An athlete’s identity should never get in the way of their ability to play the sport they love, yet players like San Jose State’s Blaire Fleming have found themselves at the center of controversy.
Fleming is a redshirt senior volleyball player and co-captain at SJSU and was assigned male at birth, according to OutKick. Due to Fleming’s gender identity and following complaints from fellow teammates and the media, Assistant Coach Melissa Batie-Smoose filed a Title IX complaint claiming that school officials showed favoritism to Fleming by allowing her to compete on the team, according to the Daily Mail.
Fleming allegedly conspired with a player from Colorado State University, according to the Daily Mail, to leave the center of the court open so SJSU co-captain Brooke Slusser would be targeted with especially hard spikes from the opposing team. While this could be true, it has nothing to do with Fleming’s gender identity and is being used in this witch hunt to invalidate transgender athletes. Any player could have done this, and, although it is not right, it does not make all trans athletes villains. If Fleming’s teammates and coaches are not making SJSU Volleyball a safe space for all of its athletes, it is reasonable to assume Fleming wanted to seek some kind of retribution. Whether she did conspire with another player to try to hurt her teammate is important when addressing her individual character, but it cannot be used as a reflection of the transgender community just because she happens to be transgender.
According to Fox News, Fleming’s “towering 6-foot-1 presence on the volleyball court” has assisted in taking SJSU Volleyball to a successful 13-3 season, as of Nov. 4. The “competitive advantage” argument against transgender athletes has always perplexed me, in part because most of the time it does not exist. For example, Fleming is listed on the team’s roster as 6’1”, which is not only not the tallest on the team, only two inches taller than Brooke Slusser, but it is also the average height for an outside hitter in volleyball, according to official data from USA Volleyball. Macy Petty, a legislative assistant for Concerned Women for America, a nonprofit legislative action committee that aims to spread and incorporate Christian ideology, and an NCAA volleyball athlete, said in the Fox News article she had previously been “blindsided” because there was a “man” on the other side of the net in one of her games. She said the NCAA and SJSU need to have the decency to disclose that they have a “man” on their team. While this is obviously insensitive to Fleming’s and other transgender athletes’ identities, it is also, not important to the actual argument of excluding these athletes from competition — when I played basketball, I was astounded when I saw girls almost literal feet taller than me and drastically stronger than me, but that only meant I had to play harder and learn to be more aggressive myself. Adjusting to a challenging opponent is part of any sport, and it is more important that transgender athletes are competing in the sports they love, in an identity they feel comfortable with, than someone being scared of a competitor.
Now, if those athletes choose to intentionally target other athletes, of course they are dangerous — but it is not because they are transgender. I am not condoning what Fleming allegedly did, but I am saying that her actions had nothing to do with her identity, and it is unfair to the entire transgender community to portray it as such. Is that not demeaning to men to assume that the reason Fleming’s alleged violence towards her teammates is due to the fact she was assigned male at birth? Yet, people actively choose to make this an issue about transgender people as a whole, when it is in fact one decision made by one athlete.
This lack of critical thinking is not a one-time issue, as we saw with Algerian Boxer Imane Khelif who is currently preparing a lawsuit against the unverified medical reports released during the Olympics claiming she was assigned male at birth, according to FirstPost. This instance, as well as countless others, prove that this is a witch hunt to persecute transgender people. When we let these instances promote so much fear mongering around a group of people, it has a negative effect on every single person who identifies that way, whether they are an athlete or not. There may be instances in everyone’s life when they meet a transgender person that they do not like or do not agree with — that is not a reason to assume every transgender person thinks like them or is inherently evil for living differently.
