Former Utah State volleyball star says SJSU trans scandal caused injured fingers, shattered dreams
Former Utah State star athlete Kaylie Ray tried to share her experience as a victim of the San Jose State volleyball scandal with lawmakers.
In response, she was given comments about her body.
Arizona Democrat state senator Catherine Miranda told Ray, "I mean, you look pretty healthy… You look very much in shape and strong," after Ray spoke about having to forfeit a game in protest of a trans athlete, at a senate education hearing on Tuesday.
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"When she started saying those words, the only thing I was thinking is, ‘where could she possibly be going with this?’" Ray told Fox News Digital. "For whatever reason, my physical appearance or stature should have some type of effect on how competitive I am with men. So I was definitely caught off guard."
Ray said she would accept an apology from Miranda, if she is given one. Miranda's office has not responded to repeated requests for comment.
Ray showed up to the state house that day to share deep personal trauma from her college volleyball career.
At Utah State, she was an opponent of former San Jose State transgender volleyball player Blaire Fleming for two years in 2022 and 2023, all before having confirmed knowledge that Fleming was male. During that time, Ray said she saw teammates suffer finger injuries from taking Fleming's signature spikes to the hands.
"I had teammates who had seriously jammed their fingers, luckily not broken, but a handful of girls who had sustained minor injuries from the male player," Ray said, adding that it happened way more often from Fleming's spikes than those from female players.
She added that all of her teammates had their suspicions about Fleming from the moment they watched film ahead of their first matchup on Oct. 1, 2022.
"When this player was presented to us, even on film, the immediate reaction is ‘whoa,’" Ray said. "It's so obvious to the naked eye that this athlete has athleticism, explosiveness, and a power that is just not matched by any of the other athletes."
Utah State lost that first match against Fleming, three sets to one.
Ray said there were some people on her team that were making comments about Fleming being a male.
"After watching this player compete, it was so obvious to us, but obviously we don't want to speculate," Ray said.
She said her team had to come up with a new strategy that they simply had no need for prior to Fleming's arrival in the Mountain West.
"Because Blaire attacked from such a high point of contact… the goal is to just get your hands over the net as far as you can," she said. "Get your hands low and over, and if Blaire hits over the top of you, it's a good swing by that player. There was kind of like a helplessness of, 'let's just do everything we can to force them to set other players.'"
Utah State won the rematch against SJSU in November, three sets to two. Then they met in the 2022 conference final, and Ray's team emerged victorious for the second of what would be three straight Mountain West titles. But Ray says they were ultimately at the mercy of how well Fleming played that day.
"We knew that if the male athlete had a phenomenal game, there was nothing we could do to stop that person… and to be quite honest with you, Blaire did not have a great game," Ray said. "To be fair, I think you go into any match hoping that their best player doesn't have their best night. I won't say that it was total helplessness because we had beaten them before and we knew we were capable of doing it again."
The following season, Utah State won both matches against SJSU, both in straight sets. Fleming only played in the second of those two games, missing time to injury. In that second game, Fleming led SJSU in points, but Utah State had answers, and won the game en route to a third-straight conference title.
It was the last time Ray would ever play Fleming.
When the scandal went national in 2024, Ray, as a captain, was trying to lead her team to a fourth straight Mountain West championship.
"I wanted it so bad," she said.
But then, official news of Fleming's birth sex reached their locker room.
"I felt sick. I felt nauseousness in my stomach," Ray said.
Her team had to put competition aside.
"[Utah State administrators] ended up sending an anonymous survey to our girls when we were on a road trip… simply to describe our thoughts and feelings about competing against San Jose, and our administrators took that information and allowed us to forfeit," Ray said.
It was the first of seven total forfeited matches the Spartans saw that season, with each one bringing more and more scrutiny and risk to the program. But for Utah State, the forfeit also reverberated throughout their season, behind closed doors.
"Girls were so sick about it… to have that loss on our record, it was really disappointing," she said. "We were very distracted during the season."
Ray joined the lawsuit led by former SJSU co-captain Brooke Slusser against the Mountain West later that season, and they even challenged in court to have the result of the forfeited game reversed. But a Biden-appointed judge did not grant the reversal.
And because of that forfeit, Ray's team finished behind SJSU in the standings. When the brackets came out, they faced the anxiety of knowing for certain, that if they were to make it back to the championship game, they would have to play SJSU.
"The only thing that anyone could focus on, was ‘well, if we win, we have to play San Jose, do we have to forfeit again?’" Ray said of the team's mindset before its first-round game against Boise State that tournament. "That was very much the attitude of my team… we were already defeated coming into the tournament."
Ray and her teammates didn't make it out of the first round. They lost to Boise State, who then went on to forfeit to SJSU in the semifinal.
Ray still hasn't gotten over not winning that fourth conference title, which she believes her team would have won had circumstances been normal. But it wasn't normal, in any sense.
"We wanted it so bad, coupled with the trauma and the anxiety, and just the horrible, horrible emotions that occurred during the season, it was so hard to keep that goal in sight."
Ray is done with college volleyball now. She played one more season at Weber State last fall and has graduated with a graduate degree. Now, much of her attention is put toward fighting to "save women's sports," just as she tried to do at her state's capital building this past week.
In January, she spoke alongside Slusser outside the U.S. Supreme Court at a rally during oral arguments for two cases related to males in women's sports. That day, Ray got her first up-close look at the forces opposing her goal, with a passionate pro-transgender rally taking place right next to theirs.
"It was the first time in my life seeing that collection of people. What struck me most is that up next to their speakers, they were waiving a flag, a transgender flag, but at the center of the flag there was a satanic symbol, it said ‘The Church of Satan,’" Ray said.
"It was so clearly a battle between good and evil… When you upset a party of Satanic people, they don't care what you have to say… when you're fighting against evil, it's going to be uncomfortable."
SJSU is the latest battleground in that fight.
The U.S. Education Department's Office for Civil Rights (OCR) determined that SJSU violated Title IX in its handling of Fleming at the end of January. But SJSU and the California University (CSU) system are suing the federal government to challenge that investigation.
"San Jose State is disgusting," Ray said of the lawsuit. "It's so despicable, and it's so bizarre."
Fox News Digital has reached out to SJSU and CSU for a response to Ray's comments.
U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon responded Wednesday, giving the institutions a deadline of 10 days to come to an agreement or risk federal funding cuts and a referral to the U.S. Department of Justice.
"President Trump, you know what to do," Ray added.
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