Opinion: College leaders have no idea how to handle transgender athlete issues

All across the country last week, athletics directors went to their volleyball coaches with a question: What would you do? 

The conversation stemmed from a somewhat obscure story that had taken over the sport, as one team after another in the Mountain West Conference — three so far, plus non-conference opponent Southern Utah — elected to quietly forfeit games against San Jose State without publicly stating a reason. 

But the reason, of course, was not a secret: A lawsuit filed in Georgia claiming that NCAA rules allowing transgender athletes to participate on women’s teams violates Title IX had put a current San Jose State player in the eye of a firestorm, even though she had not identified as transgender in any public forum. 

The claim in the lawsuit was made by another San Jose State player, co-captain Brooke Slusser, who had been a roommate of the player in question last season and only learned about her teammate’s reported gender identity after she was outed in April by the Web site Reduxx. (USA TODAY Sports is not identifying the player because neither she nor the school has commented on her gender identity). 

Once Slusser joined the lawsuit, advocacy groups and media outlets aligned with right-wing political interests began to pressure schools and contact athletes on those teams, urging them to boycott. Politicians, particularly interested in this issue during an election year, started making phone calls. And some college administrators suddenly caught up in this story, despite how prominent the conversation around trans athletes has become over the last 2 1/2 years, were caught flat-footed and unsure how to respond. 

“None of these schools know how to deal with this,” said one person with close ties to NCAA volleyball, who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the situation. “Administrations are not comfortable handling these situations. They’re constantly worried about getting sued, and within teams there’s a wide swath of opinions about what they should do.

"But what’s been interesting is a number of administrators and coaches I've talked to, we know there are other trans athletes, other trans volleyball players and other trans recruits. They're leaving it up to the kids and the coaches to figure it out, and if and when it explodes, it’s like, 'Oh, I guess we have a (expletive) powder keg on our hands.' " 

In this case, the powder keg exploded despite the fact that the player in question had already played at San Jose State for two seasons without incident and another school prior to that.

USA TODAY Sports spoke to 10 people around college athletics who have some connection to the situation at San Jose State to gain insight into the decision-making processes at the various schools involved. All of them were granted anonymity to speak freely about the challenges this issue presents and how we got here, with another firestorm around transgender athletes now impacting win-loss records and playing opportunities for teams in the middle of a conference race.

"We are super disappointed by the cancellations," San Jose State university spokesperson Michelle Smith McDonald told USA TODAY Sports. "Our kids want to play."

Regardless of anyone’s feelings about transgender participation in sports, nobody disputes that the player in question and San Jose State have been fully compliant with NCAA rules, which align with those of USA Volleyball and require a year of testosterone testing within the established limits before competition. 

The Mountain West’s two-year-old transgender policy defers to the NCAA and the institution to certify the athlete’s eligibility and states that any conference member declining to play a team with a transgender athlete will be deemed to have forfeited the game. Per the policy, schools are not obligated to reveal the gender identity of their players – and, in this case, San Jose State cannot do so because the player in question has not waived her privacy rights.

It has led to a situation where none of the key stakeholders are allowed to directly address the issue in a public way, letting anti-trans activists and politicians set the narrative while the school, the conference and the NCAA sit on the sidelines with their hands tied. Meanwhile, in the days after the controversy exploded and Boise State, Wyoming and Utah State all opted for the forfeit, a variety of politicians including Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon and Idaho Gov. Brad Little all publicly praised the decision.

Even in a situation where one of the three teams wanted to play, according to two people with knowledge of the situation, political pressure turned the tide in forcing Wyoming to forfeit. In a letter sent to the school's president and athletics director, Wyoming state senator Cheri Steinmetz tacitly threatened funding cuts if they participated in “the extremist agenda of Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) or propagate the lie that biological sex can be changed. We all know it cannot.”

So far, within the Mountain West, the decisions have fallen along the lines of red and blue states, though it’s unclear how much political considerations are motivating the other side of the debate. One athletics director in the league said their volleyball team had a discussion about the issue with administrators, took a private vote and decided its primary goal was to win a conference championship. As of this week, conference officials believe that the other seven schools will continue to play San Jose State. 

And though the Mountain West’s athletics directors recently had what was described as a productive and cordial conversation on the topic, according to people involved in the discussions, the league is mostly a bystander. It has largely remained silent — acknowledging the forfeits but little else — out of necessity. In fact, because the forfeiting schools have not said why they didn’t play the games, the conference can’t even officially comment on the matter.

“You have to respect everyone’s positions here and especially the opinions of the student-athletes,” one person connected to the discussions said. “You have 12 voices in the room with different opinions, states have different opinions. Every conference office has to navigate the politics of all institutions and locales. On this topic, it’s really hard.”

Trans athlete issue has become politicized

It’s also unclear, at the moment, what will happen if Utah State, Boise State or Wyoming qualifies for the six-team conference tournament and draws San Jose State. If this is truly a matter of principle and safety for women rather than political grandstanding, wouldn't they have to make the same decision and voluntarily end their season? 

As one athletics director in another conference acknowledged to USA TODAY Sports, their coach would be inclined not to play if San Jose State were on the schedule. But if the Spartans reach the NCAA tournament — and they might, given their forfeit-aided 9-1 record — the chances of any school forfeiting with a national title on the line are basically zero. 

That contradiction highlights the fundamental problem with this particular issue and the panic over trans athletes in general: Are people really thinking this through?

“This is a complex issue that deserves serious conversation, more research and thoughtful policy-making, and clearly that’s not what's going on right now since this issue has become politicized,” said Pat Griffin, a professor emerita in social justice education at UMass-Amherst who has been a consultant for the NCAA and various schools around the issue of LGBTQ inclusion in sports. "In the last three or four years, it’s nearly impossible to have a reasonable conversation about this topic, and that has been profoundly disappointing because it does a disservice to all the women involved and to this apparently transgender athlete, though she’s never spoken about it. 

“And that’s part of the tragedy. Her privacy has been completely violated here.”

The most interesting aspect to this story, so far, is how little it has broken through into the mainstream culture, particularly compared to former Penn swimmer Lia Thomas’ appearance at the NCAA championship meet in 2022 or even the furor around Algerian boxer Imane Khelif at this year's Olympics, which actually began with the lie that she was transgender and spiraled into days of misinformation and misplaced invective careening around the globe. 

So far, the San Jose State controversy has largely been contained to the online rage-mob echo chambers, though there's fear internally how that could change should the Spartans make the NCAA tournament, especially if it’s achieved through a series of forfeits. 

Maybe Mountain West women’s volleyball is just too low-profile to garner much attention. Maybe the general public, which hasn’t been moved very much electorally by massive amounts of anti-trans propaganda in politics over the last couple of years, is just tired of so much attention and demonization on an issue that affects so few people. Maybe with a presidential election coming in less than a month and wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, this is just a low-salience topic at the moment. 

But for the anti-trans extremists pushing this story in an organized, deliberate way and encouraging teams not to play San Jose State, the playbook is now well-established — and it’s working.

Little pushback to anti-trans activists' intimidation tactics

What they’re doing is actively hunting down these stories, no matter how obscure or how inaccurately they frame them, and using social media and political pressure as intimidation. They refer to transgender women as men and say that nobody can change their sex, and they will push misleading talking points that suggest there’s a safety issue because the player in question at San Jose State is 6-foot-1 and spikes the ball hard, both of which are common traits in elite volleyball players. It is also intellectually dishonest, given that this particular player faced all of these same teams for the last two years without any incident or controversy.

“I think to the general public, people see that, and if I saw that I’d say of course I don’t want men on the women’s volleyball team,” Griffin said. “But transgender women are not men, and I don’t think people have the expertise to be able to respond to that in a way that helps people understand the difference. They always frame it in that way, and they did it with the boxer at the Olympics; they present the person as if they are dangerous because of their size and the speed of their hits and so on, and in this particular case it’s so sad.

"It’s painful because for the most part, we are talking about 20-year-old young people who are just trying to play the sport they love and they met all the qualifications that are out there, and for people to come and attack them personally is just totally unacceptable.”

But the anti-trans activists aren’t going to stop, especially because there is so little schools and the NCAA are doing to push back on them. 

University administrations feel handcuffed because they will be, at minimum, accused of favoring inclusion over the rights of athletes who don’t want a transgender teammate, or perhaps sued. Conferences like the Mountain West and the NCAA are bound to defer to the schools and lean on their bylaws, which makes them look weak when they're silent and the other side is loud. And the transgender athletes caught in the middle are left without much protection, subject to cruelty, abuse and the unconscionable effects of outing if they didn’t intend for their gender identity to become public.

This is the reality San Jose State is dealing with right now: While the player at the center of the controversy prefers to maintain her privacy, the teammate who helped out her is free to make media appearances on Laura Ingraham's show, as she did last Friday. And on top of it, because the school is bound to silence, the local transgender community is beginning to voice displeasure with university administrators for not being supportive enough even though they are offering all the resources they can behind the scenes.

Collectively, the response among administrators in college sports is to bury heads in the sand and hope it goes away. But as a lot of people in the Mountain West have learned over the past two weeks, that’s impossible. Sooner or later, the anti-trans activists will find their next Easter egg and invent a new crisis that could happen in any sport, at any school.

Are they ready? Hardly. 

School leaders aren't prepared to deal with trans issues

One person close to the volleyball world described to USA TODAY Sports the conundrum of a current Division I coach who has been actively and openly recruiting a transgender player. And while the collective response from their administration has been generally supportive, there has been a decided lack of interest in actually preparing for what that means: Will they provide a flex space for changing if some players on the team aren’t comfortable? Will there be a communications plan if and when it becomes public and the activists start beating down the door? Will the governor of the state have the university president and athletics director's back if it blows up into a national controversy? 

“These schools just aren't doing the work,” the person said. 

And even if the anti-trans lobby can’t successfully get laws or NCAA policies changed to ban trans athletes, the effect of what they’re doing is inevitably going to discourage schools and athletes from even trying to make it work. That is essentially how they win. 

Even at San Jose State right now, where the school is backing its reportedly trans athlete, two people with insight into the team told USA TODAY Sports that the atmosphere around the squad has been so divisive and toxic that it will inevitably begin to impact performance.

“I do believe the NCAA could do a much better job of providing the resources these institutions need to be able to back up what they know is the right thing to do,” Griffin said. “There are schools that have been thinking about recruiting trans athletes, but when they look at what’s happening at a place like San Jose State, I can see them saying, ‘We’re not going there,’ so it becomes a de facto ban if not an actual ban.

"And many athletes themselves could just say, ‘I am giving up my sports career because I don’t want to be in that situation.’ So it almost doesn’t matter if states ban athletic participation, with these outside groups attacking everybody up and down the line. It is cruel beyond measure.”

There are still important, rational conversations to be had and research to be done about the fairness of transgender women in sports and advantages that may or may not be present despite close monitoring of hormone levels. 

But when an obscure volleyball player for a nationally irrelevant program in her fifth year of college suddenly becomes the target of a coordinated demonization campaign after playing her entire career without controversy, something isn’t working.

Whether schools fix it with education, compassion and an interest in the rights of all their athletes – including those who are transgender – or continue to hope it all just goes away isn't only a moral question. It's a practical one in this environment, where the next overhyped trans panic could show up on anyone’s doorstep.