Symbol of Injustice and the culture wars: Volleyball trans athlete and her teammates are caught in the middle

Blaire Fleming, a senior, was a starter for the San Jose State University Spartans. For most of her college career, she had been a good but unremarkable, and unremarked-upon, player.

Then, suddenly, she was much more than that. A few months before Fleming’s senior season, Reduxx, a “pro-woman, pro-child-safeguarding” online magazine, published an article claiming that Fleming was “a feminine male” — in other words, that she was a transgender woman.

[A]fter Reduxx outed her, what was once unspoken became loudly debated — and Fleming, in her fourth and final season, went from being a mostly unknown college volleyball player to an unwilling combatant in the culture war.

The controversy became intensely personal when Brooke Slusser — San Jose State’s co-captain and Fleming’s close friend and roommate — joined a class-action lawsuit by a group of female athletes against the N.C.A.A., arguing that the organization’s transgender-participation policy discriminated against women and therefore violated Title IX [.]