San Jose State University violated Title IX over its handling of a scandal involving a transgender volleyball player — including ignoring a plot hatched with a player on an opposing team to spike her in the face during a match, the US Department of Education announced Wednesday.
The department launched an investigation into the university last February after a series of lawsuits and controversies orbiting transgender team member Blaire Fleming, a biological male, during a highly contentious volleyball season in which seven teams forfeited games to SJSU in protest.
One of the most egregious findings was that a female athlete discovered Fleming had conspired with Colorado State women’s volleyball player Malaya Jones on Oct. 2, 2024 to violently spike her in the face with a ball during a match the following night.
Brooke Slusser alleged she had been made to share changing spaces and bedrooms with trans teammate Blaire Fleming in 2023 without being told that Fleming is a biological male. Getty Images
Blaire Fleming pictured in October 2024. AP
The Education Department claims that “SJSU did not investigate the conspiracy, but later subjected the female athlete to a Title IX complaint for ‘misgendering’ the male athlete in online videos and interviews.”
Former SJSU co-captain Brooke Slusser was one of many team members who sued the NCAA, the Mountain West Conference and university representatives after alleging she was forced to share changing rooms and bedrooms with Fleming in 2023 without being told the trans-identifying student was born a male.
SJSU’s violations included denying women equal educational opportunities and benefits, and retaliating against female athletes who spoke out, according to the investigation, including former assistant coach Melissa Batie-Smoose, who was suspended and her contract not renewed after filing a Title IX complaint against the school.
“SJSU caused significant harm to female athletes by allowing a male to compete on the women’s volleyball team—creating unfairness in competition, compromising safety, and denying women equal opportunities in athletics, including scholarships and playing time,” ED Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Kimberly Richey told Fox News Digital, which first broke the story.
“Even worse, when female athletes spoke out, SJSU retaliated — ignoring sex-discrimination claims while subjecting one female SJSU athlete to a Title IX complaint for allegedly ‘misgendering’ the male athlete competing on a women’s team. This is unacceptable. We will not relent until SJSU is held to account for these abuses and commits to upholding Title IX to protect future athletes from the same indignities.”
Slusser’s November 2024 lawsuit against the Mountain West launched an investigation of its own into the allegations but didn’t punish the players involved citing insufficient evidence.
Batie-Smoose also filed suit against the Board of Trustees of the California State University system, of which SJSU is a member. Batie-Smoose and her attorney Vernadette Broyles said they believe the suspension was “retaliatory” to her Title IX complaint over Fleming.
Batie-Smoose further said she wasn’t told Fleming was a male until she accepted the coaching job at SJSU in February 2023. She only learned a few weeks into taking the job after she started asking questions and head coach Todd Kress finally spilled the beans, according to the outlet.
The former coach claims she was then told she wasn’t allowed to tell other players or their parents about it, and was warned she’d be fired if she divulged the truth.
Learning of the conspiracy to deliberately injure her had serious mental and physical health effects on Slusser.
She told Fox News Digital in an interview last year that she developed an eating disorder due to the panic and stress from that time period, which led to anorexia so severe that she stopped menstruating for nine months.
Getty Images
“I went from around 160 to 128 [lbs] in that one semester. It definitely isn’t healthy for someone of my size to be that weight, and I ended up losing my menstrual cycle for nine months. So it was definitely severe,” said Slusser, who stands 5-foot-11.
Upon seeing her over Christmas break, her parents were so disturbed by the physical impact the situation had on her they insisted she not return to SJSU and enroll in online classes instead.
Because she was a Division I athlete, this caused her to lose her scholarship, forcing the family to pay the full semester’s tuition out of pocket, including housing costs, her father, Paul Slusser, told the outlet.
The Trump administration now wants the school to face consequences over what happened. The school has 10 days to meet a number of requirements or risk “imminent enforcement action,” including:
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;
State that SJSU will not delegate its obligation to comply with Title IX to any external association or entity and will not contract with any entity that discriminates on the basis of sex;
Restore to individual female athletes all individual athletic records and titles misappropriated by male athletes competing in women’s categories, and issue a personalized letter of apology on behalf of SJSU to each female athlete for allowing her participation in athletics to be marred by sex discrimination; and
Send a personalized apology to every woman who played in SJSU’s women’s indoor volleyball (2022–2024), 2023 beach volleyball, and to any woman on a team that forfeited rather than compete against SJSU while a male student was on the roster—expressing sincere regret for placing female athletes in that position.
In 2025, the Education Department came to resolution with the University of Pennsylvania for its handling of transgender swimmer Lia Thomas, and Wagner College for its handling of transgender fencer Redmond Sullivan.
The department was unable to reach agreements with state agencies in Maine and California, resulting in Department lawsuits.