Week of Oct. 24, 2024

From the editor’s desk

This Saturday, Oct. 26, University of Nevada, Reno volleyball players plan to sit out a match with San Jose State University, because San Jose’s team has a transgender player. Instead, they plan to gather for a rally at the Little Waldorf Saloon at 1 p.m., an hour after the game is scheduled to start in San Jose.

At first, some UNR players intended to boycott the game. An Oct. 17 statement from UNR says, however, that the university can not allow the team to forfeit—that would be gender discrimination, according to Nevada’s Constitution—but that individual players would not be penalized for refusing to play.

The local community, along with the rest of the country, is in a tense, politically charged gridlock over whether transgender players hurt other women athletes.

Local attorney Joey Gilbert announced that he’s considering suing UNR. Senate candidate Sam Brown and Gov. Joe Lomabrdo voiced their support for the players sitting out Saturday’s game. Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance, who visited Reno yesterday, strongly implied that transgender athletes are facilitatating the destruction of girls’ sports. 

Meanwhile, the NCAA has signed off on transgender athletes in some sports, and the ACLU says it’s a myth that transgender athletes have an unfair advantage—and that they instead have an unfair disadvantage in the form of harassment and threats.

So far, I have found copious vitriol against transgender athletes, but no evidence that they hurt women or degrade women’s sports. And so far, I’ve only seen one local news outlet call this unsubstantiated vitriol what it very much appears to be—bigotry. In the Oct. 20 editorial “Reno’s great bigotry reveal,” This Is Reno’s Bob Conrad & Kristen Hackbarth point out several oft-ignored facts. Here are two of them:

• The obvious refusal to recognize that transgenderism is a thing – it is – and, further, to assert that transgender athletes are somehow a greater threat to player safety—they are not—amplified transphobic tropes around the state.

Hence, bigotry.

• A study in the journal Frontiers in Sports and Active Living from last year explains: “The disproportionate focus on the relatively small portion of the population who are trans seems based on the belief that cis men, who cannot succeed in sports among other cis men, would choose to misidentify as trans women to gain an advantage in sports against cis women. However, there are no legitimate cases of this occurring. An individual’s sex does not determine their success or failure at any athletic event despite the high level of competition.”

The American Psychological Association concurs. 

Not everyone besides This Is Reno is ignoring these facts, though. The University of Nevada, Las Vegas, volleyball team plans to proceed with its home game against San José State on Nov. 7. And a counterprotest—hosted by community organizations and UNR departments including the Queer and LGBT+ Advocacy Board, Great Basin Hall and the Residential Life association, and titled “Time Out”—is scheduled to occur from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. this Saturday, several blocks south of the Little Wal rally at Great Basin Hall, 1250 N. Virginia St.

Take care,

—Kris Vagner, managing editor