This piece examines how emotion-driven policy from the Left has real consequences for female athletes, profiles Brooke Slusser’s ordeal at San Jose State, and contrasts political posturing with actual safety concerns facing women in sports.
I don’t build policy around personal trauma, because feelings shouldn’t dictate other people’s rights and freedoms. But when a political movement makes feelings the policy engine, consequences follow for ordinary people, especially women in sports.
This story centers on Brooke Slusser, a San Jose State volleyball player who says she was blindsided by a teammate’s biological sex and then punished for speaking up. Her account and the fallout show how institutional decisions can create physical and mental harm when ideology overrides common sense.
Slusser says the stress she endured led to severe health problems, including an eating disorder and a nine-month loss of her menstrual cycle. Those are not abstract statistics; they are the kind of damage that changes lives and careers forever.
“A male athlete was put on the @SJSU women’s team,” Gaines wrote. “The school lied to the women and never disclosed that he was male. Brooke spoke up after realizing she had been living with a man and sharing hotel rooms on team trips. For that, the media, news outlets, and her coach vilified her. She became the enemy. The male athlete allegedly conspired to physically harm her for speaking out.”
Sunday marked exactly one year since Blaire Fleming and Brooke Slusser’s final college volleyball game for San Jose State University.
They had been playing together, traveling together and doing team bonding activities for months even after Slusser took legal action, alleging she was never told Fleming was a biological male transgender athlete. Before that, they had already shared hotel rooms and changing spaces for a whole season in 2023 before Slusser said she even found out.
Slusser now says the panic and stress from that period in her life caused her to develop an eating disorder, which led to severe anorexia that got so bad she lost her menstrual cycle for nine months.
People close to Slusser saw the change. She told reporters friends watched her fade and describe her as looking “dead” from the stress and weight loss. That kind of personal collapse should alarm anyone who cares about fairness and safety in athletics.
Last November Slusser joined other women in a lawsuit challenging San Jose State’s policy that allowed a biologically male athlete to play on the women’s roster. The coach who recruited the player reportedly left the program shortly after the controversy surfaced.
These cases are more than locker room gossip. They raise questions about competitive fairness, physical safety, and whether schools are protecting female athletes or prioritizing ideology. When biological differences are ignored, the risk isn’t just losing matches — it is real harm to women’s bodies and opportunities.
There are concrete examples of injury tied to policy choices. Payton McNabb, another volleyball player, suffered a spike to the face that resulted in permanent injury and a traumatic brain injury after competing against a “trans” opponent. Those are outcomes that demand straightforward policy responses, not slogans.
Yet you rarely see the same political urgency from the Left when women are harmed in these situations. Instead, you’ll hear calls for symbolic gestures and talking points, while the affected athletes are left to recover and fight their battles in court or on their own.
When a terror attack happens, Democrats rush back to gun-control slogans and promise they want to “save one life,” but that same urgency evaporates when women raise alarms about safety and fairness in sports. That double standard looks political rather than principled.
Democrats have an agenda, and protecting women in these circumstances often falls low on the list. Policies that react to feelings without testing for outcomes leave athletes exposed, and the institutions that should defend them too often look the other way.
The Slusser case is a warning: ideological moves that ignore biology and safety create victims. If institutions are serious about fairness and safety, they need to rethink policies that put ideology ahead of women’s health and competitive integrity.
