Payton McNabb
Injured volleyball player and women's-sports advocate
On the Beyond Gender podcast, Payton McNabb tells Bret Alderman the full story behind the headline: the volleyball collision that left her with a lasting brain injury, the political awakening and sorority years that came before it, and the muted institutional response and legal fight that followed. It's a raw, first-person account of a collision that became a national flashpoint.
Payton McNabb was a high school volleyball player in North Carolina in October 2022 when a spike from a male opponent playing in the girls' competition struck her in the head, leaving her with a traumatic brain injury whose effects she still lives with. On the episode "She Was Injured by a Male Player. Now She's Speaking Out | Payton McNabb," she sits down with Bret Alderman to walk through that collision in detail — and through everything that shaped her before it and everything it forced her to confront after.
The conversation doesn't start with the injury. Alderman and McNabb trace her path from a political awakening through her sorority years, giving the episode a fuller portrait of who she was before she became, almost overnight, a name attached to a national debate about male athletes in women's sports. That groundwork makes the second half land harder: the hit itself, the school's muted, slow-walked response, and the legal fight she subsequently pursued against the institution involved.
What makes the episode distinctive on Beyond Gender is its refusal to stop at the injury as spectacle. McNabb speaks plainly about rebuilding her life afterward, and about the institutional silence that, in her telling, treated her harm as an inconvenience rather than a consequence to be reckoned with. Alderman lets her set the pace, and the result is less a news segment than a testimony.
By the close, the discussion widens out to the stakes McNabb has come to represent for others: men's presence in women's spaces and competitions, and what her case suggests about accountability when institutions are asked to weigh a woman's safety against a policy commitment. It's a conversation for listeners who want the person behind the headline, not just the headline.
