FFS Friday: Kim Jones and Marshi Smith, the ICONS

November 15, 2024

FFS (Female Free Speech) Friday honors women and girls who are speaking out about the harms that “gender identity” poses to women and girls as a sex class. FFS Friday posts are free and shareable. If you would like access to content that delves deeper into the movement to protect the sex-based rights of women and girls and to stop the abolition of sex, please consider a paid subscription. 

This week’s FFS Friday honors Kim Jones and Marshi Smith, the women of ICONS (the Independent Council on Women’s Sports), who have spearheaded a lawsuit brought by a dozen female athletes against the NCAA Mountain West Conference over the inclusion of a male athlete on the San Jose State women’s volleyball team. If you’re on X, give them a follow at @icons_women.

Marshi, tearing through the water at the University of Arizona, and today:

Kim, smacking a tennis ball at Stanford, and today.

Yesterday, I learned that ICONS has launched a lawsuit in which a dozen female athletes are suing the NCAA’s Mountain West Conference over the participation of male athlete Blaire Fleming in the San Jose State women’s volleyball team. One of the plaintiffs is Brooke Slusser, one of Fleming’s own teammates, who is also a named plaintiff in the matter of Gaines, et al., v. NCAA, et al., which concerns the participation of Lia (Will) Thomas in the 2022 NCAA women’s swimming championships. 

The other plaintiffs are Alyssa Sugai, Elle Patterson, Melissa Batie-Smoose, Aleah Liilii, Nicanora Clarke, Kaylie Ray, Macey Boggs, Sierra Grizzle, Jordan Sandy, Katelyn Van Kirk, and Kiersten Van Kirk. Batie-Smoose was an associate head coach of the San Jose State women’s team until the university permanently suspended her after she complained about Fleming’s participation in the team.

Among other allegations, as reported by Outkick:

As OutKick previously reported, suspended associate head volleyball coach Melissa Batie-Smoose, the only non-player plaintiff in the new lawsuit, claimed transgender Blaire Fleming colluded with Colorado State player Malaya Jones to throw the match between the two teams on October 3. It's also alleged Fleming and Jones colluded to injure Slusser, who had joined a separate Title IX lawsuit and raised safety concerns about Fleming's participation.

…

According to the suit, three San Jose State players violated team rules by leaving the team's hotel the night before the match to meet at Jones' residence.

"After the SJSU Team got back to campus, student-athlete Chandler Manusky told teammates, including co-captains Alyssa Bjork and Brooke Bryant, that Manusky, Fleming, and [Randilyn] Reeves, had snuck out of the team hotel after hours the night before the [match]," the suit reads.

Manusky later spoke to SJSU coaches about the incident after Bjork and Bryant implored her to do so.

According to Manusky's recounting, "They had discussed Fleming ‘throw[ing] the game’ and how they would set up Jones to ‘blow up’ Slusser and ‘blast’ her in the face during the game."

Manusky allegedly cried as she told coaches about the incident and asked them not to tell Fleming that she had come forward.

I met Kim Jones in early 2022, when she contacted me to say that she was very concerned about a student named Lia Thomas competing on the University of Pennsylvania women’s swimming team. Her daughter was a swimmer on a different Ivy League team. The previous fall, she was looking at the season’s roster and saw a senior named Lia Thomas on the Penn team. That surprised her, because she had never seen a Lia Thomas on the Penn women’s team. Where had Lia come from? Was Lia a transfer student? That seemed the likeliest explanation, but it also seemed odd because college students do not typically transfer as seniors. She looked into the matter and learned that “Lia” was a man named Will who had previously competed (and regularly lost) on the Penn men’s team. She did a little more digging and learned what many of us have known for several years—all over the country (and the world), men are competing on women’s sports teams on the basis of their supposed “female gender identity” and taking honors that are supposed to be reserved for women. She learned that the very category “women and girls” is being erased. She also learned that women who object to this are labeled “transphobic,” or sometimes “fascist” or “Nazi,” even when we are progressive Democrats.

She knew that Glamour Magazine had named Caitlyn (Bruce) Jenner “Woman of the Year” in 2015 and that Vanity Fair had put him on its cover (all of which she thought was pretty weird, but didn’t stress too much about), but she had no idea how pervasive this had become. She lamented, “I am progressive on women’s rights. I have voted for Democrats because of women’s issues, and I have always believed we could count on Democrats not to abandon women! How could this happen without me even knowing about it?!” 

I encouraged her to tell her story during an upcoming webinar of Women’s Declaration International and she did so, but she did it anonymously because her daughter was still in school at the time. The video of her presentation (which is very moving) has more than 38 thousand views, which is more than any other video on WDI’s YouTube channel. 

Within months, she had gone public, joined up with her friend Marshi Smith, and founded ICONS, a “network and advocacy group comprised of current and former collegiate and professional athletes, their families, and supporters.”  According to their website: 

We are building a collective voice to promote and protect women’s sports. We believe women should thrive and succeed in sport without facing sex based discrimination. We believe women deserve respect and fair competition equal to that of male athletes. We elevate and empower female athletes on and off the athletic field.

Today, I am proud to call both of them friends. They have been working hard for the past two and a half years to make sure that female-only sports in the U.S. are exclusively for women and girls, and I’m sure they have no plans to stop.

So Kim and Marshi, today’s FFS Friday is for you.