OAN Staff Katherine Mosack
1:22 PM – Friday, January 30, 2026
The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) announced this week that San José State University (SJSU) violated Title IX by allowing a biological male athlete, who identifies as a transgender woman, to participate on its women’s volleyball team.
This created unfair competition, safety concerns, and denied female athletes equal opportunities such as scholarships and playing time, the announcement emphasized.
On Wednesday, the Department of Education determined that SJSU now has ten days to comply with a series of agreements.
The move follows an investigation into allegations that SJSU permitted a biological male to compete on the women’s indoor volleyball team in 2024 and retaliated against female students and an assistant coach who objected.
“SJSU caused significant harm to female athletes by allowing a male to compete on the women’s volleyball team—creating unfairness in competition, compromising safety, and denying women equal opportunities in athletics, including scholarships and playing time,” said Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Kimberly Richey in a statement. “Even worse, when female athletes spoke out, SJSU retaliated—ignoring sex-discrimination claims while subjecting one female SJSU athlete to a Title IX complaint for allegedly ‘misgendering’ the male athlete competing on a women’s team.”
“This is unacceptable. We will not relent until SJSU is held to account for these abuses and commits to upholding Title IX to protect future athletes from the same indignities,” she added.
According to the Education Department, the school “actively recruited” a male and allowed him to compete on women’s indoor and beach volleyball starting in 2022. The institution then “reportedly instructed members of the coaching staff not to tell the female players that the athlete was a male.”
Since players were not informed, they shared locker rooms and hotel rooms with the athlete. The report also noted safety concerns, citing instances where the trans athlete spiked the ball with such force that opposing female players were literally knocked to the ground.
“The presence of this male athlete presented a safety concern for female athletes and provided SJSU’s volleyball team with an unfair physical advantage over opposing teams,” the ED said. “On multiple occasions, the male athlete spiked the ball so forcefully that it knocked females on the opposing team to the ground.”
As a result, in one season, seven all-women’s teams from other universities forfeited their competitions to avoid endangering students by forcing them to compete against a male, accepting defeat instead, for safety and equality reasons.
The Office of Civil Rights (OCR) proposed a resolution agreement to the university to resolve the violations by carrying out a list of actions, including apologizing to members of opposing teams. Other measures include:
- Adopt a “biology-based” definition of the word “male” and the word “female” to “acknowledge that the sex of a human — male or female — is unchangeable,” confirming the change in a public statement to the SJSU community;
- Specify that SJSU will follow Title IX by separating sports and intimate facilities based on biological sex;
- State that SJSU will not delegate its obligation to comply with Title IX to any external association or entity and will not contract with any entity that discriminates on the basis of sex;
- Restore to individual female athletes all individual athletic records and titles misappropriated by male athletes competing in women’s categories, and issue a personalized letter of apology on behalf of SJSU to each female athlete for allowing her participation in athletics to be marred by sex discrimination; and
- Send a personalized apology to every woman who played in SJSU’s women’s indoor volleyball (2022–2024) and 2023 beach volleyball alongside a male athlete;
- Send apologies to any woman on a team that chose to forfeit rather than compete against SJSU while a biological male student was on the roster—expressing sincere regret for placing female athletes in that difficult position.
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