Blaire Fleming is now at the center of a full-blown controversy, though she has never personally come out publicly as trans. | San Jose State / Shutterstock

The San Jose State women’s volleyball team has another win before they even get to play, as the University of Wyoming has announced its women’s team will forfeit its match this weekend against SJSU.

The Cowboys are the third team in as many weeks to announce they would rather forfeit the match than play against the Spartans and the athlete it seems everyone believes is transgender, Blaire Fleming.

The Cowboys did play against SJSU and Fleming in 2022, losing both matches. There were no reported incidents in regards to the match. While at least one media outlet called Fleming “towering,” she is the second tallest player on the team. The tallest is a cisgender woman.

San Jose State sits atop the Mountain West Conference right now, undefeated. They play the conference No. 2, Colorado State, on Thursday in, ironically, the Rams’ “inclusive excellence game,” focused on promoting the universities Principles of Community and on campus resource centers.

If SJSU wins that, they will be 11-0. In the NCAA Division I top 25, only two teams are undefeated.

The Spartans still have three games against teams that have already forfeited against them. Utah State has already said it will forfeit its second match against Fleming and SJSU.

What on earth happens if other schools join in?

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This, of course, is a mess.

When was the last time an NCAA team recorded four wins in a season because the other team chose to forfeit? When Black players emerged onto college sports in the 1930s, ’40s, ’50s, did teams forfeit instead of playing against a Black player?

Karleigh Webb voiced concern yesterday that San Jose State could possibly go the way some schools handled this issue: They left their Black players home, particularly when they headed to the South.

Interestingly, it was SJSU and its neighbor up the I-280, Stanford, that in the 1970s boycotted and forfeited to BYU because the school wouldn’t allow Black athletes on their teams.

It’s hard to believe we would see a time when schools or teams refuse to play other schools because they wouldn’t let trans women compete on their women’s teams.

Yet surely no football coach at Mississippi State in 1950 thought major universities would refuse to play anti-Black teams and schools.

Yet for now, the issue of how to include trans athletes is gripping a lot of schools, teams, coaches and athletes. And it’s shaking up a Division I college’s sport.

That is, in part, due to some poor leadership. I do think the NCAA’s current general policy outlook — let each sport make their own rules — is better than the one-year-of-HRT-fits-all approach that it was pushed into years ago by some trans advocates.

However, that kind of approach takes some really good communication and lots of open dialogue.

Plus, and this might be the most important part: It takes a clear message about eligibility, as well as who’s been responsible about making those rules. People protesting Fleming’s inclusion should focus any issues on the policy- and rules-makers. Not the athlete or the team.

NCAA President Charlie Baker should be taking the incoming fire from organizations and people mobilized against trans women in women’s sports, and he should be raising his hand to do so.

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