AI Is A Gateway To The Welfare State
October 6, 2026 |
Keith Giles
There is a story Americans have been told about transgender women in sports. It goes something like this:
A mediocre male athlete decides he cannot succeed against men. So he declares himself a woman, puts on a dress, walks into a women’s locker room, takes a scholarship from a “real woman,” dominates the competition, injures female opponents, and forces frightened teammates to share private spaces with a dangerous man.
From sources like Donald Trump and Rightwing Media
It is a frightening story, right? But is it true? Is this really a true story and a real reason to propose more than 600 anti-trans pieces of legislation this year?
The story of San Jose State Volleyball player Blaire Fleming is nothing like what you’ve been told.
Much of the political fear spread about transgender women is that they are obvious, physically imposing men invading women’s spaces, making the space unsafe for girls. But Brooke Slusser—Blaire’s teammate, co-captain and eventual legal adversary—said she initially did not know Blaire was transgender, even after moving into an apartment with her and two other teammates.
According to Slusser’s account, she learned near the end of the 2023 season after overhearing two students refer to Blaire as male. That means the two women had lived and competed together for months without Slusser perceiving Blaire as anything other than another woman on her team.
Reporting indicates that some players and staff members on the team did know about Blaire’s birth gender, while most – including the teammate who would later become the public face of the campaign against her on right-wing media – apparently did not.
Pause and consider what that tells us.
During those months, Blaire was not perceived as a threatening man masquerading as a woman. She was a roommate and teammate. She practiced, traveled, changed clothes and lived alongside other women without provoking a national controversy. Nothing about Blaire’s behavior suddenly changed when people learned she was transgender.
Other than the story being told about her.
Before disclosure, she was a teammate. Afterwards, that same teammate accused Blare of being a “male invader” – a danger to her and to the team.
As a player, Blaire’s athletic ability was ordinary enough that opponents played against her for years without considering her an overpowering, dominant force. However, after disclosure, the same volleyball spikes were circulated online as evidence that women were in imminent danger.
Yet, nothing about Blaire changed. Certainly not her body. But the narrative surely did. Particularly when the president of the United States began to single her out in his campaign to spread fear of transgender people.
Blaire did not transition so she could play college volleyball. She began socially and medically transitioning at age 14, with the support of her mother, stepfather, therapist and doctor. She joined her high school girls’ volleyball team, where her coaches and teammates knew she was transgender and accepted her.
In other words, she did not fail in men’s volleyball and then search for an easier path to fame. She never played boys’ volleyball. She was already living as a girl when she began competing on a girls’ team. That detail matters because the political caricature depends upon us imagining a calculating adult man exploiting a loophole. Blaire’s actual story begins with an eighth grader finally discovering language that helped her understand herself.
“It was a lightbulb moment,” she said in a recent interview with KRON-TV in San Francisco. “I felt this huge relief and a weight off my shoulders. It made so much sense.”
That does not sound like a con artist devising a plan to steal trophies from women. It sounds like a transgender child realizing she was not alone.
To be accurate about Blaire, she was not an insignificant bench player who suddenly became a starter in her final season. She was a strong Division I volleyball player and contributed substantially during each of her three seasons at San José State. But she certainly was not the unstoppable athletic force depicted in political advertisements and viral social-media clips.
She was never an All-American and never won any kind of championship. Her team did not steamroll its opponents, either. San José State finished the controversial 2024 season with a 14–7 record. When the Spartans finally reached the Mountain West championship match – helped by Boise State forfeiting its semifinal because of Blaire – they lost to Colorado State, three sets to one.
That is not domination. That is sports.
We don’t want to meet the skewed narrative against trans athletes with some farce of all trans Famela athletes being untalented. of the less than 100 total trans female athletes out of America’s 330 million citizens, some are great some not quite so much. But all, at any level deserve dignity. Blaire was allowed to be good at volleyball. Cisgender women are allowed to be good at volleyball, too.
The question is whether her presence made fair competition impossible. And as we’ve seen, her actual record suggests it did not.
During the 2024 controversy, Blaire was accused of conspiring with a Colorado State player to arrange for Brooke Slusser to be struck in the face with a volleyball. That is an appalling allegation. It is also one that was not substantiated.
The Mountain West investigated and found insufficient evidence to corroborate the claim of misconduct. Slusser was not struck in the face during the match. We can take those feelings seriously without converting every allegation into an established fact – or turning one transgender woman into evidence that all transgender people are inherently dangerous.
There is no public evidence that Blaire sexually preyed upon a teammate. There is no public record of her deliberately injuring an opponent. There is no evidence that she transitioned to obtain athletic fame. Yet she was absorbed into an insanely cruel narrative that routinely presents transgender women as predators, cheaters, and threats.
As of July 2026, the Trans Legislation Tracker reports that 805 bills negatively affecting transgender and gender-nonconforming people have been considered during this year’s state legislative sessions.
Did you mark that? Eight hundred and five bills. For less than 50 athletes, K-College, in America. The proposals reach far beyond elite athletics. They concern healthcare, school curricula, pronouns, bathrooms, identification documents and the legal definitions of “man” and “woman.”
Meanwhile, transgender women represent an extraordinarily small portion of American athletes. We are rearranging entire legal systems around a population so small that national organizations have struggled even to count it accurately. That does not mean questions about athletic categories are illegitimate. Biology matters in sports. Competitive fairness matters. The preservation of meaningful opportunities for women and girls matters.
But fairness cannot be evaluated honestly when the discussion begins with a fictional villain.
We should be able to ask careful, sport-specific questions about puberty, hormone levels, age, competitive level, physical contact and individual athletic development. Different sports may require different policies. Reasonable people may reach different conclusions.
But that is not what happened to Blaire Fleming.
She became the frightening image needed to justify a conclusion already reached.
In February 2025, the NCAA changed its policy and barred athletes assigned male at birth from competing on women’s teams. In June 2026, the Supreme Court ruled that states may maintain similar restrictions without violating the Constitution or Title IX – while leaving open whether schools may choose to allow transgender girls to participate. Associated Press coverage of the ruling
By then, Blaire’s collegiate career was over. But the demands for punishment continued. The federal Department of Education ordered San José State to apologize to players and opponents, revise records, and publicly declare Blaire male.
The issue was no longer simply whether a particular eligibility policy should change. The government wanted the university to repudiate Blaire’s identity—and apologize for having allowed her to participate at all.
During the controversy, teammates began freezing Blaire out. Opposing teams refused to take the court. Politicians discussed her body. Commentators slowed down footage of her spikes. Strangers debated her medical history, anatomy and right to exist in public.
Blaire said she became suicidal. She called it the darkest time of her life.
By the end, both Blaire and Brooke Slusser had left the San José State campus and were completing their degrees online. Whatever side someone takes in the policy debate, it is difficult to describe that outcome as a victory for women.
No one appears to have been protected.
Two young women were engulfed by a national political conflict. A volleyball team was torn apart. Blaire was reduced from a full human being to a body, a controversy and a campaign prop.
You do not have to settle every question about transgender participation in sports today. You don’t have to pretend biology is irrelevant or believe that every policy allowing transgender women to compete is automatically fair in every sport, at every age, and at every level. But we cannot do our best to make fair determinations when the story being told about transgender athletes is incomplete? If not edging on complete falsity.
What if most transgender athletes are not men seeking easy victories? What if they are young people who love a sport and want to belong to a team? Not dominating? Not predators?
What if their teammates can live beside them for months without knowing they are transgender at all because – until someone turns their identity into a threat – they are simply experienced as just another female teammate?
And what if politicians have taken the fears people understandably feel about fairness and used cisgender women as pawns in a much larger campaign against transgender people?
Blaire Fleming is not every transgender athlete. No individual person should be required to represent an entire community. But she is enough to disrupt the caricature.
She transitioned at 14. Because she felt a different personage inside of her – not to dominate at volleyball.
She was a good volleyball player, but not a national champion. She won matches and lost matches. She had teammates who liked her and a teammate who eventually opposed her. She was accused of terrible things that investigators could not substantiate. And when the country turned her into a monster, she almost did not survive it.
Perhaps the first obligation of fairness is to tell the truth about the person standing in front of us. And perhaps, before we write hundreds of laws targeting people like Blaire Fleming, we should be willing to ask:
Is there any chance we’re being lied to?
