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Sherman R. Frederick
Forget about it, SNL. You too, John Cleese. The WNBA is now officially beyond parody.
Backed into a corner, the women’s basketball league says it will create a task force to decide what a “woman” really means for the purposes of allowing players into the league.
Really, you need a task force?
No you don’t. You just need common sense and to apply it.
The Associated Press obtained an internal memo in which Cathy Engelbert, the WBNA’scommissioner, announced that the league task force will discuss the topic of transgender athletes next week.
“I know many of you have received questions in recent weeks regarding transgender athlete participation in women’s basketball, and I expect this topic will continue to receive significant attention,” Engelbert wrote in the memo.
“I wanted to reach out to share how we are approaching these conversations at the league office and to thank those of you who have responded to questions from the media with thoughtfulness and professionalism.”
What’s to discuss? Is the WNBA for biological women only, or can “men” who declare themselves as women also play? That’s the question, and it has nothing to do with “hate” for trans people, as so many people want to make it out to be.
Retired NBA players Royce White and Enes Kanter Freedom have laid bare that conceit by announcing plans to enter the WNBA draft. Both men, tongue in cheek, stated they identify as transgender to protest current league rules.
Royce, at left, is 6-foot-8 Iowa State monster forward selected by the Houston Rockets in the first round of the NBA draft in 2012. He played briefly in the NBA with the Sacramento Kings in 2014.
“I identify as sometimes identifying as a woman for purposes of basketball,” White, 35, said. “So I’ll be declaring for the WNBA draft in 2027.”
Royce says his fear of flying that ended his NBA career early was actually the “transgender trapped inside of me… that gave me an aversion to small spaces.”
If allowed to play, he says, “I think I’d be unstoppable.”
Unstoppable is the least of it. And if he played full-out, he’d hurt people.
Look, it’s a given this is a stunt to satirize the WNBA’s waffling on the obvious. But it’s righteous because anything other than defining a “woman” as a biologically born female in this context is nothing short of crazy.
(Sherman Frederick is a longtime Nevada journalist and a member of the Nevada Press Association Hall of Fame. You can read by him at shermanfrederick.substack.com.
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