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Former Utah State star athlete Kaylie Ray attempted to share with lawmakers her experience as a victim of the San Jose State volleyball scandal.
In response, they made comments about her body.
Arizona Democratic state Sen. Catherine Miranda told Ray, “I mean, you look pretty healthy… You look really fit and strong,” after Ray spoke about having to forfeit a game in protest of a trans athlete, at a Senate education hearing Tuesday.
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“When he started saying those words, all I was thinking is, ‘Where could I go with this?'” Ray told Pak Gazette Digital. “For some reason, my physical appearance or height should have some kind of effect on my competitiveness with men. So I was definitely caught off guard.”
Ray said he would accept an apology from Miranda, if they gave him one. Miranda’s office has not responded to repeated requests for comment.
Ray appeared on the House floor that day to share the deep personal trauma of her college volleyball career.
At Utah State, she was an opponent of transgender former San Jose State volleyball player Blaire Fleming for two years in 2022 and 2023, all before she had confirmed knowledge that Fleming was a man. During that time, Ray said he watched his teammates suffer finger injuries from taking Fleming’s signature spikes to their hands.
“I had teammates who had badly hurt their fingers, luckily not broken, but a handful of girls suffered minor injuries from the player,” Ray said, adding that this happened much more often with Fleming’s spikes than with those of the players.
He added that all of his teammates were suspicious of Fleming from the moment they saw the film before their first matchup on October 1, 2022.
“When we were introduced to this player, even on film, the immediate reaction was ‘wow!'” Ray said. “It’s so obvious at a glance that this athlete has athleticism, explosiveness and power that no other athlete can match.”
Utah State lost that first match against Fleming, three sets to one.
Ray said there were some people on his team who were making comments about Fleming being a man.
“After watching this player compete, it was very obvious to us, but obviously we don’t want to speculate,” Ray said.
He said his team had to come up with a new strategy that they simply didn’t need before Fleming’s arrival in the Mountain West.
SJSU VOLLEYBALL SCANDAL LAWSUIT COULD BE IMPACT BY SUPREME COURT TRANS ATHLETES CASES AFTER JUDGE’S DECISION
“Because Blaire attacked from such a high contact point… the goal is just to get your hands over the net as far as you can,” he said. “Put your hands down and up, and if Blaire hits you over the top, that’s a good swing from that player. There was a kind of helplessness of, ‘Let’s do everything we can to force them to put other players in.'”
Ray said there were some people on his team who were making comments about Fleming being a man. (Courtesy of ICONS, Getty Images)
Utah State won the rematch against SJSU in November, three sets to two. They then met in the 2022 conference finals, with Ray’s team emerging 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 honest, Blaire didn’t have a great game,” Ray said. “To be fair, I think you go into any game hoping that your best player isn’t having his best night. I won’t say 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 and missed time due to injury. In that second game, Fleming led SJSU in points, but Utah State had answers and won the game en route to its third consecutive conference title.
It was the last time Ray would play Fleming.
When the scandal went national in 2024, Ray, as captain, was trying to lead her team to a fourth consecutive Mountain West championship.
“I wanted it so bad,” he said.
But then, official news about Fleming’s birth sex reached his locker room.
“I felt sick. I felt sick to my stomach,” Ray said.
His team had to put aside the competition.
“[Utah State administrators] “We ended up sending an anonymous survey to our girls when we were on a road trip…just to describe our thoughts and feelings about competing against San Jose, and our administrators took that information and let us lose,” Ray said.
It was the first of seven total lost games the Spartans saw that season, and each one of them brought more and more scrutiny and risk to the program. But for Utah State, the loss also reverberated throughout the season, behind closed doors.
“The 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 even challenged in court to overturn the outcome of the lost game. But a Biden-appointed judge did not grant the reversal.
And because of that loss, 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 wanted to return to the championship game, they would have to play SJSU.
“The only thing anyone could focus on was ‘Well, if we win, we have to play San Jose, do we have to lose again?'” Ray said of the team’s mentality before its first-round game against Boise State in that tournament. “That was a lot of my team’s attitude…we were already defeated coming into the tournament.”
FORMER SJSU VOLLEYBALL STAR OPENS UP TO LIVING WITH A TRANS TEAMMATE WITHOUT KNOWING THE ATHLETE’S BIOLOGICAL SEX
Brooke Slusser #10 and Blaire Fleming #3 of the San Jose State Spartans call a play during the first set against the Air Force Falcons on Falcon Court at East Gym on October 19, 2024, in Colorado Springs, Colorado. (Andrew Wevers/Getty Images)
Ray and his teammates failed to make it past the first round. They lost to Boise State, who then lost 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 if circumstances had been normal. But it wasn’t normal, in any sense.
“We wanted it so much, along with the trauma and the anxiety and the horrible, horrible emotions that occurred during the season, that it was very difficult to keep that goal in sight.”
Ray is done with college volleyball. He played one more season at Weber State last fall and graduated with a graduate degree. Now, much of her focus is on fighting to “save women’s sports,” just as she tried to do at her state capital building last week.
In January, he spoke alongside Slusser outside the U.S. Supreme Court at a rally during oral arguments in two cases involving men in women’s sports. That day, Ray saw the forces opposing his goal up close for the first time, with a passionate pro-transgender rally taking place right next to theirs.
“It was the first time in my life that I saw that group of people. What caught my attention the most is that next to their speakers, they were waving a flag, a transgender flag, but in the center of the flag there was a satanic symbol that said ‘The Church of Satan,'” Ray said.
“It was clearly a battle between good and evil… When you upset a group of satanic people, they don’t care what you have to say… when you’re fighting evil, it’s going to be uncomfortable.”
SJSU is the latest battleground in that fight.
The U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR) determined that SJSU violated Title IX in its handling of Fleming in late January. But SJSU and the University of California (CSU) system they are suing the federal government to challenge that investigation.
“San Jose State is disgusting,” Ray said of the lawsuit. “It’s so despicable and so strange.”
Pak Gazette Digital reached out to SJSU and CSU for a response to Ray’s comments.
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U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon responded Wednesday, giving institutions 10 days to reach 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.
