San Jose Volleyball Meets the Firestorm of Gender Politics

ESPN Daily

ESPN

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4.6 • 3.9K Ratings

🗓️ 26 November 2024

⏱️ 34 minutes

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Summary

The San Jose State Spartans were preparing for another hopeful – but largely uneventful – women’s volleyball season in 2024. But then a publication outed a player on that team as transgender and from there the protests and backlash grew seemingly by the day. Player lawsuits, coach accusations and boycott threats, and that was just from inside their own locker room. Soon teams all over the San Jose schedule decided to forfeit their matches, but also never gave an official reason why. So today, ahead of the Mountain West Conference Tournament, Katie Barnes joins us to quiet the noise and turn up the conversation on a team from San Jose that just wants to play the game. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Katie Barnes, you have been on the road doing some incredible reporting. Where have you been?
0:08.3	So I've been a lot of places, most of which were out west. But most recently, I was in Denver, Colorado at a hearing in the U.S. District Court of Colorado for a preliminary injunction that was filed by
0:24.9	one San Jose State current student, who is the co-captain, Brooks Lesser, as well as the associate head coach,
0:33.6	Melissa Begis-Smith, and two former SJSU students and then eight additional students from across the Mountain West Conference who are currently playing volleyball in the conference.
0:47.4	It was about three hours of oral arguments about, you know, really weedy conversations about Title IX applications and who should be eligible
0:57.7	and why and how and what policy exists and why and how. At the core of this is an athlete who
1:02.9	is said to be transgender. And now we're not naming this player. Can you explain why is that?
1:09.2	The student in question has not spoken publicly about her
1:13.2	identity. She has been named in some media outlets. She's been named in lawsuits, but she has
1:19.3	not spoken herself, and the university also has now commented citing privacy laws. And so for us,
1:25.4	journalistically, we've decided that we will not be naming her
1:27.8	because she hasn't spoken about this at all.
1:31.1	The Mountain West Women's Volleyball Tournament is slated to start on Wednesday.
1:35.3	Where does San Jose State stand in all of this?
1:40.0	So San Jose State finished the season second in the conference.
1:48.7	That was aided by six wins via forfeit.
1:53.4	And so because of the athlete who is said to be transgender being on SJSE's roster, a number of schools, four of them,
2:03.9	within the conference itself, have chosen not to play. And under Mountain West policy,
2:10.2	those decisions result in forfeits. But at the end of the day, what is happening, you know,
2:16.7	comes down to a question about whether or not this particular athlete should get to play.
2:23.2	And it's worth noting that this athlete is playing in her third season for San Jose State's volleyball team.
2:32.2	She played at another school previously.
	...

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