Nevada loses volleyball game to San Jose State after confronting own players over transgender controversy

The University of Nevada, Reno officially announced Friday that its women’s volleyball team will forfeit its match against San Jose State on Saturday.

Nevada is the fifth team to forfeit its game against San Jose State amid an ongoing national controversy over a transgender player, Blaire Fleming, on the team and another player involved in a lawsuit for never being told that the player is a biological male according to him. process.

Nevada noted that it does not have enough players to compete in the forfeit game after its players expressed their desire and intention not to compete against San Jose State.

“Due to not having enough players to compete, the University of Nevada women’s volleyball team will not play its scheduled Mountain West Conference match at San José State on Saturday, October 26. Per Mountain West Conference policy, the game will be recorded as a conference loss for Nevada,” Nevada announced in a statement Friday morning.

San Jose State responded to the seizure in a statement to Fox News Digital.

“All of our athletes comply with NCAA and Mountain West Conference policies and are eligible to play under those organizations’ rules. We will continue to take steps to prioritize the health and safety of our students as they pursue their earned opportunities to compete,” the statement said.

Nevada players, including team captain Sia Liillii, spoke out against the idea of ​​competing against a transgender player in the weeks leading up to the cancellation, after voting to drop it on Oct. 14. The players even went so far as to schedule a press conference. along with OutKick contributor and women’s sports activist Riley Gaines will go on at the same time as Saturday’s game.

“We were quite upset after this statement from our university,” Liilii told Yahoo Sports. “It made us realize that we needed to talk about what we wanted to do as a group, make a decision and stick with it.”

However, Nevada won’t officially drop the game until Friday morning, citing state law.

“The vast majority of our team has decided that this is something we want to take a stand on,” Liilii said on the site. “We didn’t want to play against a male player.

“In all our team meetings it kept coming back to the fact that men don’t belong in women’s sports. If you were born biologically male, you don’t belong in women’s sports. It’s not even about this individual athlete. It’s about fair competition and safety for everyone.”

Nevada’s state constitution was revised in 2022 when Nevada voted to adopt the Equal Rights Amendment, which added gender identity to the list of protections. Nevada state Sen. Pat Spearman, a North Las Vegas Democrat who co-sponsored the bill to put it on the ballot, said the law helped transgender people maintain their identities.

“The university made the decision not to declare forfeiture and to continue hosting the game as scheduled based on a number of factors. As a public university, the university is legally prohibited by Section 24 of the Nevada Constitution and other laws and regulations from declaring a loss for reasons related to gender identity or expression,” a Nevada spokesperson previously told Fox News Digital.

On Tuesday, both Nevada and San Jose State announced that the game would be moved from Nevada’s campus in Reno to San Jose State’s campus in California’s Bay Area, saying the location change was “in the best interest of both programs and the good-being of the student body.” – athletes, coaches, athletic staff and spectators.”

However, San Jose State would have had to be in the game in order to receive a forfeit if no Nevada players ended up playing. By moving the game to the campus of San Jose State, then the Spartan players would not have to make the trip to Nevada to secure the lost victory. So by making this change, San Jose State will end up claiming a forfeit if no Nevada players choose to play without leaving their home state.

Now that the match has been officially cancelled, no one will have to make any trips.

Nevada joins Southern Utah, Boise State, Wyoming and Utah State in officially forfeiting their scheduled games against San Jose State.

San Jose State player Brooke Slusser has joined a lawsuit led by OutKick host and former collegiate swimmer Riley Gaines against the NCAA over its gender identity policies. Slusser joined the lawsuit because she claims she had to share a court, a locker room and even a room on overnight trips with her teammate Fleming, without ever being told that Fleming is a biological male.

Security concerns and threats against San Jose State players have made traveling for games a high-risk endeavor for the Lady Spartans. San Jose State previously confirmed to Fox News Digital that the police protection team had been assigned to it shortly after it first received word of the loss of an opponent when Southern Utah announced it would not play the Spartans in September.

“One of my teammates got a DM basically saying that she, and then my team, need to keep their distance from me on the day of the game against Colorado State because it’s not going to be a good situation for me to be in and that my team needed to keep their distance,” Slusser told Fox News Digital in an exclusive interview. “They had to keep their distance from me during the game because something was going to happen to me.

“That was the first physical threat when I could easily see that they were going to physically hurt one of us.”

In June, a survey conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago asked respondents to weigh in on whether transgender athletes of both sexes should be allowed to participate in sports leagues that match their preferred gender identity instead of their biological sex.

Sixty-five percent said it should never or rarely be allowed. When respondents were asked specifically about adult transgender athletes competing on women’s sports teams, 69% were opposed.

The United Nations released study findings that say nearly 900 biological women missed the podium because they were beaten by transgender athletes.

The study, titled “Violence against women and girls in sport”, says more than 600 athletes have not medaled in more than 400 competitions in 29 different sports, totaling more than 890 medals, according to information obtained by March 30.

“Replacing the women’s sport category with a mixed category has resulted in an increasing number of female athletes losing out, including medals, when competing against men,” the report said.

Former President Donald Trump went so far as to advocate for a ban in a recent town hall event on Fox News.

“We’re not going to let it happen,” Trump said of the issue. “We stop it, we stop it, we absolutely stop it. We can’t have it.

“Just ban it. The president forbids it. Don’t let it happen. It’s not a big deal.”