A California high school athlete says her life was upended after she refused to undress in a locker room with a transgender teammate and then started receiving death threats. The Muslim teen, who had been a standout in volleyball and track, describes a spiral that pushed her out of sports altogether and into an early graduation plan just to get away from campus drama.
Her story is now wrapped up in a broader legal and cultural fight over who gets to use which locker room, how schools handle religious objections, and what happens when teenagers are left to absorb the fallout from adult policy battles.
The clash inside a California locker room
At the center of the controversy is Hadeel Hazameh, a Muslim student who competed in volleyball and track at Jurupa Valley High School in California. According to her account, the tension started when a transgender girl joined the girls team and was allowed to use the same locker room, a setup she says conflicted with her religious beliefs about modesty and privacy. Hazameh has said she did not want to change clothes in front of the transgender teammate and asked for accommodations that would let her keep competing without compromising those beliefs.
Hazameh’s refusal to share the space did not stay a quiet disagreement. She has described how the situation escalated into open conflict with peers and staff, eventually drawing in administrators and outside advocates. In her telling, the school’s decision to prioritize the transgender student’s access to the girls facilities left her feeling sidelined and unprotected as a Muslim athlete, a dynamic that later became part of a broader federal lawsuit involving female athletes from Jurupa Valley.
“My life was ruined”: a teen walks away from sports
Hazameh has framed the fallout in stark terms, saying the locker room dispute effectively ended the sports career she had built at Jurupa Valley High School. She described herself as a Muslim athlete who loved competing, but said the conflict with a transgender teammate over the shared space pushed her to quit rather than keep walking into a locker room that made her feel cornered. In her words, the clash over the locker room left her feeling that “my life was ruined,” a line that captures how deeply she believes the episode cut into her sense of identity as both a student and a Muslim competitor in California.
Her decision to step away from volleyball and track did not come with an easy reset. Hazameh has said that instead of focusing on training or college recruiting, she started plotting how to get out of high school as fast as possible. She described fast-tracking her education so she could graduate early and leave Jurupa Valley High School behind, a choice she links directly to the pressure she felt after refusing to share the locker room with a transgender teammate and the way the school handled the conflict, as detailed in her account.
Death threats, harassment, and a school’s response
What started as a dispute over locker room access quickly spilled into Hazameh’s daily life, both on campus and online. She has said that after word spread about her objections, she became a target for classmates who saw her stance as an attack on the transgender teammate. According to her, the backlash escalated to the point where “someone almost told me to die,” a phrase she uses to describe a death threat that left her shaken and looking for help from adults in charge.
Hazameh says she reported the threat to school officials but felt the response was indifferent, describing how “they did not do anything” meaningful to protect her or hold anyone accountable. That sense of being abandoned by the institution she expected to keep her safe is a recurring theme in her story, and it feeds into a broader legal narrative in which female athletes from Jurupa Valley High School say a transgender athlete made them feel unsafe and sexually harassed, a claim that has been folded into a federal lawsuit backed by their complaints.
The lawsuit and the faith-based legal fight
The locker room dispute at Jurupa Valley High School did not stay a local controversy. Advocates for Faith and Freedom, a nonprofit law firm, announced that it had filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of female athletes who say a transgender athlete made them feel unsafe and sexually harassed in shared spaces. The case argues that the school district’s policies and actions violated the rights of girls who objected to undressing with a transgender teammate, and it uses the experiences of students like Hazameh to illustrate what they describe as a hostile environment for religious and privacy concerns.
In its public statements, Advocates for Faith and Freedom has framed the case as a test of how far schools can go in enforcing gender identity policies when those policies collide with students’ beliefs. The group says it is representing female athletes from Jurupa Valley High School who felt pressured to accept a situation that conflicted with their understanding of sex and modesty, and it has highlighted allegations that the transgender athlete’s behavior in the locker room crossed clear lines. The lawsuit, which names the district and related officials, is part of a growing wave of legal challenges that pit civil rights protections for transgender students against claims of religious discrimination and privacy violations, as outlined in filings tied to Advocates for Faith.
Religious rights, locker rooms, and a wider culture war
Hazameh’s story is landing in a national moment where schools are already under intense pressure over how they handle gender identity and religious freedom. In Virginia, for example, parents have packed school board meetings to protest policies that let transgender students use bathrooms and locker rooms that match their gender identity. At one such meeting, Parents erupted after learning a trans girl was using the boys locker room, accusing the district of ignoring their concerns and warning that the policy put their children at risk, a scene that shows how quickly these debates can turn into full-blown community showdowns over locker room rules.
Those Virginia parents have also raised religious freedom arguments that echo what Hazameh describes in California. Legal advocates like Center for American Liberty and Center for Law and Religious Freedom have argued that forcing students to share intimate spaces with transgender peers can violate their beliefs, and they have pushed school boards to adopt policies that let students opt out or use alternative facilities. In one Virginia case, attorneys such as legal counsel Josh Hetzler have accused a school district of religious discrimination for disciplining a student who objected to transgender policies, underscoring how these fights are not just about bathrooms but about whether public schools are respecting or sidelining religious objections.
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