Gender Trolls Take On the WNBA

Why shouldn’t Enes Kanter Freedom and Royce White play women’s basketball? The answer is simple: They’re not female.

By all evidence, the two former NBA players have XY chromosomes—White has fathered children—and have been through male puberty.

They have significant athletic advantages over female athletes and should not be eligible for the WNBA.

To reach this conclusion, I don’t need to peer into the pair’s souls to see whether they’re pink or blue, nor do I need to decide whether they are sincerely applying for the WNBA draft or just trolling.

Although, let’s be clear, they are trolling.

On August 6, Freedom sent a letter to the WNBA’s commissioner that might as well have read: Hello—I would like some attention.

The 34-year-old, whose NBA profile lists him at 6 foot 10 and 250 pounds, played pro basketball for 11 seasons.

Now he wants to register for the women’s draft.

He argued on X that he is “simply asking that the current rules be applied equally to everyone—the rules that represent the very values many WNBA players and coaches have publicly advocated for.” In an interview on Friday, he imagined catching a pass from the Indiana Fever star Caitlin Clark, dunking the ball, and then bumping chests with her—“which I’m allowed to do,” he said, “because I’m now a woman.” The backdrop to this stunt is the controversy over the Fever guard Sophie Cunningham, who told ESPN last month, “I want to protect young girls in a locker room, or young girls in sport who shouldn’t have to go against biological men,” and has been mocked as “MAGA Barbie” because of her views.

The players’ union put out a statement condemning the “hate, abuse, and demonization of any person or group of people, including transgender people.” [ Helen Lewis: The Supreme Court’s utterly mainstream ruling on women’s sports ] As it stands, the WNBA’s collective-bargaining agreement restricts entry to “players who are women” but does not define women .

The league has so far waved away Freedom and White.

“There are no immediate eligibility matters affecting the WNBA,” it declared in a statement Wednesday, “and we strongly denounce the bad-faith efforts to use these topics to demean or marginalize others.” No one—not even White and Freedom—seriously believes that the WNBA will let the two trollish men play as women.

But the league apparently hopes to reject them without ever grudgingly coughing out an agreement with Cunningham’s view that biological males don’t belong in women’s sports.

Five years ago, the WNBA’s official Twitter account celebrated Andraya Yearwood and Terry Miller, biologically male athletes whose female competitors in Connecticut sued to keep them out of girls’ races in high-school athletics.