Identities Don't Play Sports, Bodies Do

Men in Women Sports Makes the News and We Are Seen

The title of this piece is a quote from our lesbian team leader in response to a mom at one of our protests attempting to explain to us that an athlete on their basketball team had a female gender identity and this was what made him a bonafide female eligible to play on the girls’ team. Julie’s response so succinctly summed up the whole quandary of male players infiltrating women’s sports that I think of it every time I go to such a protest.

Our all-female organization of sex realists has been protesting boys on girls' teams for at least a year and a half. The first such record of our dissent in May of 2023 was coached by feminist lawyer, Kara Dansky, who came to Northern California for the occasion. I had read and recapped her book in 2021 long before I joined Women Are Real so my attention was drawn to the importance of these protests and soon after I became a regular on these excursions. The most memorable occurred close to a year ago when we were so spectacularly yelled at on a cold November night in San Francisco, after which I caught a cold so drippy I was out of commission for our monthly social hour the next week. 

Nevertheless, I still counted it as my favorite event in our group’s history. The act of publicly calling out that the Emperor has no clothes just filled me with satisfaction and excitement from confronting the opposition directly. Protected by free speech laws it was a game with rules that I was dedicated to testing and upholding as an immigrant whose home country had no such civil right. As a writer and cultural observer this was the value I held most dear in my American life.

All over the Bay Area we chased athletic events on the high school level, careful not to out the athletes, trans or otherwise. That these male players were appearing in female sports was not considered news by any news media in our area.

We were also big fans of Riley Gaines. I was horrified to hear that, directly after she had spoken at San Francisco State by invitation of a student organization, an unruly group of pro-trans students threatened her with violence, forcing her to be barricaded in an empty classroom for three hours. Was this how students were being allowed to behave now in our free-speech America? I went to see her speak twice just to make up for this insult. At her last talk, in Berkeley, I heard her counsel a girl athlete asking what she should do if there were a male player she had to compete against. Riley told her to do what she wished she had done which was to boycott any athletic event where a boy was playing. This began to happen here and there around the country.

Then, suddenly, a boycott came together against a college team in our own Bay Area. It was, in fact at my alma mater San Jose State, that a women’s volleyball team had a male player. Not only that the female team captain, Brooke Slusser, had joined the ICONS lawsuit. That got the word out that the team had a male player and teams from other states began to cancel their games with the Spartans. But perhaps most important was that it got the attention of the press. Shortly after we started to plan a banner action in support of Brooke at a home game, the San Jose Mercury covered the story. We were really excited. It felt like the ball was finally rolling. When I reported the story, to my network, the most challenging piece of my report was how to highlight the factors that made it newsworthy as efficiently as I could. My report:

Fifteen sex-realists attended a volleyball game at San Jose State University on Saturday. When the former brand-president of Levi’s sends you hats for the occasion, from her new clothing company inspired by your movement, you know you are at a ground zero turning point event. News media have shown up.

Two things made this game newsworthy to the press. 1) the captain of the team has joined a lawsuit brought by the Independent Council on Women’s Sports to sue the National Collegiate Athletics Association for allowing male-bodied persons to play on women’s teams. 2) Four teams scheduled to play the Spartans (the San Jose State team) have since forfeited their games with no stated reason, but it was speculated that it was because of increased injuries to female players when playing against a male player.

Once it became clear that the adults in the room, i.e. coaches, schools and sports authorities, were not going to stand up to protect female athletes against the prioritizing of “gender identity” over biological sex, the athletes themselves have stepped up thanks to the example of Riley Gaines, the swimmer who competed against the male-bodied swimmer Lia Thomas at Penn State two years ago and inspired the founding of ICONS and the lawsuit. To support the bravery of the team captain, Brooke Slusser, who came out against her own teammate being able to play on a women’s team, our team leader made a sign specifically for her.

Having removed grommets from our banners to get through the metal detector and hidden them along with the hats, for a bag inspection, we successfully entered and remained incognito until the first timeout when we put on our hats and danced to the music to celebrate having remained undetected. At the end of the timeout, we unfurled our banners.

We fully expected to be escorted out by security the moment our banners were displayed as had happened before when we appeared at track and field events at the high school level. But here at the university level, no authority figures made a move against such a free speech gesture. So we were able to stand with our three banners on three sides of the stadium for nearly the entire game. These positions having been chosen with the help of two members going to games earlier in the week to scope out the situation. A woman came to stand in front of our banner attempting to cover it, but we were otherwise ignored.

I noticed that the press photographer behind my team was from the San Francisco Chronicle which has, in the past, framed our message as anti-trans rather than pro-women and called us fraudulent feminists (because feminists are supposed to be pro-trans and pro-sex work is work, not about protecting actual women). She photographed us and interviewed Julie, our team leader, who pointed out the male player to her.

Towards the end of the game, two SJSU female students came to our team and mangled our banner as they gripped it in the middle, refusing to let go. They said what we were doing was morally wrong and they would let go if we left. The girls may have chosen our banner because it said who we were “WomenAreReal.org”

Two policemen present came over to break up the fracas. Julie told the girls we were leaving anyway and we quickly rolled up our banners. The officers were very friendly and walked with us. One commented that this made it look like they were throwing us out, but that wasn’t their intention at all. They seemed glad that we were there.

Some of us were disappointed that there was not more drama for us to report as when the two parents came out to yell at us at one high school game last year.

When the last of our group came out, they said they had met the girls who had mangled our banners and who had since realized they had been captured by our videographer. They were crying and begging us not to post their images. They were of age so we are not obliged to spare them.

Once outside we learned that we were seen on the live streaming of the game by the Rocky Mountain athletic conference, with our website banner. The scene has changed. People now know that there are male-bodied players in women’s sports on a local level. They know that older women have cared enough to launch organizations to fight back against the prioritization of “gender identity” over biological sex and here we were making visible this “new” side of the story.

We were already organized and on a first-name basis with the founders of these organizations. Our Twitter account has 21K followers. We have made the hard climb to visibility. All we have to do is maintain that visibility. Chance favors the prepared as they say.

Reactions to this post from one colleague, who was steadfast in monitoring all my reports of sports protests, was largely favorable because it did not include “harassing” minors. I hadn’t realized that was a difference that mattered since she had so vociferously attacked me for refusing to mind my own business in my post about the XY Olympic boxers. She also said that she was in favor of upholding Title IX which she was clearly unaware had been changed to protect men and boys identifying into our sex class over women and girls. I realized that this was an important detail missing from people’s understanding of the issue and asked my retired judge friend, who is now working with WoLF, for references. She sent me a copy of a federal document that I could highlight and screenshot. She also sent me a WoLF article describing the changes. I used both in due time to drive the post into view.

On Monday our Twitter captain posted the video she made of our banner action and I made it a separate post for my network so I could add the additional information about Title IX which I expected would give people pause, though I knew that none of my peeps would sanction any such criticism of the Biden administration during this tense month preceding the presidential election.

The girls’ insistence that the man playing is a woman is a consequence of Biden’s executive order and later enshrinement in new Title IX rules that persons claiming such “gender identity” are now a protected class creating the legal fiction that men can be women per their own assessment of their “gender identity” with no other criteria or oversight, medical or otherwise. What is known as Self I.D.

The player in question, Blaire Flemming, transferred to San Jose State from South Carolina when that state implemented a new law to forbid men playing in women’s sports.

At least some 89 of them watched the video.

The San Francisco Chronicle did indeed slam us with lies about how we refused to give names or comment. None of us were even approached by this writer to give us a chance to comment let alone refuse to. Only the photographer did her due diligence recording our banners and our actions; her photos were not used though likely the reporter used them to fulfill her projections that we were right wing, maga-hat wearing, anti-trans protestors. She misquoted the hats, two of our members were wearing, that said “Make Women Female Again” and had them as “Make Women Real Again”. This was a serious mischaracterization of our message as some sort of stereotype of women. She said nothing about the ten XX-XY hats the rest of us were wearing.

The flyers we were handing out, about the lawsuit she also misconstrued, in the usual trans language, describing ICONS as an anti-trans advocacy group bent on banning “transgender women” from women’s sports. We are in the process of pushing back in a way that will make activist reporters think twice about using us to fill their activist agenda. The Chronicle has refused to interview us in the past, but likely will accept a letter to the editor as others have pushed back in this way.

Meanwhile, a fifth volleyball team had refused to play the Spartans and this was news enough to make Fox News complete with TV anchors. They interviewed Brooke Slusser and included a clip showing Julie and me holding up Julie’s banner tribute to Brooke. We had made TV news! We were already ecstatic to hear we had been seen on TV during live streaming of the game. I was exhilarated and amused by this dubious honor of appearing on Fox News. We were in good company. Jennifer Sey, the founder of XX-YY athletics who sent us the hats, had a nice interview on Fox News about her Dear Nike ad.

We also enjoyed Brooke’s interview with Megyn Kelly to hear story in her own words.

She is carrying this whole controversy right now. By coincidence our banner group was sitting right behind Brooke’s mom and dad. Julie introduced herself and gave her our info. Brooke’s mom turned around and thanked us all when she saw our banners. I can imagine the pressure of having to lead the team while coming out to do legal battle that involved the very group representing a fellow team member. (Emphasis on the fellow part.)