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CV NEWS FEED // A player on the women’s San Jose State University volleyball team has joined a lawsuit to sue the NCAA for violating Title IX by allowing a man who claims to be a woman to play on the team.
OutKick reported that Brooke Slusser is the starting setter and co-captain of SJSU’s team and was forced in 2023 to both play on the same team and live in the same residence as Blaire Fleming, a biological male identifying as a woman. When the team went on trips, Fleming often specifically requested to room with Slusser.
OutKick additionally reported that SJSU did not tell Slusser or her other teammates that Fleming is a biological male, adding that Slusser only found out about Fleming’s sex through an overheard conversation. When the team found out, SJSU reportedly told the women to keep the information to themselves, telling them that “things would go badly for the team members” otherwise.
The class-action lawsuit against the NCAA that Slusser joined includes several other female athletes as plaintiffs, including All-American swimmer Riley Gaines, Olympian swimmer Reka Gyorgy, and NCAA champion swimmer Kylee Alons. Slusser joined the lawsuit after she saw the physical danger Fleming presented to other women on the court.
“One thing that’s important in this case is really the physical safety issues in volleyball,” said Slusser’s attorney, Bill Bock, in an interview with OutKick, later adding, “It’s just a crazy, misguided policy that steals athletic dreams from women and gives them to men, and at the same time, puts women’s health and safety in danger.”
Because the NCAA allows men to play in women’s sports, SJSU does not intend to change its policy about biological male athletes on women’s sports teams. Slusser hopes to change that through the lawsuit, OutKick reported.
Bock told OutKick that Slusser “really views the NCAA transgender eligibility policies as an impediment to women’s achievement in sport and as an insurmountable obstacle that closes the door of athletic opportunity to many women.”
“The reason for that is that there are just inherent physical differences between men and women,” he said:
And those physical differences ought to be a cause for celebration, but by allowing men who have greatly increased athletic opportunities and athletic potential, based solely on biology, it prevents women from winning titles, celebrating and being acclaimed for their own unique physical abilities.
