TWIBS: San José State Tells DoE to Kick Rocks
Trump’s Department of Education threatens yet another school for being normal about trans people.
by Aly Gibbs
This Week in Barrel Scraping (TWIBS) is Assigned Media’s longest running column! Every Friday, Aly Gibbs digs deep from the well of transphobia and finds the most obnoxious, goofy thing transphobes have said or obsessed over during the week and tears it to shreds.
The Education Department continues to rage against schools that have the backbone necessary to deny their bigoted interpretation of Title IX student protections.
This TWIBS is actually an update to previous reporting we’ve done on the highly dramatized situation involving a trans volleyball player at San José State University. I first covered this nonsense in October of 2024, reporting that the nation’s least gracious loser, Riley Gaines, was involving herself in SJSU’s business by petitioning their volleyball competition and begging them to refuse to compete over accusations of a trans girl playing for SJSU. She was sending actual medals to teams that forfeit ahead of time, and even paying people off for it, if Seth Dillon is to be believed.
In January, a lot of things changed for trans athletes when Donald Trump took office for the second time and immediately issued multiple sweeping transphobic Executive Orders. In April, Billie Jean Sweeney and Valorie Van-Dieman reported on Trump-associated lawyer Bill Bock, who was spearheading multiple lawsuits against school systems that allowed trans student-athletes to compete, including SJSU. In June, Sweeney covered the SJSU lawsuit again, discussing the dark money behind it, and the impact that forced outing and national attention had on the trans volleyball player.
Then, on January 28 this year, the Education Department declared that they had investigated SJSU and found them to be in violation of Title IX protections against gender-based discrimination in education. Title IX’s applicability to transgender students, long passed back and forth between liberal and conservative administrations, is currently being used by Trump’s Education Department as a cudgel against any education system that allows trans student-athletes to compete on teams that correctly align with their gender.
“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,” alleged the Education Department’s Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Kimberly Richey. “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.”
So, how would the Education Department like SJSU to repent for their shameful crimes? First, they must “adopt biology-based definitions of the words male and female and acknowledge that the sex of a human … is unchangeable.” Then, they must separate sports and “intimate facilities” by “biological sex,” which is going to make the requisite collegiate kissing booth a lot more awkward.
Last, but not least, SJSU must restore “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,” as well as sending “a personalized apology to every woman who played in SJSU’s women’s indoor volleyball (2022–2024), 2023 beach volleyball, and to any woman on a team that forfeited rather than compete against SJSU while a male student was on the roster—expressing sincere regret for placing female athletes in that position.”
Wow! Is that it? Talk about a slap on the wrist! They really got let off the hook on this one, huh?
Well, SJSU told them to fuck off, in so many words. The university stated that they would not agree to the terms of the proposed “resolution,” and sued the Education Department in federal court. They argue that, when their volleyball team had a trans player, they were fully complying with the Education Department’s interpretations of Title IX under President Joe Biden, and that the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued two rulings upholding trans student-athletes’ right to compete in 2023 and 2024 besides. SJSU President Cynthia Teniente-Matson said in a statement, “Our position is simple: We have followed the law and cannot be punished for doing so.”
SJSU stands to lose nearly $200 million in research funding, should the Education Department punish them for allowing a trans athlete to compete. Furthermore, nearly two-thirds of the university’s student body rely on nearly $130 million in federal financial aid, and may find their higher education interrupted by the Education Department’s punitive actions.
It’s clear that these demands are a humiliation ritual meant to appease the gleeful bigots in Trump’s administration. The NCAA banned trans student-athlete participation in February of 2025, spineless losers that they are, and the suit against SJSU has mostly fallen apart as a result. Kimberly Richey’s insistence that some glut of cisgender women were done personal harm by the participation of a single trans volleyball player across two seasons is laughable, and transparently discriminatory.
Here’s hoping SJSU manages to fend off these ghouls in federal court, and never has to comply with a single one of their demented demands.
Aly Gibbs (She/They) is a trans writer who reports on news important to the queer community.
