she let parents of potential recruits know about it—though, to be fair, a federal law aimed at protecting student privacy may have necessitated that.

Regardless, a win’s a win. We can hope that blue states that stubbornly insist on letting male athletes usurp opportunities intended for women and girls will finally get it through their thick skulls that the days of perpetuating this nonsense in the name of inclusivity are over.