Trans Cheating: SJSU Recruited Male Player For 'Competitive Advantage' In Women's Volleyball
Male coaches wanted to win at any cost to women
An investigation by the US Department of Education has found that “San José State University knowingly recruited a male student athlete” for the women's indoor volleyball team “with the intent of gaining a competitive advantage over other teams” in April 2022.
Former SJSU coach Trent Kersten, a man, “began actively recruiting a male volleyball athlete from another university to join the SJSU women’s indoor volleyball team” in April 2022. Fox News Digital has identified him as “Coach 1” in the investigation.
Kersten left the Spartans a year after recruiting Fleming. Kersten contacted the campus PRIDE and Gender Equity Center to make sure his virtuous recruiting choices were noted by the administration. He now coaches for a Division I school, Oregon.
Coach Kersten “stated he wanted to ask the women on the team their thoughts after they found out [Fleming] was joining the team, but he did not want to relinquish decision making power to the women on the team regarding whether a male player would be allowed to join the team.”
Kersten wanted to win, so that he could move up in his own career, so whatever the women on the team felt about it did not matter to him. Three former SJSU students, Brooke Slusser, Elle Patterson and Alyssa Sugai, are plaintiffs in a Title IX lawsuit against SJSU as a result.
Patterson never received the three-year scholarship that coach Todd Kress offered her to play at SJSU. Instead, her family paid out of pocket for a year while she played back-up to Fleming, who received the scholarship that would have gone to Patterson.
Coaches said they were withholding the scholarship because Patterson had suffered an injury. In fact, she had played in three more games than Fleming, 20 to 17, because he had missed even more games due to injury than Patterson.
Patterson was not told about Fleming’s sex at first. She changed in front of Fleming in the locker room several times without knowing he was a man, Patterson says. Meanwhile, Kress “didn't seem like the type of coach and the person who recruited me when he was actually coaching at San Jose”, Patterson tells Fox News Digital.
The way in which he went about certain situations and just playing was more along the lines of just completely tearing you down as a person and not building you back up. But it definitely felt like he had certain people, one being the man on our team, that he would have done anything for... but it didn't feel like he had the support and belief in some of the other girls on our team.
Kress had every reason to focus on the male player. After all, the coaches were depending on Blaire Fleming to deliver a competitive edge. There was no time for debate, or silly things like Title IX and fair sporting values. The interests of the women on the team were ignored.
An assistant coach, Melissa Batie-Smoose, was fired after she divulged that she had not been told about Fleming’s birth sex before her hiring. She says that she was instructed not to tell the women on the team about it when she did learn the truth. Batie-Smoose has filed litigation against SJSU for wrongful termination.
According to previous reporting in The New York Times, Fleming acknowledged the importance of telling his new teammates about himself, but ultimately decided with Kersten that he would tell each teammate only individually, after Fleming “knew them better.”
As a result, “most, if not all, of the women on the team at the time of sharing a dorm room, hotel room, and/or locker room” with Fleming only found out afterwards, through other means than their coaches or Fleming, that he was male.
Everyone who has observed gender ideology long enough will already understand what happened here: Blaire Fleming’s desire to ‘pass’ as the opposite sex outweighed every right and rule in the book. This is the rule with ‘gender identity’, not the exception.
“I enjoyed being around Blaire, nothing against Blaire as a person”, Patterson says. She did marvel at his apparent athletic ability. “I just felt like I had a lot of work to do to get to that point at where Blaire was at. How am I going to get there?”
How can a woman ever compete with a man? Cheating, of course. Behaviors that undermine sportsmanship and fair play, that seek unfair advantage over opponents, are contrary to NCAA rules for a reason. Transgender sports ‘inclusion’ ruins the ethics of sport. Coaches who cheat will coach students who cheat. Knowing dishonesty kills team spirit.
Slusser alleges in her complaint that Fleming met with Colorado State's Malaya Jones the evening prior to a match and “engineered a plan to leave the centre of the court open so that Jones would be able to target Slusser with powerful spikes in an unhindered fashion”, according to Quillette.
George M.J. Perry observed at The Female Category in 2024 that the game stats and video support Slusser’s allegation her game performance suffered as a result of Fleming’s positioning on the court the next day. Fleming also made more than twice his average number of errors in that game.
This was allegedly an attempt to harm Slusser, according to the Department of Education, which says the claim is “undisputed”. Fleming got away with it because of the dysfunctional team culture the coaching staff had created.
“To silence dissent, ‘scare tactics’ were used. The women on the team were told they needed to be careful of what they said because they all signed a contract and could lose their scholarships. That threat made several members of the team afraid to speak out.”
‘Gender’ ruins everything it touches. “We were not supposed to bring light to it, make Blaire feel uncomfortable, even though that might have made me feel uncomfortable. I know it made some of my other teammates uncomfortable”, Patterson says.
If the suspicious 2024 match had been connected to online gambling, SJSU and California would likely have capitulated to the Department of Education many months ago.
But because Blaire Fleming is a man who ‘passed’, CSU is suing the Department of Education to dispute the findings that SJSU violated Title IX. As far as California is concerned, no one did anything wrong by housing a man in an apartment with three women roommates for a year while keeping his sex a secret.
Boundary violation is essential to the project of transgender equity. Blaire Fleming will literally die, vanish into a puff of logic, without a scholarship to play volleyball with women.
He ceases to exist unless he can be in the locker room while they change. He ceases to exist unless he is allowed to share a hotel bed with Brooke Slusser, a woman. So says the state of California.
His masculinized body does not exist, goes the logic, but Blaire’s inner being, his feminine sense of self, ought to exist in the material world, therefore the whole of society must surrender sporting values and ethics and all concern for women’s boundaries so that this gendered being can exist on a women’s volleyball court.
This is not leading to wider social acceptance. Quite the opposite. According to the most recent Gallup poll, the moral acceptability of “changing one's gender” has declined 14 points since 2021. A majority of Americans, 57 percent, opposes it, an increase from 43 percent.
The minority of Americans who approve of ‘gender identity’, or ‘legal identity’, as a moral good has shrunk to just 38 percent. The question was 5 points underwater in 2021 and 19 points underwater today.
Transgender sports ‘inclusion’ has been the most visible transgender issue ever since Lia Thomas dove into the women’s pool in 2022. Men on women’s medal stands have been a disaster for the public acceptance of transgenderism.
This was predictable, I predicted it, and I call it the Lia Thomas effect. But we could also call it the Blaire Fleming effect. We have thousands of names we could use, really, and that is the actual problem. We see this happening all the time, now. It is repulsive to the public and contrary to the public interest.
Americans see a Lia Thomas, who does not ‘pass’, and perceive it as a man cheating at sports. They find out about Blaire Fleming, a man who did ‘pass’, and become furious at the deception.
Transgender advocacy projects a theory of mind on opponents of this ‘inclusion’. This growth in public opposition is supposed to result from evil, right wing racist dark money spreading misinformation about trans people, etc. In fact the sight of men on women’s medal stands has done the trick.
Kato Crews, the judge presiding over the three women’s lawsuit against SJSU, has deferred his ruling until after the US Supreme Court decides B.P.J. v West Virginia. This case is named for a boy in West Virginia who recently threw his personal best in the shot put, beating the nearest girl by two feet. He has also been accused of coarse locker room behavior towards girls.
It is all supposed to be justified by the mental health needs of Blaire Fleming. Subsequent to a series of teams forfeiting to SJSU over his presence on the court, Fleming’s mental health deteriorated.
Trent Kersten, who knowingly and deliberately set Fleming up to fail at ‘passing’, has reportedly not checked in with Fleming since he moved on to a bigger, better position. One wonders why the press has not checked back in with Fleming, either.
Coach Kersten and Coach Todd Kress wanted to win, no matter the cost to women. Or sports. Or society. They relied on the political and social power of the transgender advocacy juggernaut to protect them from consequences for cheating.
We are not supposed to call it cheating because none of the usual rules apply anymore, once a transgender identity gets involved. But we still see it.