Conflict Over Transgender High School Volleyball Player (No, not that one).
Another high school volleyball incident has taken over the right wing press. Yes, we think it’s weird too.
by Evan Urquhart
Right wing media outlets are very upset over an incident involving a transgender girl on a high school volleyball team. No, not the high school girls volleyball team in Randolph, VT. (That’s what we thought too, which is why we’re late catching on.)
THIS high school volleyball team is in North Carolina. A transgender girl, a player at the Highlands School, has been accused of being unsafe to play against for cisgender girls. Hiwassee Dam, a rival team, is forfeiting matches rather than face Highlands again, after an injury where one of their players took a spiked ball to the head. This happened sometime in September 2022, as far as we’ve been able to surmise. The story is currently being repeated in many outlets on the right, but the source seems to have been a report in the Charlotte Observer, a local paper that’s sadly behind a paywall, (please, donate!), and was then picked up by a North Carolina parents’ rights group, Education First Alliance on October 11.
The post on Education First Alliance includes video of the teams. It’s somewhat far away, and hard to make out, but a player (presumably the trans girl) goes up for a spike, the ball hits one of the players on the other team in the face or head, and that girl goes down. It’s important not to downplay the severity of the girl’s injuries: In addition to a concussion, reporting claims she had head and neck injuries, and we have no reason at this time to doubt those accounts.
The toxicity, of course, is in the transmisogynist framing. It seems unlikely, purely based on the odds, that this was the hardest a volleyball has ever been spiked by a high school girl (although if the evidence supports that understanding we will update and correct). Concussions in volleyball are relatively common, which makes sense with a sport where a ball is hit hard at head height and above. Freak accidents, of course, are part of the territory with all sports. Girls’ full participation in sports means subjecting girls to the same risks, for the same benefits, as boys. This seems like a very unfortunate incident, but not out of the expected toll of accidents that happen in girls’ sports. The parents’ rights group’s post (which we assume is based on the Charlotte Observer’s reporting, disagrees:
Again, without downplaying the girls’ injuries, having viewed the video, it did not look to us like this was the strongest spike in the history of girls’ volleyball. The idea that it could have been seems like transmisogyny to us at Assigned, and sexism, downplaying the abilities of highly competitive and skilled cisgender girls. But again, we’ll update this post if further developments prove us wrong, or if they bear this out.