Paralympics Now Letting Trans Athletes Ruin Women’s Sports

The 2024 Olympiad might be in the history books, but the controversy surrounding males competing in women’s sports is far from over.

Dysfunction in women’s boxing thrust the debate about female athlete safety and fair competition into center ring for the entire Olympic games. Despite being disqualified by the International Boxing Association to compete as women fighters, Algeria’s Imane Khelif and Taiwan’s Lin Yu-ting left Paris with gold medals in women’s boxing around their necks and cast a long shadow over the International Olympic Committee.  

Now we learn that the International Paralympic Committee (IPC) is forcing a new gender scandal on its upcoming games in Paris by qualifying a 50-year-old male sprinter from Italy, who has identified as Valentina Petrillo since 2019, to compete in women’s track and field. During the Paralympic games Aug. 28- Sept. 8, Petrillo is sure to overshadow the accomplishments of female athletes on the podium in Paris.

Here at home, the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee and the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) have done nothing to calm the storm. Neither has prioritized fairness for women nor stood up for America’s female athletes in these cases.

Worse, the NCAA continues to insult female athletes as it defends itself against a landmark lawsuit over its perverse policy allowing males who feel like women to enter women’s competitions, steal female trophies, and intrude in women’s locker rooms. Recently, more plaintiffs have joined the lawsuit brought by Riley Gaines and other current and former NCAA female athletes.

NCAA’s Trans Controversy

Despite legal jeopardy and new demands from Congress, the NCAA is thrusting a new school year of trans controversy on college sports in the U.S., starting with volleyball.

In April, Reduxx ran an exclusive report revealing that a male had been competing under the radar on a Division I NCAA women’s volleyball team:

a feminine male has been participating in elite women’s collegiate sports in California after his biological sex was reportedly withheld from his teammates and his opponents. Blaire Fleming, born Brayden, is currently playing women’s Division I volleyball for San Jose State University in the reputable Mountain West Conference.

As a 6’1” outside hitter, this male player was recruited for a college women’s volleyball career starting at Coastal Carolina in 2020 from the Virginia Juniors girls’ volleyball club, where tournament records show Fleming was listed on the official team roster as Brayden.   

Now a redshirt senior at San Jose State University (SJSU), Fleming takes the court this season with inherent net advantage as a natal male — literally. The male net in volleyball is seven inches higher than the female net, accounting for the superior vertical jump capacity of male physiology compared to females.

The return of Fleming would not be happening if the NCAA had adopted the same common-sense policy as the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA) clarifying that only natal females can compete in the women’s category.

But under President Charlie Baker, the NCAA continues to mock female athletes and women’s sports. Baker’s tenure has been marked by ineptitude and cowardly inaction. He even admitted the NCAA has never researched the physical, emotional, or psychological harm of its trans-inclusion policy on female athletes. That’s because the NCAA has never cared about women athletes in promoting its DEI agenda.  

By agreeing to follow NCAA policy, which clearly discriminates against female athletes, member institutions are putting their own athletes at risk. We know the severity of injury only increases — especially concussions in volleyball — as more males enter competition in women’s sports. 

How will the “reputable” Mountain West and its schools, including Boise State, Utah State, UNLV, Wyoming, the U.S. Air Force Academy, and others, defend forcing their female athletes to compete against a biological male and increasing their risk of serious injury on the court? Will they use emotional blackmail to silence their players like we saw with the Ivy League’s Lia Thomas?

San Jose State opens the 2024 women’s volleyball season on Aug. 30 at a tournament hosted by Cal State Fullerton. Next stop is Sept. 6 on former collegiate hoopster Caitlin Clark’s home turf at the University of Iowa. Do Iowa fans know this spectacle is coming to town? What is the University of Iowa athletics department telling its female athletes?  

Do players on these teams and their supporters even know? Concerned Women for America knows, and so does the vast network of women, including champions like Martina Navratilova, who are fed up with seeing our daughter athletes become the social experiments of the NCAA’s transgender athlete agenda prioritizing the feelings of a man’s feminine identity over biological reality.

Faced with a similar situation, University of Washington (UW) bowed out of a verbal deal with rising volleyball star, Tate Drageset, once news broke Drageset was male. UW recognized that rostering a male on its women’s team would be bad PR for the school, especially as it was transferring to the Big 10 to face volleyball powerhouse Nebraska. I’d like to think UW also believed it was flagrantly unfair to its own women’s team and a violation of their rights under Title IX.

Such damaging impacts should be on the minds of the Mountain West and the NCAA. SJSU has a trans-identifying male rostered on the women’s volleyball team. Will opponents force their women to compete across the net or stand for their rights, dignity, and their safety, and sit these matches out? 

Doreen Denny is senior advisor to Concerned Women for America, the nation’s largest public policy women’s organization.