On the court, they seem like any other college women’s volleyball team. At a recent game, the players moved around the court in staccato rhythm, setting and spiking the ball, springing into the air like pogo sticks to block attacking shots, all in their blue and gold uniforms of the San Jose State University Spartans.
Off the court, though, the team is trying its best not to crumble during an unexpected season of tension and tears, confusion and anger. The players are at the center of a drama playing out over one of the most explosive issues in American life: whether a transgender woman can play on a women’s sports team.
It all started in April, when a conservative website said that one of the San Jose State players was transgender, surprising some of the woman’s teammates.
Earlier this month, a senior co-captain of the Spartans and the assistant coach filed a lawsuit to stop the transgender athlete from playing in this week’s Mountain West Conference tournament, claiming that she violates Title IX rights to gender equity at federally funded institutions.
With a group of 10 female volleyball players, most from teams that play the Spartans, they sued San Jose State’s head coach and two administrators. And the Mountain West Conference and its commissioner. And the entire board of trustees of the California State University system. All to oust the player from the tournament, the Spartans’ program — and from women’s college sports.
In the meantime, the transgender volleyball player has remained silent. Teammates other than Brooke Slusser, the co-captain plaintiff in the lawsuit, also declined requests for interviews. The New York Times is not naming the player because she has not publicly confirmed her identity and declined an interview request through a university spokeswoman.
“We just don’t think it’s fair that a man is allowed to play,” Ms. Slusser, referring to her transgender teammate, said in an interview last week. She called it “a hard decision” to file the lawsuit because she didn’t want to “put my team through more than they are already going through.”
“But then also imagining myself with kids and seeing if they had to play against a man or playing on a team with a man and knowing that I had the place to make a change for that, I couldn’t live with myself,” she said.
Because of the complicated mess, some of the Spartans no longer talk to one another at practice or outside of games. Todd Kress, the head coach, supports the transgender athlete’s participation and has stopped talking to some players off the court, too. During games, fans wave signs and wear T-shirts in support of, or against, the transgender player. Campus police were called in for the last few weeks in case of trouble.
Mr. Kress, who has coached at San Jose State for two years, said the turmoil has overwhelmed a number of players.
“I think they are good people at heart that have been caught up in a very unique situation that’s challenged them at the core,” he said.
A federal judge this week rejected the lawsuit against the player, clearing the athlete to compete with her team in this week’s Mountain West Conference tournament. On Tuesday, another judge rejected the plaintiffs’ appeal, too.
After a first-round bye, the Spartans were preparing to play a semifinal match in the tournament scheduled for Friday, but the opposing team — Boise State University — refused for the third time this season to play the Spartans because of their transgender player. Four other teams had forfeited games against San Jose State as a stand against transgender women playing on women’s teams.
In a statement, Boise State said the decision not to play “was not an easy one,” adding that the team “should not have to forgo this opportunity while waiting for a more thoughtful and better system that serves all athletes.”
The Spartans are now one win or boycotted game away from advancing to next month’s N.C.A.A. tournament, where 64 teams will play and the Spartans will draw even more attention.
“There have been a lot of people in the community who have supported the athlete, regardless of what her identity is, because she’s being targeted,” said Bonnie Sugiyama, director of the Pride Center and Gender Equity Center at San Jose State. “Can you imagine the pressure of being in the national spotlight and even being mentioned in a presidential campaign, when all you’re doing is playing a game and following the rules?”
Inconsistent Rules
Sports have separate categories for men and women because males have biological advantages that make them generally faster and stronger, and that division gives women a fair chance to succeed. Those advantages are minimal before puberty, experts say, but multiply during puberty when the level of testosterone in males increases.
Maintaining that fairness in women’s sports while also honoring the inclusion of athletes who identify as women has become a continuing struggle for sports organizations. So far, there has been no foolproof way of ensuring that trans women have no retained advantage over athletes assigned female at birth, and the debate continues over whether trans women have an advantage if they suppress their production of testosterone for a set amount of time. Testosterone is the hormone known to increase strength, muscle mass and endurance.
The N.C.A.A. has given each sport’s national governing body the power to decide those rules.
USA Volleyball’s website says androgenic hormones, which include testosterone, may possibly give trans athletes an “unfair competitive advantage,” so the organization requires documentation that athletes assigned male at birth undergo hormone therapy to compete in the women’s category. On its website, the N.C.A.A. says trans volleyball players are eligible to play if their testosterone level is less than 10 nanomoles per liter — that’s at least four times more than what many experts say is the top of the range for non-transgender women, and in the typical range for adult men.
Some lawmakers have become involved in the debate. During the recent campaign, President-elect Donald J. Trump and other conservative politicians made it clear that they were against transgender women competing in women’s athletics and promised to seek to bar them.
The Republican governors of Wyoming, Nevada, Idaho and Utah have publicly supported their in-state teams that forfeited. Some lawmakers in Utah later attended a Utah State volleyball game in T-shirts that said “BOY-cott.”
Kevin O’Sullivan, a retired firefighter from Pleasanton, Calif., whose daughter is on the Spartans, said the situation has been politicized at the expense of a team that just wants to play volleyball.
“The rules are allowing it, and I’ve told my daughter, ‘Can this team get over this and just come together and try to win?’” he said, adding that he feels empathy for the transgender player.
“She’s a human, and we’re not going to be part of a mob mentality and march down to city hall and burn her at the stake,” he said. “I feel like that’s what this is turning into.”
Ms. Slusser, a senior from Denton, Tex., said she considers this fight “God’s plan” for her.
She said she initially didn’t realize that her teammate, who has played for the Spartans since 2022, was transgender, even when first living with her and rooming with her for away games. The two had been good friends, she said.
But when the article was published this spring about the teammate’s gender identity, Ms. Slusser said she felt betrayed. She said, “I truly don’t care how you want to live your life,” but a trans woman shouldn’t room with female teammates or use a women’s locker room.
Earlier this fall, she joined a federal lawsuit against the N.C.A.A., that had been filed in Georgia by a group of female athletes in several sports, claiming that the N.C.A.A. discriminated against them based on their sex when it allowed the transgender swimmer Lia Thomas to compete in the 2022 swimming championships.
Fairness and Safety
Bill Bock, a lawyer in that case and one who had challenged the 2020 election results in Wisconsin for Mr. Trump, had persuaded Ms. Slusser to file a subsequent lawsuit, against the Mountain West, she said. Mr. Bock has an extensive background in sports: As general counsel for the United States Anti-Doping Agency, he helped expose the cyclist Lance Armstrong for using performance-enhancing drugs.
In a telephone interview, Mr. Bock said everyone, regardless of political preference, should be concerned about trans athletes competing among women because fairness is the crux of Title IX.
“If you don’t have a fair game, you really don’t have a sport that is meaningful,” he said, adding that the N.C.A.A. and college administrators “have willfully neglected their duty” to keeps sports safe and fair and “have failed women.”
When Melissa Batie-Smoose, the Spartans’ assistant coach, arrived on campus nearly two years ago, she said that she hadn’t been told about the transgender player. But she recalled seeing the athlete play beach volleyball and telling Mr. Kress, “Oh, man, she hits and blocks like a dude,” because the player jumped so high and hung so long in the air. She also said the player avoided lifting weights, for fear of getting too muscular.
Soon after, the administration told her that the player was transgender, Ms. Batie-Smoose said in an interview, adding that she would not have taken the job if she had known that. She said women shouldn’t lose playing spots or scholarships to transgender players, adding that she couldn’t say a word about the player to anyone if she wanted to keep her job.
Earlier this month, the university suspended her after she filed a Title IX complaint claiming that San Jose State showed favoritism toward the transgender player and also tried to silence her from speaking about the player, Ms. Batie-Smoose said.
“Ever since this came out, he’s not been playing at the same level, like, he’s dialing it back a bit,” she said before describing the immense power with which the athlete had spiked the ball at Ms. Slusser when she first filed the lawsuit.
The lawsuit claims that some Spartans were worried about getting hit and injured by balls hit by the player. Yet the University of Wyoming’s athletic director, Tom Burman, wrote that his team felt safe playing against her and that she was “not the best or most dominant hitter” on the team, but “having said that it doesn’t make it ok,” according to university correspondence reviewed by The Times. The player does not lead any statistical category in her conference.
After the Spartans’ last regular season game, Mr. Kress said he was proud to coach a team that made it through “the pain, the conflict and the relentless negativity” of the season, adding that “this could have broken us, but it didn’t.”
After the match, the players left the gym, one by one. Ms. Slusser met her aunt, who had traveled from Alabama to see her play. Two of the transgender player’s relatives were also there.
Asked about the team dynamics this season, those relatives, including her mother, said they were just there to support their player.
“It’s her story to tell,” one of them said.
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