There is a strange rule in modern progressive politics: Women are to be believed — until the man involved identifies as a woman. In that moment, belief suddenly becomes optional, empathy evaporates, and the woman who speaks up is quickly reframed as the aggressor.
That rule is now being enforced in real time against former San Jose State volleyball player Brooke Slusser, who has found herself at the center of an online firestorm after describing how she unknowingly shared beds in hotel rooms, and later an apartment, with a teammate who was biologically male.
Slusser’s account, reported by Fox News, circulated widely on social media, particularly among pro-transgender activists on X who have spent the last several days piling onto her with insults, ridicule, and moral denunciation. The reaction has been depressingly predictable. Rather than engaging with the substance of what Slusser described — a young woman discovering that she had been sharing intimate spaces with a male teammate without her knowledge — critics focused instead on delegitimizing her feelings and attacking her character.
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Some have declared that she is engaging in grifting. Still others resorted to the kind of naked misogyny that would normally send progressive commentators into a frenzy. One man sneered about her appearance, writing that she had gone from “no upper lip to transphobe right-wing grifter pipeline.” Apparently, misogyny is once again acceptable — so long as the woman on the receiving end has questioned gender ideology.
Former gymnast and Founder & CEO of XX-XY Athletics Jennifer Sey captured the obvious point when she wrote in Slusser’s defense that “Brooke has every right to feel violated. This is a violation of her personal space and boundaries. She was lied to.” That simple observation should not be controversial, yet in the current cultural climate, it has become almost unspeakable.
The central fact critics keep trying to erase is that Slusser did not knowingly agree to share beds in hotel rooms and an apartment with a male athlete. According to her account, she was never told that her teammate was biologically male. That distinction matters enormously because the entire structure of women’s sports travel — shared hotel rooms, shared locker rooms, shared changing spaces — rests on the assumption that women are being asked to share those intimate spaces with other women.
Women routinely make decisions about privacy and vulnerability based on the sex of the people around them. Those decisions are not rooted in hatred or animosity; a woman does not need to justify why she feels comfortable sharing a bed with another woman but not with a man. The boundary, so reasonable that most women would personally lay down as well, itself is reason enough. Yet the reaction to Slusser suggests that many activists now believe women must abandon those personal boundaries entirely.
Critics repeatedly insist that “nothing happened,” as though the absence of an assault somehow resolves the issue. That argument reveals something deeply unsettling about the moral framework driving this backlash.
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If “nothing happened” is the standard by which women are allowed to express discomfort, then women’s boundaries effectively disappear. Under that logic, a woman has no right to object to a situation that makes her feel vulnerable or misled until after an actual assault has occurred. In other words, the only legitimate boundary is the one that has already been crossed.
For decades, feminists argued precisely the opposite.
Women were encouraged to trust their instincts about safety and vulnerability, to listen to the quiet internal alarms that tell us when something feels wrong, and to speak up when our boundaries are violated or ignored. Entire movements were built around the idea that women should not have to wait for something terrible to happen before their concerns are taken seriously, and that they should always be automatically believed. Yet when the issue involves gender identity, that principle suddenly collapses.
Women who voice discomfort are told their instincts are illegitimate. They are instructed to suppress those feelings for the sake of inclusivity. If they fail to do so, they are branded bigots and subjected to a torrent of public humiliation designed to frighten others into silence, like the one Slusser is now being subjected to. That reaction sends a dangerous message to young women everywhere.
It tells them that their boundaries are negotiable, their instincts are suspect, and their discomfort must be subordinated to ideological priorities. It teaches them that if something feels wrong, the safest course of action is to keep quiet — because voicing those feelings may provoke a mob. But conditioning women to ignore their internal warning systems is not progressive; it’s reckless.
Those instincts exist because women have learned, over generations, that paying attention to them can be the difference between safety and danger. Women do not lose the right to their boundaries simply because acknowledging them makes transgender activists uncomfortable.
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Slusser did something both ordinary and courageous: she described an experience that left her feeling misled and exposed. The vicious response she has received reveals less about her character than about the fragile ideology determined to silence her.
If feminism means anything at all, it should mean defending a woman’s right to say, plainly and without apology: I have a boundary, and it was crossed.
