What the Left Refused to Understand About Women’s Sports
Sia Liilii comes from a big family in Hawaii, the ninth of 11 children. Without her volleyball scholarship at the University of Nevada at Reno, she told me recently, she would never have been able to go to college. So when she got wind this past summer that one of Nevada’s opponents in the Mountain West Conference, San Jose State University, was fielding a transgender player, she rebelled. “It’s not right that this person is taking not only a starting spot but a roster spot, from a female who has, just like us, played volleyball her whole life and dreamt of playing at the collegiate level,” Liilii said.
The story of transgender women competing in female sports is frequently told as one of inclusion—creating opportunities for people to compete as their authentic selves. But for athletes such as Liilii, these rules were a matter of exclusion. Every spot taken by someone with a male athletic advantage is an opportunity closed to a female rival.
Other players in the conference, it turned out, had concerns similar to Liilii’s. In particular, some worried whether a ball spiked over the net by a stronger and more powerful player could injure them. Those concerns would ultimately lead Nevada and other teams to forfeit games to San Jose State, in the largest-scale protest yet by female athletes against the presence of a trans competitor.
