San Jose State's trans volleyballer can continue to play: judge

A transgender woman can continue to play on San Jose State University’s women’s volleyball team, a federal judge has ruled.

Members of other teams in the Mountain West Conference, plus one of the player’s teammates, some former San Jose State players, and a now-suspended San Jose State associate coach, had filed suit November 13 seeking to have the trans woman declared ineligible and requesting an emergency injunction to keep her from playing in the Mountain West tournament, which starts Wednesday in Las Vegas. This is her third year on the team at the California school. She hasn’t come out publicly, and The Advocate is not naming her.

Judge S. Kato Crews of the U.S. District Court for Colorado ruled Monday that the request for an emergency injunction came too late. “The Court finds the movants’ delay was not reasonable, there is no evidence to suggest they were precluded from seeking emergency relief earlier, and the rush to litigate these complex issues now over a mandatory injunction places a heavy lift on the MWC at the eleventh hour,” Crews wrote, according to ESPN. They had long been aware of the trans player’s presence, he pointed out.

Crews, an appointee of President Joe Biden, also wrote that the plaintiffs were unlikely to win the overall suit, The New York Timesreports. Courts have established that Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, banning sex discrimination in education, and the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, guaranteeing equal protection under the law, ban anti-trans discrimination, he noted.

San Jose State welcomed Crews’s decision. “All San Jose State University student-athletes are eligible to participate in their sports under NCAA and Mountain West Conference rules,” said a statement from the university. “We are gratified that the court rejected an eleventh-hour attempt to change those rules. Our team looks forward to competing in the Mountain West volleyball tournament this week.”

“We are excited to have the opportunity to represent San Jose State University and the 19 young women who have so valiantly helped us get to this point,” the team’s head coach, Todd Kress, told ESPN.

LGBTQ+ rights group Equality California praised the decision as well. “We’re glad to see this frivolous, hateful and divisive lawsuit be rejected,” spokesman Tom Temprano told the Times. “This court and many other courts before it have continued to rule in favor of transgender athletes being able to participate in school sports. We hope that courts will continue to do this moving forward.”

The NCAA — the National Collegiate Athletic Association — allows the governing body for each sport to set the rules for trans players’ participation. USA Volleyball, the governing body for that sport, requires trans athletes to have “taken the necessary steps to transition to their adopted gender” and to submit documentation of those steps.

And California, unlike 26 conservative states, has no law or policy restricting trans athletes at public K-12 schools, colleges, or universities. San Jose State is a public university. The suit named as defendants the Mountain West Conference and its commissioner, the San Jose State head volleyball coach and two university administrators, and the California State University System board of trustees.

Those who filed the suit claimed that the trans player’s presence discriminated against cisgender women by denying them equal opportunities to compete. They have filed an appeal of Crews’s denial of the emergency injunction with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10^th Circuit “to protect the women volleyball players who are about to compete for a conference championship,” their lawyer William Bock said, according to ESPN. No date has been set for the appeal to be heard.

The suit is funded by the Independent Council on Women’s Sports, which says its mission is to "elevate and empower" women and girls in sports, but it opposes the inclusion of trans women.

The San Jose State volleyball team has a 12-6 record, the second best in the conference. Six of its wins, however, came from forfeits by both conference and nonconference teams because they didn’t want to play against a team with a trans member.

In the tournament, San Jose State is scheduled to play Friday against Wednesday’s winner of a game between Boise State and Utah State, both of which forfeited games against San Jose State during the regular season. ESPN sought comment from both, but neither responded. The two teams with the best regular season records — San Jose State and Colorado State — automatically go to the semifinals. The winners of the semifinals will play each other Saturday, and the winner of that match will go to the NCAA Division I tournament in December.