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.”
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. The ACLU defended the trans girls’ right to compete. Above a picture of Yearwood and Miller, the WNBA expressed its own support: “We support you and all of the other trans athletes just trying to compete in the sports they love.” (Six years on, there has been no ruling in the case.)
The WNBA has become an appealing target for culture-war politicking, in part because the successes of Clark and a handful of other exceptional players have significantly raised the league’s profile in the past few years. As its prominence grows, its ability to sidestep controversy shrinks.
Not long after Freedom’s declaration, White also announced plans to enter the draft. After a short, lackluster career in the NBA, he is now a conservative activist who has run for the U.S. Senate in Minnesota, and he is currently under a no-contact order with his ex-wife because of alleged threats against her and their teenage son. (He has disputed the accusations.) White has declared that he is indeed a woman, if only for basketball purposes. “I’ve always trusted the science and I thought I was a man my entire life, but after further review, a strong look at my personal preferences, it would appear that I am indeed sometimes identifying as a transgender woman,” he said on Fox News. He has since bought a long wig and accused a television network that canceled an interview with him of “not giving Black women a voice.”
When the WNBA uses the words bad faith, the only reasonable interpretation is that league officials do not believe that White and Freedom are women, despite their self-declarations. Funny story: I’m still on the advocacy group GLAAD’s enemies list for saying the same thing in 2017, in a column headlined “A Man Can’t Just Say He Has Turned Into a Woman.” At the time, Britain’s government was debating whether to loosen requirements for a person to legally change their gender. Many feminists feared that without any gatekeeping, nothing would stop male creeps and predators from using a new identity to victimize women (as the rapist Karen White did in a women’s prison). Although my article acknowledges the existence of transgender identities, it also argues that legal protections for trans people should rest on a medical diagnosis, or at least a formal bureaucratic procedure, rather than a simple verbal declaration.
Now, it seems, the WNBA agrees with me—White has not magically turned into a woman because he says so. You are allowed to dispute people’s self-identification. But only if they are a Republican.
In the United States, many progressive organizations, including the ACLU, maintain that the female category belongs to anyone who (sincerely) identifies into it. The underlying argument is that trans people should not have to seek medical treatment or alter their physical presentation to have their inner identities respected.
Freedom and White have elicited much less deference. Pod Save America’s Jon Lovett recently declared, “If they would like to play in the WNBA, they better fucking transition. Let’s get them on some fucking hormones.” The left-wing satirist Walter Masterson demanded that the two men “commit to the bit” and “chemically transition, or STFU.” But this is not a demand that is applied, say, to male sex offenders who ask to be housed in women’s prisons in California. Several years ago, the ACLU and other groups successfully lobbied for a law directing prison authorities to house trans women in a women’s facility if they request it, regardless of whether they have physically transitioned at all.
Bombarded with pro-trans commentators insisting that he medically transition, White has gleefully thrown progressive talking points back at them. “Don’t tell me how to be a Black woman! Taking hormones are optional,” he wrote in one X post. In another, he added, “Genitalia doesn’t determine gender.” Royce’s clapbacks are near-verbatim rehashings of popular activist slogans.
Over the past decade, many sports have wrestled with the question of how trans and nonbinary athletes can be accommodated fairly and safely. In some cases, such inclusion has presented no problems—biological females have competed in sports for both sex categories because they have no unfair advantage in either. (The WNBA accommodated the player Layshia Clarendon, who came out as trans and nonbinary, until their retirement in 2024.) Admitting biological males to women’s sports presents a more difficult question. Almost everyone agrees that men are on average stronger and faster than women, but how much of that advantage can be mitigated by testosterone suppression? Various sporting bodies have tried different approaches in the past decade, although many—including the International Olympic Committee and the Women’s Tennis Association—have now concluded that the women’s category cannot admit males, no matter how comprehensive their physical transition has been.
Having belatedly realized that the majority of Americans do not agree with their enthusiasm for male inclusion in women’s sports, the response of the left has often been to say: Why are we even talking about this nonstory? The columnist Candace Buckner of The Athletic criticized Cunningham for “choosing to weigh in on the divisive topic of transgender athletes in women’s sports, a grossly exaggerated ‘issue,’ and opening the door for a flood of agitators to defile the discussion.” But surely, athletes are allowed to have an opinion about competitive eligibility for their own league? For a long time, the right told stars such as Colin Kaepernick, who wanted to make political points about racism and injustice, that they should “stick to sports.” Some on the left now think that female athletes should not even have that grace.
What Freedom and White’s trolling has exposed is a widespread refusal to defend gender-self-identification policies on their own merits. One can argue that there is no such thing as male athletic advantage, or that inclusion for trans people is more important than fairness and safety for women. Both of these arguments are wrong, in my view, but at least they are internally coherent. What we get instead is a squeamish refusal to own the consequences of the approach that liberals endorse: White and Freedom are cynical operators, and that’s all anyone needs to know.
My counterpoint would be that cynical operators will always be with us. Any regulations that can’t deal with that fact are, by definition, bad regulations. Self-identification is unworkable in practice for the same reason that prison abolition isn’t viable: Bad actors will ruthlessly further their own interests at other people’s expense. For more examples, see how rich students are asking for disability accommodations to secure an advantage in college exams. How some air travelers are using wheelchair services to skip lines—at the expense of genuinely disabled people. How the service-animal exemption for airplanes was stretched so far that someone eventually tried to take a peacock into the cabin. Wherever there is an unpoliced boundary, some individuals will cross it.
Why would gender be exempt from this phenomenon? In 2024, soon after Germany passed a gender-self-ID law, a neo-Nazi named Sven Liebich declared that he was now Marla-Svenja Liebich and would therefore require accommodation in a women’s prison. (Marla-Svenja kept Sven’s handlebar mustache, however.) After a public backlash, Liebich was sent to a men’s jail, although it is unclear what legal basis the German state had for declaring this one particular case of self-identification fraudulent.
The WNBA appears to be following the same playbook—gearing up to make an arbitrary decision because of bad publicity, rather than engaging with the fact that its policies have created an exploitable loophole. Keeping out Freedom and White is not a hard problem to solve: Just say that you respect people’s identities, but sports are segregated by sex.
Progressives are losing the fight over gender identity in women’s sports. It’s time to concede and move on. They should save their energy to fight some of the truly egregious discrimination imposed against trans people by red states and Donald Trump’s executive orders. No one’s interest is served by refusing to articulate why Freedom and White don’t belong in the WNBA.