The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights set a deadline Tuesday that sounds very similar to two earlier deadlines, giving San José State University 10 days to comply with a record of athletics-related calls for or face enforcement motion, including the termination of the college’s federal funding.

This is the third 10-day deadline issued by the OCR to SJSU, the first in January and the second having expired last weekend. All three concern the same case, that of a transgender girl who performed on the varsity’s girls’s volleyball group from 2022 to 2024.

A federal investigation was launched in February 2025 after controversy over Blaire Fleming disrupted the 2024 volleyball season. Four Mountain West Conference groups — Boise State, Wyoming, Utah State and Nevada-Reno — selected to forfeit matches to SJSU.

The probe concluded that SJSU’s insurance policies “allowing males to compete in women’s sports and access female-only facilities deny women equal educational opportunities and benefits.”

SJSU pushed back, insisting it adopted the law in permitting Fleming to play. SJSU president Cynthia Teniente-Matson wrote in a March 6 letter to the campus neighborhood that the college “vigorously disputes the conclusions that OCR reached…. Our position is simple: We have followed the law and cannot be punished for doing so.”

SJSU requested that the OCR rescind its findings and close its investigation. Instead, the federal company redoubled its efforts, with the latest salvo a “letter of impending enforcement” issued Tuesday and accompanied by a assertion from U.S. Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Kimberly Richey.

“We have provided SJSU with multiple opportunities to resolve its Title IX violations with common sense actions: separating male and female athletes based on their biological sex, keeping men out of women’s locker rooms and bathrooms, restoring rightfully-earned titles and accolades to female athletes, and apologizing to the women forced to forfeit competitions to protect themselves,” Richey said. “Yet, SJSU remains obstinate, choosing a radical ideology over safety, dignity, and fairness for its own students.

“With today’s action, the Department is putting the university on notice: comply with the law or risk losing its federal funding.”

SJSU enlisted the help of the California State University system, which sued the Department of Education on March 6 to problem its allegedly “lawless overreach” and block the federal authorities from cutting funding to SJSU if the varsity doesn’t agree to a proposed itemized decision settlement.

“Whether and under what conditions transgender women should be allowed to compete in women’s athletics has been hotly contested,” the CSU lawsuit said. “But this case is not about that issue. It is about the Department’s attempt to punish SJSU, even though the law in the Ninth Circuit has been and is clear. Under Ninth Circuit law, Title IX and the Equal Protection Clause protect transgender students from discrimination.”

Suing the Education Department “is not a step we take lightly,” Teniente-Matson said. “However, we have a responsibility to defend the integrity of our institution and the rule of law, while ensuring that every member of our community is treated fairly and in accordance with the law.”

An estimated two-thirds of SJSU college students obtain federal financial help totaling about $130 million yearly, according to Cal State University. Losing federal funds may also disrupt $175 million in research.

The Office of Civil Rights’ proposed decision settlement, which SJSU dismissed out of hand, comprises the next calls for:

1) Issue a public assertion that SJSU will undertake biology-based definitions of the phrases “male” and “female” and acknowledge that the intercourse of a human — male or feminine — is unchangeable.

2) Specify that SJSU will observe Title IX by separating sports activities and intimate amenities based on organic intercourse.

3) State that SJSU won’t delegate its obligation to comply with Title IX to any exterior affiliation or entity and won’t contract with any entity that discriminates on the premise of intercourse.

4) Restore to feminine athletes all particular person athletic information and titles misappropriated by male athletes competing in girls’s classes, and issue a personalised letter of apology on behalf of SJSU to each feminine athlete for permitting her participation in athletics to be marred by intercourse discrimination.

5) Send a personalised apology to every girl who performed in SJSU’s girls’s indoor volleyball from 2022 to 2024, seaside volleyball in 2023, and to any girl on a group that forfeited somewhat than compete against SJSU while a male pupil was on the roster — expressing honest remorse for putting feminine athletes in that place.

In a associated lawsuit, a Colorado district choose this month deferred ruling on motions to dismiss former SJSU volleyball participant Brooke Slusser’s lawsuit against the California State University system. Slusser alleged that she was made to share bedrooms and altering areas with Fleming without being informed that Fleming is transgender.

Judge Kato Crews dismissed the Mountain West Conference as a defendant but said he needs to put the remainder of the case on maintain until after a Supreme Court ruling in B.P.J. v. West Virginia, which is predicted to come in June.

The B.P.J. case went to the Supreme Court after a transgender teen sued West Virginia to block a state law that prevents males from competing in women’ high faculty sports activities.