At least one judge has seen the transphobic hysteria for what it is.
In denying a request to upend this week’s Mountain West volleyball tournament and/or force San Jose State to leave one of its players home, a federal judge called out the disingenuousness of the lawsuit. And in doing so, revealed the farce behind this sudden groundswell of opposition to transgender women athletes.
“The Court finds their delay in filing this action and seeking emergency relief related to the MWC Tournament weakens their arguments,’ U.S. District Judge S. Kato Crews wrote in his ruling issued Monday.
“The movants could have sought injunctive relief much earlier if the exigencies of the circumstances required mandatory court intervention.”
For three years now, San Jose State’s volleyball team has included a transgender woman. (Neither the young woman nor San Jose State has confirmed it but, as Crews pointed out, no one has denied it, either.) The Mountain West Conference created a participation policy for transgender athletes back in 2022, which included forfeit as punishment for refusing to play a team with a transgender athlete, and athletic directors at every school in the conference agreed to it.
Yet not until this season, after the player had been outed by a right-wing website and then thrown under the bus by one of her own teammates, did the howling and forfeits begin. This is an important point, so I’m going to repeat it:
For two years, the San Jose State player was on the volleyball team and the world continued to spin. No one was injured, no one was assaulted in a locker room, no legion of transgender women showed up in formation behind her to take over women’s sports. The San Jose State player practiced and played and no one, not her teammates and not her opponents, took issue with it. Whether that’s because no one realized she’s transgender or it was deemed inconsequential are two sides of the same coin.
So what changed? Other than teammate Brooke Slusser and the other grifters deciding that demonizing a young woman would get them a spot on Fox News?
If the San Jose State player was such a threat, if the Mountain West’s transgender participation policy was so onerous, surely the athletes and the schools who filed the lawsuit would have done so immediately.
Unless, of course, this was all for show. In which case, waiting until the 11th hour would add fuel to their faux outrage.
“At the earliest, Moving Plaintiffs or their institutions began to learn that one of SJSU’s teammates was an alleged trans woman with an article published in the spring of 2024. And they certainly had knowledge of this alleged player when the string of member institutions started forfeiting matches against SJSU in September 2024,” Crews wrote.
Predictably, Slusser and three other athletes filed a notice of appeal. But the likelihood of it succeeding would seem to be slim, as well, given Crews’ painstaking detailing of precedent.
The anti-trans ilk likes to claim that allowing transgender women to play sports is a violation of Title IX. But Crews says it’s actually the opposite, taking five pages of his 28-page ruling to cite previous Supreme Court and Tenth Circuit cases that found discriminating against someone for being transgender is sex discrimination. Which is prohibited by Title IX.
“The (plaintiffs’) Title IX theory raised in this case directly conflicts with Title IX’s prohibition on discrimination against trans individuals,” Crews wrote.
San Jose State is the No. 2 seed in the Mountain West Conference tournament, which begins Wednesday. The Spartans have a bye in the first round and will play either Boise State or Utah State on Friday. Those are two of the schools that forfeited games during the regular season, which means we’re about to find out how committed to the bigotry those teams are.
For all the shrieking there is about transgender women athletes, it’s the cisgender women pushing the forfeits who cost their fellow athletes opportunities to play and saddled their teams with losses. It’s those women, not the San Jose State player, who are the real threat.
Follow USA TODAY Sports columnist Nancy Armour on social media @nrarmour.