For years, the anti-trans movement has used women’s sports to manufacture outrage about trans women. Now three cis men have decided to insert themselves into the WNBA draft to keep that outrage machine running.
Former NBA players Enes Kanter Freedom, Royce White, and Larry Sanders say they plan to enter the 2027 WNBA Draft as an anti-trans stunt.
There are currently zero trans women playing in the league. So, the people currently fucking with women’s professional basketball are *checks notes* …cis men.
You truly cannot make this up.
The stunt is meant to make a point about trans women. Instead, it makes a much more interesting point about the men behind it.
Consider the sheer entitlement of the maneuver. The WNBA is in the middle of historic growth. Its players are finally getting more of the attention, investment and celebration they deserve for being some of the most elite athletes in the world. And three former NBA players have looked at that success and decided this league is theirs to commandeer for attention, political relevance and a culture-war stunt.
They get to drag the WNBA into their bullshit, make themselves part of the conversation and use the platform women athletes built to say whatever they would like about trans people.
And somehow, after all of that, they would still like us to direct our suspicion toward trans women.
No, babes. We can see you.
It would be easy to dismiss this as three guys being idiots, but that lets them too easily off the hook. They know exactly what they’re doing. The culture war over trans people is politically useful, increasingly lucrative and very good at generating attention. Women’s sports have become one of its favorite battlegrounds.
And women are convenient props.
These men don’t care about women’s sports. They don’t care about women’s rights. At the end of the day, they don’t really care about women at all. They just need us to make their attack on trans people work.
Women are the justification. Trans people are the target.
And somehow, men still end up setting the terms.
That’s what makes this stunt so clarifying. There’s usually a mountain of political rhetoric obscuring what’s happening. Here, the mechanics are sitting right out in the open:
Invent danger. Invoke women. Target trans people. Center men.
There’s a word for a system where men decide what matters to women, speak on our behalf and make themselves the most important people in the conversation.
Patriarchy. The word is patriarchy.
And attacking trans women is part of that system, not an exception to it. Trans women belong in women’s sports for the same reason they belong in women’s bathrooms and locker rooms: they are women. Their presence doesn’t diminish women’s spaces. They are part of them.
Meanwhile, these three men looked at a women’s professional sports league and decided it was theirs to commandeer for their own purposes. They turned its draft into their stunt, its players’ success into their opportunity and its platform into a vehicle for their political ambitions.
So let’s keep our eyes on what’s actually happening.
There are zero trans women playing in the WNBA today. Maybe someday there will be. Good. They belong there.
You want to know the only ones who are fucking with women’s sports?
As always, it’s the cis men.
