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Dec. 1, 2024 - Where There's Woke - Thomas Smith
01:20:38
WTW70: San Jose State University's Volleyball Season That Wasn't About Volleyball

The Right Wing media ecosystem is all over Lydia's alma mater, San Jose State University, for a very unserious (surprise) reason: volleyball. Lydia breaks down the "controversy" for us. If you enjoy our work, please consider leaving a 5-star review! You can always email questions, comments, and leads to lydia@seriouspod.com. Please pretty please consider becoming a patron at patreon.com/wherethereswoke!

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What's so scary about the woke mob?
How often you just don't see them coming.
Anywhere you see diversity, equity, and inclusion, you see Marxism and you see woke principles being pushed.
Wokeness is a virus more dangerous than any pandemic hands down.
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Hello and welcome to Where There's Woke.
I'm your host, Thomas Smith.
That over there is your other host, Lydia Smith.
How are you doing, Lydia?
I'm doing pretty well.
Happy Thanksgiving.
Happy after Thanksgiving.
It has nothing to do with what we're going to talk about.
Yeah.
It's very cordial of you.
I don't know.
I'm not good at, like, linking in the story with the intro like Matt is.
Matt is a killer at it.
Yeah.
Unready.
And I just say, fine.
Like, every time.
Yeah.
What are you going to serve up to us?
Oh, jeez.
Yeah.
So this is a story I've been kind of tracking for a while.
We're going to be talking about the controversy at my alma mater, where I went to for graduate school, San Jose State, and their women's volleyball team.
What could possibly be controversial about that?
Are they a drug cartel?
Are they secret murders?
What could be so important that there's a women's volleyball controversy that I have heard of?
It's so important that it was the main point at the RNC, at the Madison Square Garden rally.
After immigration, this is like number two.
What kind of carbon footprint does that volleyball team have?
I'm just trying to think of what's so important.
They do dump a lot of oil, like, wherever they go, just, like, as they're...
Wow, I guess we'll find out what is truly so important after this break.
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It's the only reason this happens, and it's, you know, I just feel like, especially these days, when we've lost...
A lot of mainstream media, I feel like the reaction to the election from the New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times has been, you know, enabling.
Yeah.
Disappointing.
Yeah.
Very disappointing.
Caving.
Essentially, I just.
Oh, yeah.
Like morning Joe.
Right.
MSNBC.
Oh, my God.
Yeah. - Yeah.
Not that I ever gave a shit about Morning Joe, but I mean, it really is like we're losing more and more of it.
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All right.
Well, after this break, we'll find out how many genocides this volleyball team has done.
There must be something really serious.
I am just...
I am pins and needles.
I can't...
What's it going to be?
So this exploded when an individual named Brooke Slusser...
Joined a lawsuit, an existing lawsuit, and we'll talk about that a little bit first before we kind of get into the specifics regarding San Jose State.
So the lawsuit that Brooke joined, this was in September of 2024. They submitted an amended complaint.
This is the NCAA lawsuit that's Gaines et al., as in Riley Gaines, so you kind of see where this is going, versus the NCAA specific to like Georgia Tech University and their claims that This is basically the same thing.
So this is one that was filed March 2024. Oh, okay.
So it is like a newer.
They are just going around.
Yeah.
And so then this one is filed in coordination with a new nonprofit organization founded in 2022. It's called the Independent Council on Women's Sports or ICONS. You'll see it referred to as ICONS all over the place.
They have like a merch section on their website.
And that was founded by Marshy Smith and Kim Jones.
Both of them are former student athletes.
And Kim Jones is actually a mother of one of Leah Thomas's former teammates.
And so she definitely has a bone to pick because of, you know, perceived injustices there, along with Riley Gaines.
So these two individuals are, you know, kind of new to this space, at least in terms of advocacy.
And you can really tell like when they do media appearances and stuff, especially Marshy Smith.
I was watching something of her where she was kind of like holding her earpiece in because she was, I think, not super used to it.
But anyway, although it's a new nonprofit, they are getting very involved with a lot of different things.
So they both had signed on to an amicus brief for West Virginia versus BPJ, which is a 2024 filing that the Supreme Court has not yet agreed to hear at this time.
But they are, you know, amicus brief has been put up.
The petitions have been put up.
And other amici include America First Legal, Do No Harm, Concerned Women for America, kind of like the people you would typically expect with this area of concern, I guess.
And what that case is about, and we'll see if the Supreme Court decides to take it up, is West Virginia passed a law in 2021 that categorically banned girls who are transgender from participating on all-girls sports teams from middle school through college.
And a student sued BPJ and they ended up winning and went through the appeal process and went on appeal.
And so West Virginia is taking it up to the Supreme Court at this point.
They also, these two women via ICONS, submitted an amicus brief in U.S. v.
Scrimetti, which is going to be, oral arguments are coming up on that, I think, very soon.
Those are regarding access to gender-affirming medical care in Tennessee.
So, lots of stuff going on there.
Boy, I don't love all this.
And this one is coming out of the Supreme Court.
I know.
So, this is going to be a Supreme Court season of transphobia and ruining trans people's lives.
Awesome.
Yeah, it probably will be, honestly.
It's depressing.
Keep an eye on that.
Yeah.
So, that sucks.
Yeah, of course.
So with that original complaint, the ACLU is going up against them.
And they submitted an amended complaint in September 2024, like I mentioned, where additional women joined.
And one of those women was Brooke Slusser.
Brooke Slusser is the captain for the women's volleyball team at San Jose State.
She did not start at San Jose State.
She's a transfer student.
She started at Alabama and has not publicly talked about why she left.
She's just said that she was looking for a place to love the game again.
I do have a clip where I think she might allude to something that happened.
You think it's something more than normal sports.
I think it could be.
You know, again, she has not really said anything 100% anywhere.
But in terms of like her playing time and stuff, you know, as like a freshman and sophomore, it's not like she was being benched for particularly long periods of time.
Like she's a really good player.
who has given interviews about her from like the athletic staff perspective, has talked about her leadership and the way that she, you know, handles herself on the court and her volleyball IQ and all of those things.
They're very impressed by what she brings to the table with those things.
So I would be surprised if it was related to that.
She's just said that she wanted to find happiness in the sport again.
And San Jose State recruited her.
So in the complaint, though, she named a teammate of hers that she said was transgender. - Wow.
Awesome.
Yeah.
Brooke, the captain, named her teammate.
I will not be using the name myself.
Some of the clips might be using her name, but it's not something I want to engage in because this person has not come out and shared things themselves.
And the school obviously is maintaining her right to privacy.
And, you know, it's not my business.
No way.
Yeah.
When Brooke shared her teammate's name and said that she was transgender, she not only just alleged that, but she kind of set forth like all of these specific the facts of the case kind of thing.
Right.
So saying that she shared a residence with this student and that she roomed with her for traveling.
Come to find out, according to Brooke, that it was because the student had basically given a list of women on the team that she felt comfortable with staying for travel and overnights and things like that.
And Brooke was one of them.
And so the athletic staff roomed them up together.
And apparently, the way that Brooke found out about this, according to this lawsuit, was that she had overheard a conversation between other students that this individual on the volleyball team is a guy, in quotes.
And Brooke asked more questions about it and they said that, oh yeah, that person's a dude.
And Brooke was like really kind of shocked by it.
It was brand new news to her because, you know, by this point, it had been a year since they had met and they had room together and they had played on the same volleyball team together.
And she ended up like not really talking about it for the rest of the year because according to her, she wanted to think about how she was going to respond.
Simultaneously, what I guess Brooke wasn't aware of, which I find surprising, but she says she was not aware about this, a mother from a competing school.
So this is in the Mountain West Conference.
We'll be talking a little bit about the conference and the various teams that they play for San Jose State women's volleyball.
But an opponent's mother basically sent a tip to this website called Redux.
Have you heard of Redux?
I don't remember.
It is horrific.
Is this like some of that transvestigating stuff?
Yes, that's exactly what it is.
And it's just completely horrible.
Southern Poverty Law Center has said that it's nothing but rabid transphobia.
And like many white nationalist websites that list endless pages of black crime meant to suggest that black people are inherently prone to criminality, Redux is an endless scroll of alleged trans sex offenders and pedophiles.
It's really bad.
I like went on the website and it's just horrific.
And so this came out in April 2024. Remember when these same fucking people during Me Too were like, there is a whisper network and they're just accusing.
Never mind that it is pretty much all people and men who actually are disgusting and harass people.
And then they're like, well, but this is fine.
We can do a totally anonymous list of people we're just accusing of being trans.
And by the way, pedophiles in the same sentence you're saying?
Like, I don't know.
Oh, yeah.
What that has to do with each other, but like, unreal.
Nothing, unless you're this website and then it's everything.
They not only posted, you know, there is a suspected student athlete at San Jose State on the women's volleyball team who was a signed male at birth.
You know, like, they don't say any generalities like that.
They out this person on the article.
And not just that, including pictures.
They went on this person's aunt's Facebook to find pictures of before their transition.
They deadnamed them in the article.
It's just really, really awful.
Yeah, it kills me that that happened.
And that was an isolated thing, April 2024. And obviously, this student knew about it.
But supposedly, a lot of other people didn't necessarily until Brooke decided to name her in this very obvious lawsuit.
So she named her...
What do you mean named?
So this lawsuit was already happening.
Yep, and then they did an amended.
Oh, so it is part of the complaint.
It's not an amicus brief or whatever?
No, correct.
She joined the lawsuit.
So then they submitted an amended complaint to include her story.
Who's the defendant?
The defendant is the NCAA, Georgia Tech.
The whole NCAA. Yes, yes, because of their policies.
We're adding on, here's another...
Instance in which Title IX was violated.
So with Brooke's addition to this lawsuit, this is when it all went crazy.
There was one instance kind of immediately after the lawsuit where they were in...
They do, like, preseason tournaments and stuff with other schools that aren't in the conference.
And there was one school that refused to play them.
And when the organizer reached out to the coach, she said that it was because they were tired, so they were just going to, you know, take the forfeit kind of thing.
And that their team needed to recuperate from some of the other games that they've had during the tournament.
And that was the only reason they got.
But probably what it had to do with was this.
Yeah, it was not true.
And so what you see then is...
What you do in that case is you play some of your bench players that don't get any playing time.
So immediately following the complaint, we basically have a series of forfeits that happen from Mountain West Conference schools that you would probably expect.
So on September 28th, San Jose State was slated to play Boise State, Boise forfeited.
On October 5th, San Jose State was slated to play Wyoming and Wyoming forfeited.
And then they played a few matches during the month of October until October 23rd when Utah State forfeited.
October 26th, Nevada forfeited.
And then on November 14th, Wyoming forfeited again.
And then on November 21st, Boise forfeited again and...
And right now, we're actually in the Mountain West tournament, the conference tournament, to determine who's the champion of the Mountain West conference, right?
And they were slated to play Boise State for the semifinal, and Boise forfeited there as well.
And actually, today, they're playing Colorado for the championship game.
It actually is probably over by now.
This is crazy.
And is this Division I? Division I, mm-hmm.
These fucking people.
I would be pissed if I were on any of these teams.
Yeah.
You're telling me, look, I don't know anything about this girl.
I don't know.
I guess I could imagine if she's like seven feet tall and benches 400 pounds and spikes balls and takes people's heads off or something.
Like, okay, maybe that would be concerning.
But like, volleyball?
Like, women's volleyball?
Yeah.
What position is she?
I could imagine it being absolutely not even noticeable, which it seems like it wasn't for the longest time.
It seems like nobody cared.
This didn't matter for a pretty long time.
And the idea that in Division I sports...
Imagine the seniors on the other teams...
It's whose last season, last chance to do this competition, which is very important to them.
And they're like, sorry, one of the players on this team might be trans.
So there goes your season.
Yeah.
Like, just play the fucking game, you losers.
Like, I'd be so pissed.
Yeah, so Brooke talks about this a lot.
She has said that the teammate towers over opposing teams.
This student is 6'1", and seven of the San Jose State teammates are six feet or taller.
Brooke Slusser is 5'11".
Like, these are not significant differences.
She has said that this individual can jump very high, and I don't have any information related to that, like what that data point is.
But, you know, fair enough on her jump.
But as far as how tall she is, 20% of all current active players in the NCAA are taller than 6 feet.
So this is not unreasonable.
Additionally, Brooks Lesser has said that this student hits the ball at 80 miles per hour.
A 2015 study of a Spanish team that is very, very good at volleyball found that the average women's volleyball spike is 44 miles per hour and the average men's is 60 miles per hour.
So, this student is incredible and should be in the Guinness Book of World Records, then, if truly they are hitting the ball at 80 miles an hour.
I did see some, like, records related to, like, the fastest spike, and in women's volleyball, the individual is Paola Agonu at 70.1 miles per hour.
So like that's that's very fast and very strong.
But it is unlikely that this student, that this 20 something year old student is hitting the ball at 80 miles per hour, because I feel like we would have heard a lot about that before they were even outed as being transgender.
It would be like, oh, my God, can you believe it?
Just in another victim.
Yeah.
Claim that her head came clean off.
And there's footage of one of the games where she spikes and she's a very talented player.
Definitely.
And she leads the team in a variety of statistics that I don't understand because I don't know what all the abbreviations stand for.
There's a lot of them.
And I was trying to like understand.
But she does lead in what they call kills, just like these spikes that, you know, nobody can stop, I guess.
And one of those attempts that she had ended up hitting a player on the opposing team.
And everybody said, oh, my God, it hit that girl in the face, you know, like came down at what they think is 80 miles an hour in this woman's face on the opposing team.
Donald Trump reposted it that this girl got hit in the face by a volleyball because, you know, we have non-women in women's sports.
And what they found as they were slowing it down was it likely actually just hit her shoulder, and it showed the student right after, and her face is fine.
It's just a part of the game.
It doesn't matter.
People get hurt.
That's what happens.
Additionally, when Brooke is talking about, and other people who participate in this conversation, they talk about how dangerous it is to be up against someone who is that tall, that strong, that powerful, that there's these biological differences in physicality between men and women, et cetera, et cetera.
A very, very, very common practice in women's volleyball.
Not even that.
They have men just play.
They are practice players because they want...
Half the players are killed every time, but the other half, they get a lot better.
A lot of improvement.
But that's part of the NCAA rules.
Like, that is completely allowed.
Most schools participate in that.
I feel like San Jose State participates in it.
I didn't find anything, you know, corroborating either way.
But it was something I was looking into.
I'd be surprised if they didn't, because it does give you a competitive advantage.
And it's not just like practicing against people who are taller than your team, because you might be going up against...
significantly tall women on other teams or, you know, that have particular strength that your team might not have.
But it also gives your team the chance to rest from having to jump constantly for spikes and things like that.
Like you get to practice defense and not have to kind of practice both at the same time.
So it actually protects the players on the team to some degree as well.
But if you would hear it from Brooke, it's the most dangerous thing in the world having the student on their team and that everybody is scared of her and that no one feels safe and that people are having to dodge her spikes because they're so scary and so powerful.
And I'm sitting here going, well, I bet you, you guys have male practice players.
I bet that's happening.
Coaches will sub in too and do that same thing.
All right, hon. Sports are not your forte.
Fair.
No shame in there.
I would just like to point out that sports are kind of my forte.
I'm really into sports.
And I thought, first thing I thought as you were talking was, well, why don't I check the national statistics?
Yeah.
This is NCAA Division I. There's stats on all this stuff.
Yep.
And I don't know volleyball that well.
I don't claim to.
I mean, I know the basics.
So I don't know like what stats are going to matter.
But you mentioned kills.
Kills per set seems solid.
And I click on the national rankings and I was just looking at like the stats and I didn't even see we had to clarify.
I didn't even see San Jose State in the top 50, meaning of the individuals that list their school.
Right.
And the top 50 individuals in women's volleyball in D1 in the nation.
And there was no sound.
As they said, I was like, do we have the right thing?
Until I got to page two, and this person is in the 70s in the nation in terms of kills per set.
Interestingly enough, it also lists their height.
And 6'1", the person right above them, 6'5".
Next person, 6'3".
6-2, 6-2.
Yep.
There are some 5-11, which, by the way, really impressive.
5-9?
Wow, that's super impressive.
Yeah, that's awesome.
I always love that, like the folks that are...
The shorties.
Yeah, a little bit shorter, but they're getting kills.
You know, that means they're actually still, you know, spiking the ball.
It's not like they're just so...
And in fact, the fourth in the nation is 5-9.
That's actually really cool.
And the numbers...
So...
Kills per set, the top number is 5.6 in the nation.
That's the nationwide leader in NCAA Division I was 5.6.
This person is at 3.8.
Pretty big difference there.
Yeah.
Is there an advantage or not?
Well, that's a weird question.
Yeah, I know.
This is a complex issue.
And I don't know when you want to get into that.
But my opinion has long been, A, this is not a problem anyone should ever give a fuck about, like at all.
B, I do actually think there should be rules about this.
And I think a lot of people are like, gosh, there should be rules about this.
Trans person, yeah.
Hey, guess what?
There are rules about it.
Yes, there are.
Hey, guess what?
There's a whole world of people outside of your limited little experience that do this stuff all day.
You come when you see an angry thing on Fox News about it, then you come and you're like, "Oh man, nobody knows about this.
Nobody knows anything but me.
I'm the first person to discover sports and I'm going to..." It's like, it's the NC fucking double A.
All told this is a billion dollar industry.
Not women's volleyball in particular, but like the NCAA as an entity.
Billions of dollars.
Billions of dollars.
They have to come up with rules for stuff.
They've thought about this.
Do I know their rules?
I don't.
No.
Do I know that they're guaranteed to be perfect rules?
No.
Should I have a fucking opinion on it?
Really?
As a person who hasn't studied this?
I'm not a doctor.
I don't understand it.
No!
If you were a person who's an expert in this field, I think it's sensible.
You know, we do divide men-women sports, and there are reasons for that that are solid.
And it's a complex issue, like anything with human beings.
There's going to be, like, a spectrum of different things, and people talk about—you talked about the height advantage.
Number two in kills per set in The Nation, Candy Martin from Florida, 6'6".
Wow.
That's awesome.
She's really tall.
The idea that you single out someone who seems to be pretty good, but in the 70s in the nation, that doesn't seem like overwhelmingly...
Not even the tallest on the team.
Oh, God, yeah.
On San Jose State, she's not even the tallest on the team.
Yeah, I mean, this is someone in the 70s.
That's not overwhelming.
That's not someone who's murdering people.
This just, it doesn't seem like an issue.
And for me, when he first told me about this...
Mm-hmm.
It's like, for me, okay, who's the entity whose entire job it is to regulate sports, specifically these sports, the NCAA? Have they thought about it?
Yes.
Do they have rules?
Yes.
Is this person acting within the rules?
Well, you'll get to it.
But that seems to be the beginning and the end of the conversation for me.
And yet all these people are dipping their nose into it.
They're making a huge issue.
It's heartbreaking.
How many people's careers?
I would be fucking pissed, again, if I was on any team that forfeited to her That's just so pathetic.
These people aren't going to the pro volleyball league that we all know and love and we pay millions of dollars to.
For most of these athletes, this is it.
And many of them are seniors.
In fact, this person is a senior.
As is Brooke, yeah.
This is how she's choosing to spend her senior year.
Yeah, and it's like, you're going to ruin it with this?
It's just pathetic.
It's sad.
Yeah, I'll tell you, some people who have been very proud of the stance of some of their schools, the governors of some of those states, they've gone on to X to say, you know, really proud of the women.
Yeah, really proud of the women at Boise for standing up against, you know, inequality in sports at the college level.
So you have, you know, governors from Utah, from Nevada.
You would have thought...
That this trans student is the number one in the nation.
And furthermore, you would have thought, well, San Jose State also must be poised to win it all.
They're not ranked!
Did you say that?
They're not ranked.
In every NCAA sport, they tend to rank the top 25. If you don't have a number by your name, guess what?
You're not ranked.
And they're not ranked.
They're not in the top 25 of the thing.
I mean, that...
This isn't an issue.
What is the worry here, you know?
Yeah, yeah.
And I mean, you know, one of the things that as this started coming out, you know, I talked about all the forfeits and the media attention.
It kind of kept growing and growing and growing.
And come November, the associate coach for the women's volleyball team at San Jose State ended up joining Brooke's cause.
And they filed a new lawsuit.
That's Yeah, against the Mountain West Conference regarding the tournament.
And so this was an emergency motion for injunctive relief because the conference tournament was coming up very quickly, two weeks before the conference.
They knew the conference was coming up.
They waited till two weeks to file this.
And a number of students that would be in the tournament, so a lot of the students that participated in some of the boycotts that were supportive of not playing.
I think actually it was Nevada, you know, in Reno, the school did not make the decision to forfeit, but the athletes pulled themselves out kind of thing.
Like the school was like, we are planning on playing the game.
And then the student athletes were like, no, we're not, you know, majority of the team.
Very, very proud of them, too.
Truly the Rosa Parkses of our generation.
So this lawsuit, what they wanted, what they demanded from the judge was they wanted an order requiring the Mountain West Conference to rescind the transgender participation policy, which we'll talk about in a second.
They wanted them to flip the wins and losses for the forfeits for each of the times that San Jose State went up against the team that didn't want to play.
They wanted to switch who won, who lost, recalculate the team's standings and enjoin San Jose State from continuing to roster its transgender player and prohibit her from playing in the tournament in two weeks.
Brooke Slusser, interestingly enough, only asked for that last item, that her teammate be removed from the roster and not get to play in the tournament.
But she didn't want to flip the wins and losses for the forfeits.
She didn't want to recalculate the team's standings, and she didn't care.
Interestingly, she did not care about the transgender participation policy.
Boy, weird about that level of fairness.
Yeah.
Like, I'm so obsessed with fairness that we need, but also we still get the wins.
I still should get the wins.
Yeah.
Yeah, well, and like in different interviews and stuff, she specifically has said, you know, like, I know this isn't going to make a difference this year, but this is about making an impact, you know, for the women who come after me and, you know, making that thing better.
But she wasn't signing on to rescind the TPP, the Transgender Participation Policy.
So, like, it's just, it does not make sense.
Maybe she just wants it changed or something?
Yeah, there must be some reason.
So when the judge considered this, so this had to move at like lightning speed, right?
Because the conference, the tournament is coming up.
And the judge issued an order just a few days ago, right before the tournament was set to start.
And I'm just going to read you a quick quote from here.
But here, when considering the movement's challenge to the TPP, this policy was approved and ratified by the MWC's member institutions, including Plaintiff Intervener USU, Utah State University, in August 2022. Because
that's how sports fucking works.
Yeah.
And throughout the order, the judge cites 10th Circuit and SCOTUS precedent.
So pin in that for how this could unfold.
You know, we're talking about things that seem safe as of right now.
Furthermore, I think all the teams that are against integration should forfeit, too.
Yeah, yeah, I know.
If you can't stand having a black woman on the team.
I know.
So the group of, you know, plaintiffs appealed this and they lost in the appeal that happened kind of simultaneously because, again, this was moving at a very, very quick pace.
I wanted to talk just very briefly about Mountain West, you know, what the judge cites there regarding Mountain West transgender participation policy.
This is something that, as he stated, was approved and ratified by all of the schools that are part of the Mountain West Conference in August 2022. Every single one read this, approved it, ratified it.
It became part of the conference documentation.
And Mountain West, as this started kind of getting a little more traction in the media after Brooke joined that initial lawsuit in September, they ended up uploading the policy and appending it to their 2024-25 handbook.
And so, again, like I'm looking at an excerpt from the TPP here, and it specifically says, you know, if a transgender athlete has been deemed eligible by the NCAA and has been included on an MW member institutions team, they are permitted to participate in all conference competitions.
And so when you're wondering, okay, well, then what's the NCAA requirements?
It doesn't matter.
I mean, I have it.
Maybe we'll go over that in the next part or something.
As far as I'm concerned, if you're going to...
Look, I guess I understand in their minds what they're doing.
Like in their minds, this is a great injustice because the policy is wrong and so they're trying to bring attention to it.
I still think you could just do that.
Especially, again, it would be one thing if this person was like they have to bring so many extra volleyballs because when she spikes them, if they're on fire, they actually slide on fire.
Several audience members are killed.
And the team is in first.
No one's ever scored a point on them.
It's actually really boring to even go to the game.
Then, okay, then we're talking.
All right, that seems insane.
That would be extreme.
I just looked up, there's another, you know, they only bother ranking the top 25. But there's another metric they use, which is just based on, like, strength of schedule and record.
Just kind of more, not a ton of, it's just math, basically, but it's not...
They don't put a ton of thought into it.
They put a lot of thought into the 25 because it matters usually.
But anyway, just that metric, and they can do that for all of them because they all have a record and they all have whatever.
San Jose State, do you want to guess their ranking?
I would say...
I'll give you a hint.
Of the total, seems to be 346 teams.
Okay, I'm going to say 172. 130. Okay.
So you picked middle of the pack.
But still, 130th?
We're doing this over the 130th ranked team?
130th?
What?
Yeah.
Come on, man.
What is this?
What a waste of time and energy.
What a heartbreaking thing.
It's such a heartbreaking thing.
There's a lot of this that's really, really sad.
This poor person to be put through this.
I know.
And it's just for what?
The 130th ranked team?
Again, if you want to challenge the policy, challenge the fucking policy and argue the merit of it or something.
But doing this dramatic doxing thing is obviously just bullshit political theater to get people hurt.
Yep.
You know, I alluded to this kind of at the beginning of this episode.
So let me go ahead and send you this link.
But surprise, surprise, Brooke Slessor goes on Megyn Kelly to do a pretty extended interview.
And Megyn Kelly asks, you know, what does your family say about this?
You know, what you've been through and the situation you've been put in.
You've been through being on a team?
Yeah.
Well, with regard to rooming with this person, et cetera, et cetera.
So we'll go ahead and listen to this conversation.
No one in college has ever had to stay with it, like even on their lines.
Yeah, there is real risk.
There's genuine danger to you.
What did your parents say?
What did your family say when they realized the school had placed you in this position?
My parents were enraged.
I mean, you can only imagine.
It's like you're sending your child off, putting them in the hands and trust of these coaches to basically take care of you and be able to relay life decisions and everything through them.
And then come to find out that they said all these things like, bring Brooke here, we'll care for her, we'll love for her.
And lie about a man being on the team.
And allowing me to move in with a man on the team.
After knowing everything that I've been through personally with my past in volleyball.
Everything I've been through personally with my past.
They did not have been angrier about the whole situation.
I mean, rightfully so.
I feel for them entirely and would have shared the outrage.
Shut the fuck up, Megyn Kelly.
Yeah, so even though they knew what I went through in volleyball, you know, kind of thing.
And I was like, oh, that's really interesting.
I wonder, because there are a lot of problems in sports and athletics.
It's entirely possible she has genuine trauma of some kind.
Yeah, that would suck, but it has nothing to do with this.
Right, and it has nothing to do with this individual either, who she constantly misgenders throughout Megyn Kelly's show, obviously, and continues to name throughout the show, obviously.
And it's one of those things where, you know, I just, I cannot believe that the individual that has been going through all of this still shows up on the court and plays as if nothing is happening.
Yeah.
She still, like, respects Brooke as a captain from everything I see.
Well, that's dumb.
Shouldn't do that.
Yeah.
It's just, I mean, the coach, I mean, I don't know that I would necessarily, but she's just, like, just focused on volleyball.
And the coach had said in an interview, this is just, you know, one of the matches shortly after the lawsuit came out.
And there were a lot of people complaining.
This is where I don't understand sometimes with people in our program, and I've told our team this.
They were upset with the players' energy on the court that night.
I give her credit because she reacted in a much better way than I would have.
The amended lawsuit was September 23rd.
They had a game on September 24th.
And she went out and she played as if nothing had happened at all.
So, I don't know.
She is a strong, incredible person and does not deserve this.
Yeah, I also, look, the idea, so she said move in.
Did they move in together?
They did live together.
So when Brooke transferred.
I thought you said rooming together, like for road trips or something.
So when Brooke transferred, the way that I understand it was the athletic staff suggested, you know, that she room with some of the girls on the team that had come in as well.
So then that way she could kind of get to know them and stuff before the season started.
And so she was a roommate with this individual as well as two other girls.
I believe I think it was four of them that lived together.
So let me get this straight.
Room together, live together.
How long have they been doing this?
It was just this season or something?
No, this is their second season together.
This is their second season?
Yeah.
Second season together.
Room together, live together, played together.
Literally didn't even notice, you know, like no issue, nothing.
And then to do this tearjerker, I can't believe the danger they put me in from the nothing that happened that I'd never noticed and I never would have noticed and didn't matter in a million years.
It's just disgusting, fake victimhood bullshit.
It is so cruel.
Like, it's really sad.
Yeah, yeah, it really, really is.
I don't know if this will get me in trouble, but hey, Brooke, your voice is a little deep.
Just wait till the transvestigators come after you because that happens.
I don't wish it on anyone, but that's the thing about these things.
That spirals out and often the leopards eating faces people who are like, well, I want you to go after everyone.
They don't realize what they've set off is a disgusting, misogynist, horrible movement of hate that goes after any women that doesn't fit their exact ideal.
Of what a woman looks like, sounds like, acts like.
Yeah.
And that captures all kinds.
Who knows the percentage of people on that hate website you said that are just cis?
Yeah.
Probably a lot.
And that's a great point.
And something that I stumbled on, you know, when I was talking about the founders of the Independent Council on Women's Sports, I mentioned Marshy Smith.
And she posted this thing on Facebook during the Olympics about Imam Khalif and You know, she was, like, crying.
And she was, like, watching a man punch a woman in the face while everyone was cheering at the Olympics was so hurtful and, like, literally crying on camera during this.
And I was like, but that's not true.
I mean, that's a perfect example of that.
Iman Khalif did not look like Marshy Smith's idea of what a woman was.
And so she decided that Iman Khalif was a man.
Well, and it was that weird, like, wasn't the Russian, like, something...
There's a lot of...
Algerian?
No, the only reason this was on anyone's radar is they said at some point she had failed some testing, but it was...
Not the actual Olympic Committee.
Remember?
It was just like, they thought it might have been, again, the fucking, because we're always going to trust the Russians' word on it.
They're being sore losers or whatever.
And there's no evidence, and again, it's Algeria, like there's going to be some out trans person just competing.
I mean, it's just nuts.
It's just ridiculous.
Yeah, it is.
It really is.
And it's all because of how she looks.
Like, that's the way, again, this doesn't end with exactly, it never ends for the, I mean, honestly, for the Latino people who voted for Trump too, it doesn't end with just the people you want them to ruin, the lives you want to ruin.
Like, it always goes further.
And to think that you're safe as a woman from this movement of purity, you know, of like what their idea of female purity, do you think you're going to be safe?
Or some people you care about are going to be safe, should illustrate that this is a bad idea to do.
I mean, it's just not, it's really harmful in every way.
And by the way, I'm not, it's already harmful enough because it's harming trans people.
But additionally, it's also a movement of enforcing this exact patriarchal idea of what women should look like at all times.
And it hurts all women as well.
Yeah.
So in contrast with how she acted on the Megyn Kelly show, I'm going to send you an interview that she did with KTVU out of San Francisco.
And this is really interesting.
We're going to play this for a little bit, but just notice the difference in how she is interacting in this environment.
When asked about how and why she felt unsafe, Schlesser said...
The height that the person can jump is so much higher, and honestly higher for a man.
It's insane.
And then the strength behind the ball when they're swinging is also just so much more powerful.
But her transgender teammate's stats don't appear to give the Spartans a dramatic upper hand.
The San Jose State women's volleyball team is ranked 119th nationally.
But nonetheless, Lester claims safety is one of her top concerns.
There's many times for multiple people all the time that we're having to try and dodge the balls that are coming straight at our face.
Oh my god.
I've been hit multiple times by the balls, and I've had bruising on my legs just from trying to dodge it, and it catches my thigh, and I've had a bruise on my thigh for weeks.
Bumps, bruises, and minor injuries are common in Division I volleyball, as is practicing against men.
But when pressed, Slusser said she's never been injured to the point of coming off the court.
In total, there are approximately 500,000 female athletes in the NCAA. Trans female athletes account for less than 50. This is an important conversation for us to have.
Sid Ziegler, a co-founder of Outsports.com, an LGBTQ-focused publication, says it's a discussion that needs to be had.
I've been running out sports for 25 years.
I've written about trans athletes over two decades before anyone was talking about it.
For me, it's important for every athlete to have a path to inclusion.
He added that in this particular case, the issue should not be with the San Jose State volleyball player, rather the governing bodies.
This athlete is not the problem.
If you have an issue with this athlete competing, your issue is with the NCAA and USA Volleyball.
Bring it up with them.
Since becoming the only member of the San Jose State women's volleyball team to speak out, Slester has become the face of the controversy.
This season, six teams have chosen to forfeit matches against the Spartans.
I think the biggest issue is, one, it's not safe, like what we've talked about.
It's just no woman's ever going to have that strength and power that they have.
And two, they're taking opportunities and scholarships and medals away from women that have worked their entire lives for it.
KTVU reached out to San Jose State University.
They said they're unable to comment due to student privacy laws.
Yeah, San Jose State's really held the line on that.
They will not comment.
You know, the head coach has not commented.
The associate coach is commenting.
They actually suspended her.
Coach?
The associate coach.
Yeah, suspended her because of her participation in this and violating, I'm sure...
Plenty of paperwork.
Yeah, yeah.
I think, for me, what really stood out in the way that she presented herself with Megyn Kelly versus KTVU is she never misgenders her teammate in the KTVU interview.
She says, they, all the time.
She's perfectly capable of it, but when she's on Megyn Kelly's show, she says, him, he.
She constantly is doing that.
And then the way that that she approaches expressing her concerns, it's very different in those two interviews, too.
I think that Brooks Lesser knows what she's doing 100 percent.
And I think that she capitalizes on it when she's in the environment that is going to be receptive to it.
And part of the other reason why I believe this is because when they were looking into her mom, her mom is a big, big supporter of her.
And her mom, though, however, has not responded to any interview requests or anything like that.
And so, you know, reporters have done a little bit of digging on their own because she is posting anti-trans content now.
And turns out she's been posting anti-trans content since 2021.
So this is just this is part of who this family is.
And Brooke had a problem with her teammate when she found out that she was transgender.
And that's the only thing.
That's it.
She did not complain about her height.
She did not complain about her power.
She did not complain about opportunities that were, you know, being prevented to other students or whatever at San Jose State.
None of that happened until she found out that her teammate was transgender.
That was it.
All right.
So in that KTVU interview, you heard the reporter kind of fact-checking some things alongside Brooke's comments.
Not in real time, though, obviously.
Yeah, yeah.
Right, right.
That's what I mean.
Real time for me.
And one of the things that she mentioned was that there are about 500,000 NCAA student-athletes, female student-athletes.
And of those, less than 50 are transgender.
Mm-hmm.
And one of the things for the NCAA, in order to compete in the sport and, you know, division that you identify with with regard to your gender is specific.
The NCAA used to have like a broader policy and then they ended up kind of trimming it back and they decided to go sports specific and leaning on, you know, the governing body of that sport to make the decision.
And I think that's totally reasonable, right?
So when we're looking at the NCAA's expectations for women's volleyball, it's going to be based off of USA Volleyball's expectations for eligibility.
So for transgender women 18 and over, they are required to maintain testosterone levels of under 10 nanomoles per liter for a minimum of one year.
Now, what the heck does that mean in comparison to, like, how would you know?
Obviously blood tests, but Mm-hmm.
I was going to say, because a lot of these are distributions, so I'm sure many women, probably some of these fucking athletes, many cis women are above those levels, I would imagine.
Yeah, it's always going to be a range.
It's always going to be a different level, you know, at any point in time.
This is also something that isn't just activated by, you know, what your genitals are, right?
Like these are things that are tied to a lot of different parts of your body.
And for example, women with polycystic ovarian syndrome, they often have heightened testosterone levels because of the way that their body manages androgen within, you know, their various systems.
One of the first signs of that is if you put a volleyball through someone's skull by hitting it so hard, they're like, you might have this syndrome.
Yeah.
So when you're looking at, you know, transgender women having no more than 10 nanomoles per liter for over a year, in comparison to that, cis women are generally 0.7 to 2.8.
Women with PCOS are typically between 2.8 and 5.2.
And then men are between like 10 and 30 cis men.
So again, it's a very wide range, can change over the course of time.
But if you are taking hormone therapy to address that, you know, the I don't even know, like, OK, testosterone, not even just it being an imperfect way to measure how male you are, how female you are.
The other piece of it is how does it express itself in some of those like athletic abilities?
Right.
Because even with men, you could have high testosterone and be really bad at a sport.
Obviously.
Yeah.
You can have low testosterone and be really good or have like a really good work ethic.
And so you're practicing all the time and like you have a specific skill for this.
Like I would be curious to see a study of like.
Olympic athletes, right?
And I'm just thinking back on gymnastics and like the various, you know, sports specific things, like you could look at sports specific.
And I would be curious to see, you know, like women in gymnastics versus men in gymnastics.
And what's the testosterone difference there?
And I don't know.
I don't know what it is.
Because the other piece of it, too, is when you are a incredibly competitive athlete, that actually has an impact on your growth when you're young.
And so you see that a lot with like gymnasts, where the way that they practice and what they put their bodies through and everything like that, it actually ends up influencing the expression of hormones and stuff.
And like you have athletes who end up not having their periods anymore.
That's a lowered estrogen situation.
Like this stuff is very, very complicated, I guess, to your earlier point.
It's not just the policy and the execution of that policy and figuring out a way to make sure that things are inclusive for people, but also just the science of it.
It's not like a clear-cut, you belong in this box, you belong in this box.
And I think it's a testament to how gender is fluid.
And pinning it down, it can be complicated.
Yeah, I think it's another thing where, you know, I don't think, I'm not going to pretend, I don't think we need to pretend that there would never be any issue.
Like, when you draw lines for anything with humans, there's always going to be edge cases of stuff where you might worry about fairness.
But, like, what I think is that, A, this is not a problem.
Obviously, it's demonstrably not a problem.
Like, the people dominating the league seem to be cis, like, all the way down.
And...
B, it's like you could take a look at the actual numbers, and as you say, 50 out of...
Less than 50. 500,000 female student-athletes.
Could that be right?
That's a lot.
So when I looked it up, I mean, that's what KTVU said, that it was female athletes.
I did not see that it was assigned to females specifically, so that might be a mistake that they made.
Oh, I think that was total.
So, yeah, I am seeing a random one that says 229,000 female athletes in the NCAA. About half, yeah.
Yeah.
But yeah, I mean, this is negligible numbers.
And it's just something that's better left to the people in charge of this.
It sounds like their job is to figure this out.
Let them figure it out.
You know, I think that there's going to be, depending on how oral arguments go for U.S. v. Scrimetti coming up, you know, we'll probably have more information soon.
Because if it's something where the Supreme Court rules that a state has the ability to deny access to medical care for some of its constituents, then it might be a situation where, you know, in some of these states over the course of a generation, you won't in some of these states over the course of a generation, you won't have any athletes that qualify if they're transgender because they can't necessarily like meet the hormone requirements unless
So it'll be interesting to see, I guess, what kind of argument they're making there.
Again, you know, with ICONS, the Independent Council on Women's Sports, with their amicus, they really, really focused in on, you know, again, women's equality with sports.
Like that's that's their bread and butter.
But again, they're also joined with and these entities also join them in their fight, their legal fights, do no harm.
And we talked about that at length with January Little John and her story through John Ronson's podcast, right?
So we've talked about it before.
It's this interconnected web.
And what's unfortunate is that we are looking at now an administration that not only says it's okay to have these positions, but actively fans the flames of them.
Like I said, Donald Trump...
sharing out that video of this player spiking the ball and saying that it hit, you know, this girl's head when it didn't and continuing people to feel afraid of something that's not something to be afraid of or that everybody should be worried about in all sports because these are also people who watch football and have no issue watching football and the lasting brain damage that happens to those players with repeated concussions.
Like, that is something that was striking to me, watching this, that like, okay, do we care about athlete safety or not?
That's the question.
No, we care about women because it's a patriarchal thing of setting them on a pedestal and you have to rescue them.
if it were just cis women versus cis women, then I don't think they would react at all.
It's just because it's just because of this belief that it's perceived to be men doing something to them.
Yeah, it's right.
It's yeah, it's just really sad.
I think ultimately when you boil it down, it just comes down to people who don't think being trans is real.
That really is all it is.
If you think being trans is real, you think gender dysphoria and all of that, if you think that's a real thing, then it's like, well, some number of those people are going to like sports and it's good that we have rules that make that as fair as possible.
And that's that.
But if you think it's not real and you don't respect their dignity, you're like, all right, well, I'll try to tolerate it maybe or not.
But if it ever seems like it's affecting anything I care about, then I'm going to make a whole fucking deal about it.
Because they don't think it's real.
They don't respect it.
And it's really sad.
I can't...
Just the amount of...
Sadness in this, you know, just like that person's, how do you go?
I don't understand how you look someone in the eye after this.
Like, how does this awful person who's this captain continue?
They play on the team.
Like, how do they?
Yeah, I mean, they're two of the best players on their team.
It's just, it's mind-blowing to me.
It's really sad.
It's not as though when you file a legal thingy, you type it up that day, and it's up.
It's like, no, if that comes out, that takes weeks, if not perhaps months of preparation.
I know that was a faster one, maybe, but like...
No, no, not the initial complaint.
The Mountain West one, yeah, for sure.
But, yeah, but her joining the NCAA. And she didn't tell the athletic staff.
Brooks Lesser didn't tell the athletic staff until about an hour before it went up.
Yeah.
Wow.
Blindsided the athletic staff.
She would have known for a long time.
Yep.
So a premeditated attack that is obviously going to endanger the physical safety of your classmate, your teammate.
Yeah.
So much so that San Jose State, they've said that they've had to hire additional security on behalf of that student, as well as Brooke.
And so this is a publicly funded college that is now spending who knows how much money on additional security for this situation that Brooke created herself.
I also wanted to mention, too, I totally glossed over this.
This has also turned into, like, going down a conspiracy route.
So when I talked about the associate coach, her name is, I think, Melissa Beatty-Smooth.
And she came over with the current coach right now.
They started coaching in 2023.
So this is their second season with them.
And they had coached at schools previously and do really well together.
But this assistant coach, associate coach, joined Brooke's efforts and then said that the transgender teammate met up with a Colorado State player the night before a game.
And that they colluded to leave parts of the court open to make Brooke's lesser vulnerable to kills from the Colorado State player.
And the plan was to physically retaliate for Slusser being involved in the NCAA lawsuit.
What?
Yeah.
So this associate coach is going out and saying, this happened.
I know this happened.
And they, you know, obviously look into anything, any sort of allegations like that.
There's zero evidence for it.
Yeah, you can't fuck around with the NCAA. Like, you can't throw...
You know, that's like classic with it, like the gambling stuff.
That's not something they're like cool with.
Yeah.
And so, you know, the coach has had to come out and deny the allegations.
He said there are people on this team that don't want certain people to be able to play and to continue to stay on this team.
And the university and I have made the decision that everyone certified to play volleyball on San Jose State will remain a part of this program until the end of the year.
End of story.
I would hope it's not their decision, but that's just me.
I don't think it necessarily is, right?
Because they would have to be following Mountain West Conference and NCAA. Title IX and whatever else.
I mean, I guess it depends on how the lawsuits all work out.
But it didn't stop there with this, like, oh, they had a plan to make sure that Brooke could get hurt.
It went beyond that.
So then, like, you know, you have your right-wing media ecosphere.
Kind of perpetuating that.
And then at a Colorado State volleyball game shortly thereafter, that player that supposedly met with the transgender player at San Jose State was kneeling during the national anthem along with two other women on the team.
And people were like, oh my gosh, is this like because of the student at San Jose State?
You know, are they kneeling because of Yeah, we just hate the police.
Yeah.
They're all women of color.
They've been doing it because, yeah, because like that is something that matters to them with regard to Black Lives Matter, obviously, and stuff.
And so it's just people taking these like little things and exploding them.
It consumes their entire lives.
It really, really does.
And so to the point where like that associate coach has been suspended from her job because she has let this consume her in this way where, you know, Brooke Slusser is like, this is what she's going to be known for.
And that was probably OK with her because you see people like Riley Gaines who they're doing fine.
They're doing just fine being the, you know, the disruptor of.
Basis transphobia.
Exactly.
And, you know, getting her media appearances in on Fox News with Megyn Kelly, with OutKick, you know, the Daily Wire-affiliated right-wing sports site, all those things.
She's getting that time in, and she's going to have a career after this, you know, probably not in volleyball, but in transphobia.
Yeah.
Yep.
There is a professional transphobia league.
Yeah.
There's not.
I mean, there is pro volleyball of some kind, but...
You know, I do want to look up because the Mountain West Tournament Championship game is probably done.
Oh, Colorado State won.
Beat San Jose State.
Boy, you can't even get a championship out of all this, huh?
I know.
That's a bummer.
So it just so happens that we're recording this right as that Mountain West tournament was happening.
Yep.
And San Jose State, I guess, you know, due to a lot of forfeits, although we don't know what would have happened otherwise, but was in the finals.
Yep.
And they lost.
So weird.
It's amazing.
I mean, I wonder how many limbs and heads the other team lost, but they were still able to power through.
That's impressive.
Yeah, yeah.
And that might be the end of the story.
The way it works is you still could get into the...
Well, okay, I'm assuming there's a NCAA tournament at the same format as basketball, I think.
I think that's usually...
There's some sort of playoffs, you know, whatever, bracket type thing.
They could conceivably still get in if they were...
It's not to do with their ranking, though, and they're not ranked well.
Yeah, they're not ranked.
I mean, that could have changed because of this tournament.
Like, sometimes you can...
You know, it's been a while.
I actually don't pay attention to college sports that much anymore.
But I do remember you can make it somehow, even if you don't win your tournament.
Yeah.
But, yeah, that's...
Probably not likely, given how low they were before.
And so this could be literally the end of it.
Could be all done.
Entirely done.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, I'm just looking at projections for fun and that they're not projected to be in it.
And it's doubtful.
They would be because they're not ranked.
And yeah, that's how it works.
So that's the end of it.
It's all...
It's the end of their season, yeah.
And it's sad.
But like, yeah, that's the whole...
All this hubbub.
All the fuss he made.
And it's like...
They didn't win.
They're not probably going on to the tournament.
So what do you have?
What did you do?
To that person's point, even if you had a problem with this, and fine, if you think you have a problem with the criteria, have a problem with the criteria, don't make it about this athlete.
What did this person do wrong?
They've followed your rules.
They followed the NCAA's rules.
There's nothing at all even alleged, it seems to me, of any misconduct or anything.
Despite the danger that this asshole thought she was in, is there a whiff of anything improper that happened?
Any problems?
Any anything?
No.
Yeah.
Nothing.
Why make it about this girl?
It's so hostile.
It's so sad.
It's so mean.
Especially because this was someone that that student had named as someone that she felt safe around.
She had expressed to the coach and stuff who she would feel safe with and comfortable with rooming on overnights and travel.
And She only named a handful of people and Brooke was one of them and then Brooke turns around and ends up being an incredibly unsafe person for her.
It's just really sad.
I think they considered each other friends before this.
Yeah, I don't know.
Just really depressing.
I do want to give a shout out to the ESPN coverage specifically on this.
They have a great article that does a great job outlining all of this stuff, all this nonsense.
Katie Barnes, great coverage there.
New York Times has been picking this up now, too.
And all of this could have just been handled in a much smaller, more respectful way and not become a huge spectacle.
So...
Yeah, it's needless.
It's needlessly hateful.
Again, you want to challenge the policy, challenge the policy based on, I don't know, science based on something.
Yeah.
You know, don't out this person.
It's horrible.
It's just mean, evil behavior.
It sucks.
Mm-hmm.
Ultimately, this is not something new.
This specific situation with San Jose State is new, but Riley Gaines is not a new name.
And I actually have a couple of things I wanted to share from a hearing last year, around this time, actually, around December 2023, December 5th, 2023. And it was titled, The Importance of Protecting Female Athletics and Title IX. And the witnesses that they included were, of course, Riley Gaines and then Sarah Perry, who is a senior legal fellow with the Heritage Foundation.
So I want to kind of focus in on this particular line of questioning regarding biological differences that Representative Paul Gosar from Arizona brings up.
So if you want to hit play, I think the panelist handles it well.
In my sidebar, I'm seeing some really tempting options instead, like comedians destroying woke hecklers.
Fuck your pronouns.
I mean, I guess I can ignore it.
It's an occupational hazard of our job.
Yeah, it's ruined.
My algorithm is fucked.
Okay.
German.
As an understanding of fairness is one that we almost instinctively learn from birth.
Nothing offends a little child more than a sibling getting a treat and he or she does it.
And America really hates cheaters.
Just ask Lance Armstrong.
Remember Deflategate?
The recovery of the steroid era was not kind to baseball.
That is why beating women in women's sports is so obnoxious to American public.
Not only is allowing men to play in women's sports a flagrant violation of fairness, as well as posing a danger to women in the locker room and the bathrooms, making women feel the opposite of unique, as then anyone can become one, it normalizes and encourages the terrible reality and tragedy of children mutilating themselves in a misguided and hopeless attempt to change genders.
Family Research Council cited the World Professional Association that the transgender held as a source of the following list of awful diseases that cross-sex hormones cause.
Here's a list.
Blood clots, high triglycerides, cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, high red blood cells, a destabilization of some psychological disorders.
It defies common sense that mutilation improves mental health.
For the love of God to everyone who promotes this terrible ideology, desist!
Stop!
Every time you claim a man can play a woman's sports, every time you tell a child that they can be whatever gender you want to be, every time you read a book to a child promoting this propaganda, you are risking the health, happiness, and well-being of our children.
Please stop experimenting with our youth.
Ms. Gross-Graves, I want to ask your question, is the genetic composition of a transgender versus a woman the same?
No.
Well, I'm not a scientist, but...
Well, we're talking about science here, so I hope you...
They're not the same.
So that's why you see all these physiological differences.
If I can answer, though, I mean, if your question is, how do you define woman and woman is an adult female, but there's a lot of variation that goes beyond my level of high biology.
Well, I just want to tell you, you can't, I'm not looking at a definition.
I'm talking about the science.
The science genetically is a man is a man is different genetics than women.
This guy's crazy.
Plain and simple.
Yeah.
That's just what it is.
I would say is that it is I'm not a scientist or doctor but is my understanding that it is more complex than what you are saying in that there is variation among men and among women and sometimes more variation among than there is between again I'm not a scientist and you know I don't think the panelists are scientists either it seems like it may be a different scientific hearing that That's why you have the differences.
That's why you see muscle mass.
That's why you see tidal volume.
That's why you see all these variations.
So, for example, in the WNBA, there's players that are 5'5", and there's players that are 6'9".
There's a wide variation.
Now that you brought that up, let's talk about that.
Everything's going to win all this year.
I think the Liberty will do it?
Did she not?
You know what?
She did.
It's actually going to the problem with these sorts of sex verification and sex texting.
When I think about what all women, but especially black women whose bodies have historically fell outside the sort of typical What's considered the typical norm.
The idea that people would have to prove up their femaleness to play is horrifying, and it's going in the wrong direction.
I don't think anybody wants that.
I disagree, because I want to inspect everyone's channels.
I think you've got to be real with people, about what their aspects are.
Riley, how does men playing in women's sports affect the esprit de corps of a team or the team spirit?
Speaking to, again, my lived experience, first and foremost, it was a major distraction to have a male competing with us at that national championships.
It was all we could talk about as a team.
We were fearful to go into the locker room.
We had to wait and watch if Thomas came out.
Then we would enter to avoid going in at the same time.
Of course, our sport is very physical, but there is a mental aspect to it.
And allowing men into our sports certainly negatively impacted that mental aspect, as well as the physical, of course.
Imagine if someone asked me that about a woman.
Thomas, what was it like doing a sport with a woman?
Well, fuck, I had to wait.
I didn't want to be around it.
And I just had to leave.
You'd be like, what are you, some kind of creep?
What are you, some kind of weirdo?
Like, yeah, what are you talking about?
What's your problem?
What is that?
Sounds like all stuff that you did.
Yeah.
Well, and then the comment about like, it's all we could talk about.
And then and then you think about like Brooks Lesser, like, yeah, obviously it's gonna be all that they talk about because she decided to join a lawsuit while she's on the team with this player.
Like, it's just, yeah, incredible.
All we could talk about.
Yeah.
They're just sitting there in the friendliest quarters, obviously, the House controlled by Republicans and this very weird guy.
Yeah.
And it's just like, you have to come up with what the victim narrative is.
Well, we sucked during it.
Yeah, yeah.
Why was this so bad?
Well, we made it horrible.
And that's why it's not our fault?
It's crazy.
Yeah.
Yeah, you might remember him from the video he posted back in 2021 where it was like an anime thing and he put his face on one of the characters and he put AOC and Joe Biden on the other characters and then it showed him killing AOC. I do see that he's got a lot of Stop the Steal stuff.
This guy's...
Yeah, yeah.
He's a pretty terrible person.
Yeah, there was, you know, a school shooting in, I mean, which one?
But May 2022, Rob Elementary.
And he tweeted that the perpetrator was a transsexual leftist illegal alien.
What are the odds?
Yeah, and then shared a post from 4chan, which included pictures of a trans woman who had nothing to do with the attack.
How would he even get that?
You have to be pretty...
I don't even really know how to get to 4chan or it's 8chan now or whatever.
Yeah, I have no idea.
Yeah, it's not that easy or clear what that even is and how to look at it.
At least it seems, I don't know, anytime I've seen stuff about it, it's like kind of secretive dark web crap or no?
But anyway, the point is, how does he get a hold of that?
Like, is somebody on his staff into that?
Is he into it?
This is crazy.
Probably.
I mean, he delivered, back in 2021, he delivered the keynote speech at the America First Political Action Conference, which Nick Fuentes hosted.
And, you know, just as recent in like 2023 to his website, he posted an email that he had sent, I guess, saying that U.S. Army General Mark Milley should be killed, that he he said that he was a sodomy promoting, you know, general or whatever, and that, quote, in a better society, General Milley would be hung.
How is this person have like not a huge list of ethics investigations like this?
This is really dangerous stuff.
This guy is very scary.
Yeah.
It's amazing how they just get to have these nut jobs in Congress.
Yeah.
In Congress.
Yeah.
And then they point to us what they saw someone say in an internet forum once in 2008 or whatever.
And like that's a these leftists be crazy.
But it's like this fucking weirdo creep wanting to inspect your genitals, make it up a bunch of weird shit.
Yeah.
Is a member of the House.
And he has been since 2011.
He was censured for the AOC and Biden video and removed from his committee assignments.
But once the Republicans got back control, then they just restored him to all of his assignments.
Because that's fine.
Cool.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, that's very interesting.
I mean, it's your alma mater.
My alma mater.
Where you used to play volleyball, too, particularly with floorboards.
I don't know.
Side out.
I don't know.
Yeah, yeah, it is tough.
I mean, like, that's where my sister went to school there, my mom went to school there, my dad, my aunt, like, my other aunt, my uncle, like, everybody went to school there.
You know, I've spent a lot of time on that campus, and you would think that being in the Bay Area, too, would be a little more inclusive, but I don't know.
Brooke is not from the Bay Area, so.
Yeah.
Oh, boy.
Yeah, so weird.
Well, for a different sort of breath of fresh air, I think in this episode we've talked a lot about what was the point of all this.
And Jasmine Crockett has a similar position.
Representative Jasmine Crockett has a similar position for that House hearing of December 2023. And why don't you pull up that second clip I sent you and we'll just listen to her thoughts on the entire sideshow.
The chair now recognizes Ms. Crockett from Texas.
Oh, okay.
All right.
So most everyone up here on the other side of the aisle has endorsed a person that has been found liable for sexual abuse of women to be our president of the United States.
But we are going to talk about how this party is going to protect women.
Protecting women.
What exactly does that mean?
Are we going to talk about sexual abuse?
Because we can get into it, because we do have some real conversations that we can have about it.
Considering the fact that we're currently in the middle of, say, a war, There's been allegations of rape being used in war.
Seems like maybe we could have a few conversations about what it would look like to prevent that, what it would look like to maybe go and get those hostages out, maybe go and send some money to our allies.
It looks like we could do something of value, but let me tell you, this session we have set so many good records.
One of those records was we've had a record number of people that have retired or announced their retirements in the month of November from the House.
And from everything that I hear, it's because this body has become completely unserious.
But we do have serious issues, especially when it comes to women.
So let's talk about what it looks like to protect women in this country.
When lawmakers like this are so far out of touch with what women need, we see states pushing back, at least states that will allow you to push back.
I'm from the state of Texas, and of course they don't want you to ever have an opportunity to raise your voice in the state of Texas.
In fact, Ms. Perry, I know your organization, the Heritage Foundation, loves Texas.
Ooh, they love Texas.
They always sending us some nonsense bills.
They somehow set this country on the wrong trajectory.
They send them to Texas.
They send them to Florida.
Every deplorable state that we can think about, they usually coming out of y'all's think tank.
But nevertheless, when we talk about protecting women, what we've seen is, say, in the state of Ohio, was one of the most recent states, when their lawmakers didn't have the courage to do what they needed to do because, of course, we believe...
Point of order.
Because we believe in gerrymandering in this point of order, please stop my time.
I move to strike her words, deplorable states.
That's not a point of order.
Let the gentlelady proceed.
The committee will suspend.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
The committee will suspend.
People are so stupid.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
Point of order?
Yeah.
You and I wouldn't say that.
Oh, boy.
Yeah, she said it.
I mean, this has become unserious.
It really is.
Yeah.
You know, when we watched, and again, I'm not trying to tout Republicans necessarily, but when we watched the Swamp documentary recently, and where it followed Freedom Caucus members, and at the end, Ken Buck was like, I'm not doing this anymore.
Yeah.
It's interesting watching even some of these, like, Republicans that we don't really have anything in common with.
Like, even some of them kind of getting fed up with it.
I mean, and for him, it was like, it was moneyed interests and things like that.
But it's still like...
Because he's probably like, man, we should be spending more time doing...
Show trials of trans people and whatever, you know.
No, I don't know if he cared about that necessarily.
I mean, I think he just wanted to cut budgets to everything.
And then the other folks in the Republican Party weren't as serious about actually, like, reigning and spending and stuff.
So he just kind of had enough and left.
But I think it's interesting because I feel like, as Representative Crockett said, there is so much we can tackle to protect women and to protect LGBTQ individuals and to protect people of color and all these marginalized communities.
And like if you even just focus on women, like the one group that probably the Republicans, they say they care about, if we just focus on that, there are so many other ways that we can protect them instead of devoting all of our attention, all of our energy on this very niche there are so many other ways that we can protect them instead of devoting all of our Of women's sports in college.
And that's not to say that it isn't something to be talked about, but the fact that they had an entire congressional hearing about this feels a little ridiculous at this point.
So, I don't know, I just found it really interesting, you know, that obviously this is a fight that's been going on even longer than this, but there are some signs that it might be coming to a head pretty soon with those Supreme Court cases we were talking about.
Yeah, it's just depressing how stupid it all is.
It's truly too stupid to even think about.
They just do these bullshit hearings that are nothing, the content of which is stuff they saw on Twitter, and that's what a committee hearing is now.
It's nothing.
It's useless.
It's really sad.
And I think that what we see is that obviously they find their scapegoat and they locked on to trans people and specifically trans women athletes because it resonates.
It resonates with people.
That's the fact of it.
I don't know how much this affected the election.
I don't know.
I'm not sure.
I'm not sure if...
It's hard to know exactly, but I think there's a reason they're pushing on this, and I think because it's appealing to a lot of people.
I think a lot of people are scared by this issue, and I think all we can do is try to keep informing people and try to keep spreading actual knowledge, scientific knowledge, instead of fear, and it's just...
Oh boy, it sure feels shitty to have these people do all this, be unserious, and then win.
That's our country.
Yay!
Oh boy.
Well, great breakdown.
Sad ending to that, really.
Yeah.
Sad story all around.
And needlessly hateful.
That's the story of this era.
And here's hoping, though, that that student athlete gets some peace and respite away from this and can live her life the way that she wants to live it.
Yep.
All right.
Thanks so much for listening, everyone.
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