Talk:San Jose State transgender volleyball controversy

Feedback from New Page Review process

I left the following feedback for the creator/future reviewers while reviewing this article: Thank you for your work on this article. Please fix the error in footnote 2. Thanks and have a good day!

Mariamnei (talk) 08:04, 12 March 2026 (UTC)

Requested move 12 March 2026

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The result of the move request was: not moved. Minimal participation, no support to move. As this is ongoing, it's unlikely we need to revisit this in the immediate future, but if circumstances do change then it's always an option. (closed by non-admin page mover) HundredVisionsAndRevisions (talk) 16:53, 19 March 2026 (UTC)

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San Jose State transgender volleyball controversy → 2024 San Jose State transgender volleyball controversy – I think there is enough substance to this article to avoid it being deleted, however I think the article should be renamed so that it specifies the year of the event. Adding the year clarifies scope, avoids ambiguity with any future or past disputes involving San José State athletics SammySpartan (talk) 16:40, 12 March 2026 (UTC)

While I recognize it's a common naming convention, I'm going to be honest - putting the year before a generic article title always read to me as incredibly bad titling, just from a prosaic standpoint. It makes it read as bureaucratic, like we're looking over an obscure tax form. If a second San Jose transgender volleyball controversy happens, then we can add the years to clarify Snokalok (talk) 17:35, 12 March 2026 (UTC)

I generally agree that Wikipedia titles can be a bit bureaucratic, but I think we need to remember that WP:Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, and so the primary goal is to be a compendium of knowledge. Its primary purpose is to present knowledge clearly and unambiguously, not to craft narrative or literary phrasing. Prosaic titling is welcome when it helps readers, but it should always give way to more precise or technically accurate language when needed. SammySpartan (talk) 18:28, 13 March 2026 (UTC)

• Oppose per WP:PRECISE. The proposed title is overly precise. I'm usually a proponent of WP:NOYEAR, but I don't think this considered an event for the purposes of WP:NCEVENT.  Bait30  ^{Talk 2 me pls?} 07:54, 13 March 2026 (UTC)

  I liken this article to the 2025 University of Oklahoma essay controversy, both in scope and subject (Transgender controversies at universities during the second Trump administration). That article was originally tilted Samantha Fulnecky essay controversy, and changed to its current title after a discussion. When discussing the name change WP:NCWWW was specifically mentioned in favor of including the year in the title, which several editors agreed with. I think the year should be included in this article's title for basically the same reasons. SammySpartan (talk) 18:21, 13 March 2026 (UTC)

  Good point. The article does say that this is ongoing, so I still think it should either remain as is or be 2024-present.  Bait30  ^{Talk 2 me pls?} 22:15, 13 March 2026 (UTC)

• Oppose - it's inaccurate! The controversy (has?) lasted much more than one year. Red Slash 14:37, 17 March 2026 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Recent cleanup edits

Hello! I recently made some cleanup edits that were, piece by piece, reverted. I believe the reversions to be thoughtful, but ultimately unhelpful to the encyclopedia. I would like to now justify those edits I made. (My edits are on the left side of this diff; the reverted (original) version is on the right.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=San_Jose_State_transgender_volleyball_controversy&diff=1343995819&oldid=1343974851

1. Including a "see also" as a hatnote is bizarre. AFAIK, we (almost) exclusively use "see also" at the beginning when there is a similarly named topic that we want to distinguish the article from. Generally, "see also" goes at the end of the article.

2. Unless every member of that high school team and that club team has been interviewed, we cannot say in wikivoice that "none of the players" knew she was transgender.

3. We were not present for any conversations between Fleming and the colleges. We cannot assert that Fleming was up front with them. We do not know if Fleming "didn't fit in"; we only know that that's the reason Fleming said. We cannot state Fleming's self-reports in wikivoice!

4. I cannot comprehend how Brooke's biggest dream being to have children has any relevance whatsoever to this case. I cannot comprehend how her upbringing has any relevance. We do not include random details of people's lives.

5. AFAIK Executive Order 14201 only banned trans women from women's college sports; in any case, it's only relevant that it was women's college sports.

6. Title IX protections being applied to transgender women was unique to the Biden administration. Obama did start the process, it's true, but it wasn't enforced until Biden. I mean, depending on what you mean by "received protections", you can argue that it never applied, because I'm not aware of any court cases where a transgender athlete was barred from competing, sued for inclusion, and won. Of course, I may well be wrong.

7. We would need reliable sources that describe Reduxx as being "far-right", or honestly even "right-wing". They certainly don't describe themselves that way.

8. "Amidst the national chaos" doesn't really make sense until the national chaos is described more, but I am not going to die on this particular, rather small hill.

9. One person calling another anorexic should be characterized as an assertion.

10. You'll need to source calling the Independent Council on Women's Sports "anti-trans".

11. I just clarified Title IX; I think that makes sense.

12. Riley Gaines should not be wikilinked every single time that she's mentioned.

13. You would need to source that ICONS "demanded" anything. That's a super-strong verb to use.

14. I have no idea why the comma before "after Boise State declined" drew your ire, but I'm pretty sure it should go there.

15. The paragraph on the Trump campaign is just weird and irrelevant. Put that in the article on Trump's campaign, if anywhere.

16. "Forced" is a strong word, and needs strong and explicit sourcing for it.

17. The Trump administration did not use the phrase "assigned sex at birth" and does not appear to actually care about assigned sex at birth, instead relying on strict biology (gametes, etc.).

18. The lawsuit is ongoing, idk why this was removed.

19. Did I remove those from the See Also? If so, that was ill-advised, those absolutely belong there, good catch.

...

Would love to hear anyone's thoughts about these things. Red Slash 20:54, 17 March 2026 (UTC)

1. By all means, put it somewhere else.

2. Fine, cut that one.

3. The source stated these things in its own voice. Not in Fleming's. We're not using her self reports in wikivoice, we're using the NYT's.

4. You can't comprehend how a leading figure in a Trumpist hate campaign against a trans woman being a Christian conservative raised by other Christian conservatives has any relevance? Really? Really?

5. Literally just go to the Executive Order 14201 page, it very clearly says all ages to the point where under this order the state department permanently bans from entering the US visa applicants who list a sex other than their assigned one.

6. They weren't restricted from protections previously, it was just formalized as a central policy by the Biden admin. There is a long history of case law prior to that however of Title IX as well as the rest of the Civil Rights Act covering transgender people.

7. See the NBC source I just added, I have no idea why that didn't copy over. Perhaps it was and it just got culled later on. Either way, it's there now.

8. It had become a national culture war thing by this point.

9. It's not one person characterizing another as anorexic, it's one person (Slusser) characterizing herself as anorexic, then another (Fleming) agreeing, then a third (Slusser's father) agreeing but saying she got better.

10. "anti-trans sports". NYT calls them "the pre-eminent organization in the trans-sports-ban movement."

11. If you mean in the lawsuit section, fine put it back.

12. Fine by me.

13. Per NYT, exact quote "ICONS noted Slusser’s legal action and demanded that, in order “to protect your women student athletes,"

14. If you make one singular massive edit that makes a lot of bad changes and a few good ones, don't be surprised when the good ones get caught in the revert.

15. The sources talk about it being used by the Trump Campaign, and this entire debacle being weaponized by the fascists is part of what makes it so relevant and notable in the first place. I do not see your problem with this.

16. Sorry, are you calling an order that threatens coercive action against anyone that doesn't comply anything less than forceful?

17. Good for the Trump admin, but Wikipedia is not an extension of the Trump administration, and thus we're under no obligation to use their terminology.

18. Feel free to put this part back. Snokalok (talk) 22:03, 17 March 2026 (UTC)

1. Done

2. I just reread the NYT article, and... actually, our article says the opposite of the source!! NYT says "Throughout her childhood, Fleming played tennis and soccer and participated in gymnastics, but volleyball was her favorite sport. She joined a coed recreational team when she was about 10 and, during the summers, went to volleyball camps on college campuses. In 2018, during junior year, she joined her public high school’s girls’ team. She said that none of the coaches or other players, all of whom knew that Fleming was transgender, objected. The same went for a local club team she joined." So I rewrote this to say "She has stated that every coach and fellow player on her school and club teams knew that she was transgender and raised no objections."

3. Have you read the article recently? It does not claim that. It says: "

Fleming soon drew the attention of college recruiters. On the requisite Instagram account and YouTube channel she created to upload her highlights, and in the emails she wrote to coaches, Fleming did not mention that she was trans. It was only when she visited a college that she brought it up — telling the coaches that if it was a problem for the school, then she wouldn’t go there. “Almost every one of those conversations went very well,” Fleming told me. “To my knowledge, no one seemed to think that me being transgender was an issue. If it was, they didn’t indicate that to me.”

I don't think that supports the assertions in the article beyond simply relaying what Fleming herself has reported. I've slightly reworded that to say she "remembers telling" them.

4. No, really, really. Please explain explicitly how her being raised by conservative Christians and wanting to have children is relevant.

5. You're correct! I misremembered badly. That is a good catch.

6. "They weren't restricted from protections previously"--they were never recognized as being under protections, either, afaik. I'm not aware of any court case pre-Biden that actually held that a trans female athlete merited the same right to play girls' sports as a biological female athlete; are you?

7. I'm not convinced that an unbacked passing mention on one online article qualifies calling a self-professed "feminist" news outlet as "far-right".

8. I'm not going to die on this hill at all.

9. Is that correct? My b, that's fine.

10. Hmm, "anti-trans sports organization" sounds like it's saying that it's a sports organization that's anti-trans. It needs to be "anti-trans-sports" which just looks awkward, so I rewrote it: "a group of cisgender female athletes led by Riley Gaines and ICONS - an organization opposing trans women participating in women's sports, formed after one of the co-founders watched her daughter lose to trans swimmer Lia Thomas"

11. done

12. done

13. You're dead right! That's exactly how the NYT characterized it. Sure, it should stay. Thank you!

14. done

15. I'm gonna be honest, I don't see what's relevant about it. Not a huge deal though, if you're that convinced I can yield on this one.

16. Yeah, I am. The New York Times doesn't use the word "forced"--it says "The executive order prompted the N.C.A.A. to announce in February that it was prohibiting trans student athletes from competing in women’s sports, effective immediately." If you prefer I can copy their verb, but I think "led to" is better.

17. I mean, the executive order (and, more relevantly, the DoE finding) is extremely explicit about what it refers to: it's the underlying biology, not based on a doctor's (potentially faulty) judgment at birth. I'll quote the finding: "As a result of the noncompliance finding, OCR issued a proposed Resolution Agreement to SJSU to voluntarily resolve its Title IX violations. It requires SJSU to take the following actions: Issue a public statement to the SJSU community that SJSU will adopt biology-based definitions of the words ‘male’ and ‘female’ and acknowledge that the sex of a human – male or female – is unchangeable; Specify that SJSU will follow Title IX by separating sports and intimate facilities based on biological sex ..." The paragraph as written was inaccurate. I've restored it and sourced the ed.gov press release

18. done

Pleasure working with you to improve Wikipedia. Red Slash 06:00, 18 March 2026 (UTC)

2. Oh, that was dumb of me. Fair enough then.

3. “ in the emails she wrote to coaches, Fleming did not mention that she was trans. It was only when she visited a college that she brought it up” that’s stated in NYT’s own voice, not Fleming’s.

4. Because if you haven’t noticed, Christian theofascism is more or less the entire underpinning ideology regarding the anti-LGBT movement in the United States since the dawn of time. Our sources certainly felt Slusser’s political beliefs were worth emphasizing.

6. Here you are.

7. It’s NBC calling it far-right, and if that’s a particularly dissonant idea to you, I recommend reading up on the gender-critical movement.

10. Yes because I’m sure the group formed after the founder’s daughter lost to a trans woman in order to work with the Trump admin to ban trans women from sport and run national abuse campaigns against any trans woman caught throwing a ball around can’t be accurately described in any way that construes them as anti-trans at all.

16. But do you think “forced” is an inaccurate descriptor, is the question.

17. “Assigned sex” is still the proper term in these cases. Again, just because the Trump admin frames something a certain way does not mean that wikipedia needs to uncritically parrot that framing in wikivoice. Snokalok (talk) 13:20, 18 March 2026 (UTC)

3. Not gonna fight on it, it's not a big deal.

4. I... ... am struggling to understand that you think that "raised by conservative Christians" and "wants to have kids" as being emblematic of "Christian theofascism". Am I really understanding you correctly?

6. Holy cow, I do remember that now! You're dead right, of course. Thanks for finding that for me.

7. It's a bit weird to rely on just one source's assessment of it. (Would you trust if the WSJ was the only source we could find to call some pro-trans group "far left"?) I'll see if I can find any other sources and concede the point for now.

10. I don't care what you infer about the group's motivations; the reliable sources we have describe them as specifically and explicitly working on keeping trans women out of women's sports.

16. It doesn't matter what I think; the fact is that our sources do not use the word "forced" or any synonym of it, and it is editorializing to assume that it was forced.

17. But we are talking about what the Trump admin is saying. The Trump administration is explicitly saying that it is the underlying biology, not a doctor's assignment, that should determine eligibility for women's sports. That is what the order is referring to. If someone was assigned female but later testing proved they were biologically male, that person would not be allowed to compete. Red Slash 15:46, 18 March 2026 (UTC)

4. Call it whatever you want. I call it fascism. But the fact is, you can't seriously be saying that the Christian right being the central ideology present in a Trumpist hate campaign against a trans woman is somehow irrelevant for the article.

10. Right. "anti-trans sports". But also, the rest of your wording is not much better. It's not a group of cisgender female athletes, it's a whole melange of people some of whom are cis female athletes. If you like, we can lift NYT's "pre-eminent" language and I'd consider that fair.

16. It's not editorializing that say that an EO saying "Do this or else" is an act of force, particularly when our sources say that the EO saying "Do this or else" is the reason the NCAA did the thing.

17. Your whole argument here rests upon the assumption that the Trump admin's characterization of transness and biology is on some level the correct one, and that as such we must grant its framing the implicit agreement of repeating it in wikivoice. But I don't see anything there about sex testing. All the order does on that front is say that sex is immutable and that you can't change your documents from what they are originally. "Assigned sex" is thus a perfectly acceptable terminology to maintain. Snokalok (talk) 16:17, 18 March 2026 (UTC)

4. "the Christian right" my dude, she was raised in a Christian household and wants to have kids, yes, I deem that irrelevant. You have yet to explain how it's relevant.

10. Sure, let's use NYT's language

16. It most certainly is. If dad says "Come on, everyone needs to get in the car, we're going to Disneyworld!", did dad FORCE his kid to get in the car? Especially when the kid came running with the world's biggest smile on his face? You have no evidence that the NCAA was not overjoyed at being given the political cover to make the move. We need to use neutral language here.

17. When we are writing about what the Trump administration is saying, we should use language that... matches what they're saying. This is as bizarre as the flat Earth conspiracy theory article saying that "the theory refers to the idea that the Earth is not 3D". No, the flat earth theory refers to the earth being flat. The Trump order refers to biological sex, not sex assigned at birth. Red Slash 02:17, 24 March 2026 (UTC)

4. She was raised in a Christian *conservative* household, which as I did say previously is incredibly relevant given A. That the Christian right has been at the undisputed center of the anti-LGBT movement in the United States since before Stonewall, that is so well known that it falls cleanly under academic common knowledge; and B. Considering that the rest of the article has her going on FOX News and curing anorexia through the power of prayer, yeah it's relevant even outside of anything to do with Christofascism; and C. Per the lawsuit section, which you have read, "Slusser joined the lawsuit in the fall of 2024, on the grounds that "If I had a daughter one day, that was in my position and I never did anything about it and could have, then I wouldn't have been able to live with myself". The SkyNews source directly raises her greatest aspiration in life being to have kids as a major motivating factor for her joining in on this, saying "If I had a daughter one day, that was in my position and I never did anything about it and could have, then I wouldn't have been able to live with myself," she said. "Having kids is literally my biggest dream in life." So yes, it's relevant even outside of Christofascism, given that she herself called it a major motivation for her actions.

16. If the dad says "Get in the car or find somewhere else to live" then yeah, that's forcing. Trump's bill cut funding to any institution that didn't fall in line. That's not "Come on, let's all go have fun together", that's "Do this or starve". 'Forced' is the neutral language, particularly given that the NYT source this comes from also highlights how the NCAA was previously very explicitly trans inclusive.

17. And "biological sex" is not neutral language, it's partisan language. "Assigned sex" is medically standard terminology. We don't repeat Nazi terminology and classifications in wikivoice either. Snokalok (talk) 03:11, 26 March 2026 (UTC)

"transitioned socially and medically at the age of 14"

So that this article is more properly encyclopedic, can we clarify exactly what "transitioned socially and medically at the age of 14" means in the context of this article? Is it actually legal for someone to have a gender confirmation operation at the age of 14 in the United States? ~2026-20625-89 (talk) 15:08, 3 June 2026 (UTC)