The federal lawsuit sparked by San Jose State possibly having a transgender woman on its volleyball team ought to terrify everyone.
Not for any of the trumped-up “reasons” cited by the attorneys for Spartans co-captain Brooke Slusser and her co-plaintiffs. Regardless of what she, transphobic activist Riley Gaines and all these other “Save women’s sports!” grifters would have you believe, transgender women are not a threat to women’s sports or the athletes who play them.
What is a threat? The witch hunts this lawsuit, as well as the state bans on transgender women in sports, are inciting.
Buried among the meanness and the misinformation and the petulance in the lawsuit, filed earlier this week against San Jose State, the Mountain West Conference and several administrators, is a section demanding the right to declare open season on anyone suspected of being transgender.
“It has now become a rule violation for a team or school to even ask the MWC or NCAA to investigate the eligibility of a transgender student-athlete or to report concerns about the eligibility of the athlete,” according to the lawsuit.
Well, yes. Because the alternative is to open the door to questioning — loudly and publicly, no doubt — the gender of any woman athlete who doesn’t conform to a white, hetero, cisgender norm. It won’t just be those women who jump higher or run faster, either. It’ll be any woman with short hair or small breasts. Women with more muscular physiques. Women with deeper or huskier voices. Who don’t look “feminine” enough, whatever that means.
Don’t believe it? It’s already happened. Algerian boxer Imane Khelif was terrorized at the Paris Olympics. After South Carolina coach Dawn Staley said at the Final Four that she has no problem with transgender female athletes, the cesspool that is the right-wing internet combed through the Gamecocks roster and theorized about who might be transgender.
“There is no rational basis for a rule that prevents a school from reporting eligibility concerns regarding a student-athlete,” according to the lawsuit.
Oh, really. Being able to scream “Trans!” without consequence gives license to bad actors, the folks who simply can’t accept they’re not that good or, knowing they can’t compete, will try to remove their competition, instead.
Alyssa Sugai, one of the plaintiffs in the new lawsuit, played in 16 of San Jose State’s 29 matches as a walk-on in 2021. Yet she thinks it’s someone else’s fault she didn’t get a scholarship or more playing time the following season. In Utah, some parents were so furious their kids were getting beat that school officials combed through a young girl’s enrollment records to placate them.
Worse than these modern-day inquisitions are the resolution of them. Little girls and young women pulled off the field or court and taken into a locker room to be subjected to a genital check by a doctor of someone else’s choosing. Because there’s no risk of abuse happening there! Parents carrying their kids’ birth certificates to games and practices, just in case they have to be whipped out to satisfy the gender police.
Is this really what we want for our girls and young women? To allow their very being to be questioned by anyone they encounter? To be subjected by some undefinable purity test for femininity?
I doubt Slusser, Sugai, Gaines and all the other women who’ve decided transphobic hysteria is the quickest way to get themselves on Fox News or become a right-wing influencer have imagined this happening to them. Because they look like what a woman is “supposed” to look like — again, whatever that means — they would never be subjected to this kind of humiliation and degradation.
Ditto for the parents who have been gaslit into believing transgender women athletes are lurking on every sideline, big, manly brutes who will injure their daughters and keep them from playing sports. They can’t imagine their daughters ever being seen as suspect.
That’s the thing about opening the door to hate and ignorance, though. Eventually it comes for everyone. If this lawsuit is successful, no one’s daughter will be safe.
Follow USA TODAY Sports columnist Nancy Armour on social media @nrarmour.