She Was Injured by a Male Player. Now She's Speaking Out | Payton McNabb

Payton McNabb, a former North Carolina high-school volleyball player, suffered a concussion and lasting neurological damage after a spike from a male opponent competing in the girls' category. She tells Bret Alderman about her recovery, the hostility she met for speaking publicly, and the legal case that followed. For UK readers, her story sits beside the Supreme Court's 2025 ruling confirming that "sex" in the Equality Act 2010 means biological sex, and the Sports Councils Equality Group guidance that already allows UK governing bodies to exclude male-bodied athletes from female categories on safety as well as fairness grounds.

Payton McNabb was a varsity volleyball player in North Carolina when a serve from a male opponent, playing in the girls' category, struck her in the head at close range. She describes the concussion, the lasting neurological symptoms and the long road back to something like normal life, along with the abuse she received online once she started talking about what happened to her. Bret Alderman's conversation with her covers how she became politically engaged, her experience of university sorority culture, and eventually her decision to become an ambassador for the Independent Women's Forum, taking her case into courtrooms and onto national platforms. The episode is notable for treating McNabb's injury as evidence rather than anecdote: a documented, traceable harm caused by mixing male and female categories in a sport where size, speed and power differentials matter. That framing has direct relevance in the UK, where the same underlying argument has already been tested in law and policy, separately from McNabb's own case. In April 2025 the UK Supreme Court ruled in For Women Scotland v Scottish Ministers that the terms "man" and "woman" in the Equality Act 2010 refer to biological sex, not acquired gender under a Gender Recognition Certificate. That judgment hardened the legal basis for single-sex provision across services, including sport, and has pushed governing bodies to revisit or defend their own rules. The Sports Councils Equality Group, representing UK Sport and the home nations' sports councils, had already published guidance in 2021 concluding that in gender-affected sport, inclusion of transgender women in the female category and fairness or safety for female competitors cannot be fully reconciled, and recommending that bodies choose accordingly. England and Wales Cricket, British Triathlon, the Rugby Football Union and other UK sports have since restricted their female categories to those born female, citing exactly the combination of safety and competitive fairness that runs through McNabb's account. What the episode adds to that documentary record is the human cost side of the equation: what a safety-based policy is actually meant to prevent, and what happens to an athlete and her sport when no such policy was in place. McNabb's subsequent legal case, discussed in the chapter on her university trial, also speaks to a question UK tribunals and sports bodies are increasingly being asked to settle: whether an athlete injured under a mixed-category rule has a remedy, and against whom. For anyone following the UK's own contested rulings on sport, schools and single-sex spaces, McNabb's testimony offers a concrete case study of the stakes behind policies that, in Britain, are now resting on firmer legal ground than they were even two years ago.

The dossier behind this episode

Single-sex spaces and women's sport in the UK

The UK has never had a single, uniform rule requiring every sporting body to organise competition by sex in exactly the same way. Instead, Parliament created a legal framework in the Equality Act 2010, while national governing bodies decide how that framework applies to the physical demands, contact risks, competitive level and practical structure of their own sports.

Read the evidence dossier