Episode Transcript
[00:00:06] Speaker A: Getting back to our origin of we the People, tackling current issues, both political and legal, with common sense.
As we the People, we must bring common sense back to make our lives better.
Only on now Media tv.
[00:00:25] Speaker B: Foreign welcome to we the People. I'm your host, Alina Gonzalez Dachry.
Tonight, we are talking about women's sports, but more specifically, we are talking about a question that should not be difficult for an organization called the Women's National Basketball Association.
What is a woman?
That's it. That's the question. What is a woman?
Now I know the minute someone asked that question today, people immediately retreat to their political corners. One side assumes I am attacking transgender people. The other side prepares for a fight over biology and common sense.
But this conversation did not begin because someone randomly decided to target the transgender community, which I am not targeting that community.
It began because a woman who actually plays professional women's basketball dared to say that women's sports should remain women's sports, the biological female sport.
Her name is Sophie Cunningham. She is a guard for the Indiana Fever, and she has become one of the most recognizable and most polarizing players in the wnba, much because she just stated, though she has love for the transgender community and respects them, that women's sports should remain something free of biological men.
Some of you may know her as the Blondes player who gained national attention after aggressively defending her teammate Caitlin Clark.
Cunningham has developed a reputation for being fearless, outspoken, and entirely uninterested in whether everyone likes what she has to say.
In a July interview with espn, Cunningham addressed the issue of transgender athletes in women's sports.
She did not say she hated transgender people.
In fact, she said the opposite. She said that she was there to extend love to them.
But but also, she said that love must include honesty.
She wanted to protect young girls in locker rooms and in athletic competition from having to compete against biological males.
That was it.
She did not say transgender people should be mistreated. She did not say they should be excluded from society. She did not question their dignity, their humanity, or their right to live their lives.
She said that female athletics should be reserved for biological females.
And apparently within certain corners of the wnba, that was enough to make her a problem.
Minnesota Lynx coach Cheryl Reeve responded publicly. Reeve said transgender athletes were not the biggest problem facing women's sports and accused others of turning the subject into a massive issue.
Before the Lynx played Tab Cunningham in the Indiana Fever, Reeve wore a shirt that read Trans Kids Belong.
Seattle Storm player Stephanie Dolson arrived at another Fervor game wearing a shirt that says trans rights are human rights.
Let me pause here, because both of those statements are true in the abstract.
Transgender children belong in our communities as absolutely transgender people possess human rights.
Sophie Cunningham never said otherwise.
But neither slogan answers the question she raised.
Do biological males belong in female athletic competition?
That is the question.
And repeatedly shifting the conversation from athletic eligibility to human dignity may be emotionally effective, but it does not answer it.
Coach Reeve herself acknowledged that the issue becomes more complicated after puberty, particularly when scholarships and elite competition are involved. She says she believes some form of inclusive common ground can be found.
But once you acknowledge that puberty matters, that scholarships matter, and that the level of competition matters, you have already acknowledged the first fundamental point.
Biology matters.
And in sports, biology is not an insult. It is not a political slogan. It is the reason female athletic categories exist today.
Now here is where this story moved from a disagreement among professional athletes into something approaching political theater.
Two former NBA players, Enos Cantor Freedom and Royce White, announced that they were declaring themselves eligible for the 2027 WNBA draft.
Yes, you heard that correctly.
These are former male professional basketball players who competed in the NBA.
They announced that they now identified as women, or in White's case, so sometimes identified as a woman for purposes of professional basketball and therefore consider themselves eligible for the wnba.
Was it Sapphire satire?
Absolutely. Of course it was.
Was it deliberately provocative?
Yes. Damn straight it was.
Neither man appears to be claiming a sincere transgender identity.
They are making a point, and they were doing it in the most conspicuous way possible.
But satire has been used throughout history to expose contradictions that ordinary arguments fail to penetrate.
And whether you approve of their method or not, or find it absolutely hilarious, their declarations exposed a problem the dumby the WNBA had left unresolved.
The WNBA's collective bargaining agreement says very simply that only players who are women are eligible to play in the league.
Sounds clear enough until you ask this question.
How does the WNBA define a woman?
The agreement does not say.
The league has no publicly available policy establishing whether eligibility is determined by biological sex, gender identity, hormone levels, medical transition, or self identification.
For nearly 30 years, the league apparently did not believe it needed to explain the word woman in its own name.
Then two former NBA players raised their hands and said, fine, if identity is what matters. We identify as women. Where do we sign?
Suddenly, the WNBA had a conversation it could no longer avoid.
Commissioner Kathy Engelbert notified team presidents and general managers that the subject would be discussed. A league task force met. Additional discussions and listening sessions were promised.
The league then issued a statement saying there were no immediate eligibility matters affecting the WNBA and condemning what it called bad faith attempts demean or marginalize others.
And to be fair, no transgender woman has ever played in the wnba. That doesn't mean it won't happen.
This is not a situation which an existing player is being removed from a roster, so the league is correct about that.
But saying but saying that there is no immediate case does not mean that there is no unresolved policy.
It means the league waited until a public controversy exposed the absence of one.
Then came the Spectacle in Chicago Enas Cancer Freedom attended a game between the Indiana Fever and the Chicago sky wearing a shirt that read Woman Colon, Adult, Human, Female.
During the game, he became involved in a verbal confrontation with Chicago sky guard Natasha Cloud.
Security removed him from the arena, and the Chicago sky subsequently banned him from returning to WindTrust Arena. Lead sources also told reporters that neither Cantor Freedom nor Roy SW would be eligible for the WNBA draft.
Now, I am not defending everything Cantor said or did inside that arena.
Deliberately provoking an individual player during a game is very different from debating the league's eligibility policy.
Whatever point he wanted to make was quickly overshadow overshadowed by that confrontation.
But removing Cantor from the building still did not resolve the underlying contradiction.
In fact, the reported decision that he is ineligible makes the central question even more unavoidable. If Enis Cantor Freedom cannot become eligible for the WNBA merely by announcing that he identifies as a woman, then the league is using some limiting principle beyond self identification.
What is it the WMBA cannot simultaneously say that gender identity must be respected, that the word woman requires no objective definition, and that these two biological males are obviously not women for purposes of athletic eligibility?
If the league knows they are not eligible, then it knows that something more than a spoken declaration determines who belongs in the female athletic category.
The public has a right to ask what that something is. And here's why I believe this story matters. Beyond basketball, we have reached a moment when a woman can say, I support transgender people, but I also want to protect female only sports. And instead of treating that as a reasonable distinction, people treat her as if she has committed an act of hostility.
When did defending a boundary become hatred?
When does saying that women deserve their own athletic category become an attack on someone else's humanity?
And when did women become the one group expected to surrender their opportunities, their privacy, and even the meaning of their own identity in order to prove that they are inclusive? That is absolute ridiculousness.
And those are the questions we will examine tonight. Because this controversy is not ultimately about two former NBA players Pulling a publicity stunt. It is about whether the WNBA is willing to define and defend the category upon which its own existence depends.
So when we return, we will look at why women's sports were created in the first place and why acknowledging biological differences is not discrimination.
It is the foundation of competitive fairness.
Stay with us. We'll be right back.
Welcome back.
Before the break, we discussed the controversy now confronting the wnba.
Sophie Cunningham said that she supports transgender people, but believes biological, biological males should not compete in female sports.
Coaches and players push back.
Two former NBA players then use satire to test the WNBA's undefined eligibility policy.
But beneath all that noise is a very basic question. Why do we have a separate female athletic category in the first place?
The answer is not that women are less valuable than men.
It is not that women are incapable, weak, or somehow inferior.
We have protected female category because male and female bodies develop differently, particularly after puberty, and those differences affect athletic performance.
That is not an insult, it is not a political opinion.
And it does not become hateful merely because someone finds it uncomfortable.
We create categories throughout sports whenever a physical characteristic produces a meaningful competitive advantage.
Look at boxing.
Boxing has weight classes. Wrestling has weight classes. Children compete within age divisions.
The Paralympics uses classifications intended to match athletes with comparable levels of physical function.
None of these categories is a statement about anyone's human worth.
We do not say that a heavyweight boxer is a better human being than a featherweight.
We recognize that placing them in the same ring would not produce a fair competition.
And we do not accuse a 25 year old athlete of discriminating against children because we refuse to place the adult in a 12 year old soccer league.
A protected category is not an act of hatred.
It is an acknowledgment that fair competition sometimes requires meaningful boundaries.
That is precisely why women's sports exist.
Before separate female teams and opportunities were established, women were not simply competing alongside men on equal terms.
For the most part, women were excluded, overlooked, underfunded, which we can still argue that today, or physically unable to compete for the limited positions available in open athletic competition.
Female sports created a space in which women could train, compete, break records, earn scholarships, build careers, and experience the discipline and camaraderie that athletics provides.
The category was created because biological sex affects performance and it still does.
Male puberty generally produces greater height, broader shoulders, larger skeletal structure, greater muscle mass, lower body fat percentage, higher hemoglobin levels, greater heart and lung capacity, and advantages in strength, speed, power and endurance.
Not every male possesses all those advantages to the same degree.
And not every man can defeat every woman in every athletic event?
Of course not.
There are extraordinary female athletes who could outperform millions of men.
There are also short basketball players who can outperform taller ones and smaller fighters who can defeat larger opponents. But athletic categories are not based upon whether every member of one group can defeat every member of another.
They address population level physical advantages that become particularly significant at the highest levels of competition.
That distinction matters. The argument is not that every biological male will always defeat every biological female.
The argument is that male puberty creates physical advantages substantial enough that when talented athletes are compared with other talented athletes, women require a protective category to have an equal equal opportunities to compete and succeed.
And basketball is a sport in which those differences matter enormously.
Height matters. Wingspan matters. Upper body strength matters. Explosive jumping ability matters. Acceleration matters. The ability to absorb and deliver physical contact matters. Professional basketball is not a casual shooting contest in someone's driveway. These are elite athletes moving at extraordinary speed, fighting for space, setting screens, driving through contact, leaping for rebounds, and playing a physically demanding game over an entire season.
That is why the WNBA exists as a female professional league. If biological differences were irrelevant, there would be no reason to create a separate league for women. The w.
Now Supporters of transgender participation often respond that hormone treatment can reduce male athletic advantages.
And that deserves an honest answer. Because hormones do affect the body, testosterone suppression can reduce hemoglobin, muscle mass, and strength. It would be dishonest to pretend that medical transition produces no physical changes.
But the question is not whether hormone therapy changes the body.
The question is whether it eliminates the advantages acquired through male puberty sufficiently to make elite family female competition fair.
A systemic review published in the British Journal of sports medicine examined 24 studies involving transgender women undergoing hormone therapy.
Researchers found that hemoglobin levels declined relatively quickly. Strength, lean body mass, and muscle area also decreased over time.
But even after three years of hormone therapy, measurements of strength, lean body mass, and muscle area remained above those observed in biological women.
The researchers also noted that longer term evidence was limited.
In other words, hormone treatment may reduce some advantages that is not the same as proving that it erases them.
Hormone levels also do not reverse height. They do not shorten arms or legs. They do not narrow an adult skeletal frame. They do not undo every developmental effect of male puberty.
That is why sporting organizations around the world have been reconsidering policies based solely upon testosterone levels.
In February 2025, the NCAA adopted a policy providing that an athlete assigned male at birth may not compete on a woman's team. That was a Huge win for girls.
It was.
The NCAA allows that athlete to practice with the team under certain conditions, but not to compete for a women's championship or receive a scholarship designated for women.
That distinction attempts to accommodate an individual's participation without transferring a competitive opportunity away from a biological female athlete.
Then, in March of this year, the International Olympic Committee adopted an even clearer policy, beginning with future Olympic competition. Eligibility for the female category is limited to biological females. That means XX chromosome DNA.
The IOC concluded that biological males possess performance advantages across sports involving strength, power and endurance. Its findings described average male advantages of approximately 10 to 12% in many running and swimming events, more than 20% in many jumping and throwing events, and still larger advantages in some activities involving explosive power or physical collision.
That is not a political organization casually tossing around culture war language. That is the body responsible for protecting the integrity of Olympic competition.
And notice what the IOC called its policy.
Protection of the female category, not punishment of transgender athletes.
Protection of the female category.
Those are not the same.
A transgender individual can sincerely identify as a woman.
That person can be deserving of respect and legal protection.
And an athletic organization can still determine that. Eligibility for a female competition must be based upon biological sex.
We must be capable of holding more than one thought at a time.
Human dignity is universal. Athletic eligibility is conditional.
Every athlete, regardless of identity, must satisfy eligibility rules. Age requirements are eligibility rules, weight classifications are eligibility rules, academic standards are eligibility rules, drug testing policies are eligibility rules, and sex based categories are eligibility rules.
No one has an automatic right to compete in every athletic category simply because that category feels more consistent with the person's identity.
I understand the instinct to find a solution in which no one feels rejected. It comes from a place of compassion.
But in competitive sports, every roster position given to one athlete is unavailable to another.
Every qualifying spot awarded to one competitor is denied to someone else.
Every scholarship has a recipient and someone who did not receive it.
There is no policy without consequences.
So when someone says the answer must always be inclusion, we have to ask inclusion into which category, under what rules, and at whose expense? Because if inclusion means that a biological female loses her position, her playing time, her scholarship, her record, or her championship, then we have not created a solution without exclusion.
We have merely decided which athlete is expected to absorb it. And too often, that athlete is the woman for whom the protected category was created in the first place.
This is why Sophie Cunningham's statement was not hateful. She did not deny anyone's humanity. She recognized that female athletes have rights too. The debate is not between kindness and cruelty. It is between competing ideas about fairness, and we should be able to examine those ideas without silencing women who defend their own athletic spaces.
When we return, we will look at the law, what Title 9 was designed to accomplish, how it transformed opportunities for women, and what the United States Supreme Court said just this summer about preserving female sports for biological females. Stay with us. We'll be right back.
Welcome back.
In the last segment, we discussed why the female athletic category exists. Biological differences are not an insult or a political intervention or invention. Excuse me. They are the reason separate women's sports were created.
Now we need to talk about the law and specifically Title 9.
Title IX is often invoked in conversations about women's sports, but it is frequently misunderstood.
The law was enacted in 1972 as part of the Education Amendments and signed by President Richard Nixon.
Its central provision is remarkably brief.
It says that no person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex be excluded from participation in, denied the benefits of, of, or subjected to discrimination under an education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.
The original statute does not specifically mention basketball, track, swimming locker rooms or athletic scholarships. But Congress later directed the federal government to issue regulations addressing athletics. Those regulations require schools to provide equal athletic opportunities for both sexes. They also expressly permit schools to operate separate teams for members of each sex when selection is based upon competitive skill or when the activity is a contact sport.
And yes, the federal regulation specifically identifies basketball as a contact sport.
That matters because Title 9 did not achieve equality by pretending that sex was a revelation. Irrelevant.
It achieved equality by recognizing that female students needed equal opportunities, including separate athletic teams, because simply declaring one open competition would not place girls or women on equal footing. The numbers tell the story. During the 1971-72 school year, only about 300,000 girls participated in high school sports in the United States.
Approximately 3.6 million boys participated.
Think about that.
That is a humongous difference.
For every girl competing in high school sport, There were roughly 12 boys.
Women's sports received only a tiny fraction of college athletic spending. Female athletes had fewer teams, fewer scholarships, inferior equipment, worse at facilities, less desirable practice times and far less institutional support.
Then came title nine.
Today, approximately 3.5 million high school girls participate in sports, along with roughly 235,000 women competing at the college level.
Title IX did not merely produce more basketball games. It opened educational doors. It created scholarships. It taught generations of young women discipline, leadership, teamwork, resilience and confidence.
And ultimately, it helped create the pipeline of athletes who made professional organizations like the WNBA possible.
That History is important because we are now being told that defending the biological female category may itself violate the civil rights law that created those opportunities.
That question reached the United States Supreme Court this year.
On June 30, 2026, the court decided two cases together, West Virginia vs. BPJ and Little vs. Hecox.
West Virginia and Idaho were among 27 states that enacted laws limiting female school sports to biological females.
The laws were challenged by transgender athletes who argued that excluding them from girls or women's teams violated Title IX and the Equal Protection clause of the 14th Amendment.
One of the challengers in the West Virginia case was a transgender student who had identified as a female from a young age and received puberty blockers and hormone treatment. The argument was not simply that gender identity should always control.
The student argued that because male puberty has been suppressed, the athletic advantages ordinarily associated with male puberty did not apply in the same way to that case.
That is an important distinction, and it was central to the disagreement among the justices.
By a vote of 6 to 3, the Supreme Court upheld the state's authority to preserve female sports for biological females.
The Court held that Title 9 allows schools to maintain separate women's and men's teams defined by biological biological sex.
It also held that West Virginia and Idaho did not violate the Equal Protection Clause by limiting female athletic teams to biological females, which was the basis for Title 9.
The majority's reasoning began with the language and history of Title ix. The Court explained that when Congress used the word sex in 1972, its ordinary meaning referred to biological sex, not gender identity.
The regulations permitted separate male and female teams precisely because physical differences between the sexes can affect safety, fairness, and athletic opportunity.
The majority also rejected the argument that every transgender athlete must receive an individualized physical assessment. The Court concluded that states do not have to compare the strength, speed, medical treatment, puberty history, and athletic ability of every individual athlete before applying the sex based eligibility rule.
That is significant because without a clear category, eligibility could become a case by case, medical and legal contest before every season, every championship, and perhaps every roster decision.
The Court recognized safety and competitive fairness as important governmental interests. It concluded that limiting female teams to biological females is substantially related to those interests and therefore satisfies constitutional reviews.
But we need to be precise about what the Court did and did not decide.
The Supreme Court said that Title IX permits schools to preserve female sports for biological females.
It did not say that Title IX requires every school or private organization in America to adopt exactly the same policy.
The Court upheld the ability of states and schools to draw that biological line. It did not issue a universal command covering every athletic association.
And to be fair, Title IX does not directly govern the wnba.
The WNBA is a private professional sports league, not a school or an educational program receiving federal financial assistance. Therefore, the Supreme Court's decision does not dictate who the WNBA must allow onto its teams.
But the decision is still tremendously relevant.
It confirms that defining female athletic eligibility according to biological sex is not automatically unlawful discrimination.
The highest court in the country recognized that preserving female sports can legitimately serve fairness, safety, and equal opportunity.
This dissenting justices saw the case differently, and their argument deserves to be presented honestly.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor argued that the blanket state laws may be too broad, particularly when applied to transgender girls who never experienced male puberty because they received puberty blockers. The dissent believed the lower courts should have conducted more factual analysis to determine whether particular transgender athletes retained any meaningful competitive advantage.
In that view, excluding every transgender girl without considering her individual development may impose a serious burden on without advancing fairness or safety in every case.
That is the strongest legal argument on the other side. But it also illustrates the practical problem identified by the majority. If eligibility depends on individual medical evidence, who makes that determination?
A school principal? A state athletic association? A panel of physicians? A judge? Hell, I wouldn't trust the NCAA to make that determination up until last year.
What medical records must a child disclose? And how about the fact that medical organizations are coming out saying that giving puberty blockers at a young age is detrimental to a child?
And how frequently must hormone levels be tested? What amount of physical advantage is considered too much? And do those standards change depending upon the sports, the athlete's position, or the level of competition?
A rule based upon biological sex is not perfectly tailored to every individual human being. Very few categorical rules are.
But it is objective, understandable and capable of being applied consistently here in Florida.
My home state law already addresses the issue. The Fairness and Women's Sports act requires public secondary schools and public colleges and universities to designate teams based upon biological sex and reserves female teams for students of the female sex.
Florida did not eliminate athletic opportunities for transgender students. The law preserves male, female and co educational designations while protecting the female category.
And that brings us back to the wnba.
The NCAA has a clear rule. The International Olympic Committee now has a clear rule.
27 states have acted. The Supreme Court has confirmed that states may constitutionally preserve female teams for biological females.
Yet the Women's National Basketball Association, a league whose very existence depends upon the biological female category, still does not publicly explain what the word women means in its eligibility agreement.
The WNBA is legally free to develop its own policy. But freedom to make a decision is not an excuse to avoid making one. And perhaps that is the deeper legacy of Title ix. Women's opportunities did not expand because everyone politely waited for society to become ready. They expanded because women demanded that their interest to be recognized, their teams to be funded, and their right to compete be taken seriously.
Today, women are once again asking institutions to take their interests seriously.
Not because transgender people lack dignity, not because every transgender athlete presents the same competitive circumstances, but because a protective female category cannot survive if the people managing it are unwilling to say whom it protects.
When we return, we will bring this conversation back to the wnba, Sophie Cunningham, Caitlin Clark, and the league's political culture.
And we will ask the question that has been building throughout tonight's show. When is enough finally enough?
When do we women get to be protected and not have to keep bending over backwards or saying that, fine, take away our rights to have a sports league of our own, lockers of our own.
Stay with us. We'll be right back.
So tonight we have examined the controversy surrounding the wnba, the reason the female athletic category exists, the history of Title ix, and the Supreme Court's recent decision affirming that states may preserve women's sports for biological females.
But for our final segment, I want to step away from the legal briefs, the scientific studies and the organizational policies for a moment.
I want to ask the question the average American is probably sitting at home asking, why in the world are we even having this discussion?
Honestly?
The WNBA can determine whether a player's toe touched the three point line by examining six different camera angles in slow motion.
It can measure an athlete's height, weight, wingspan, speed, shooting percentage, rebounding average, and every imaginable statistic down to the decimal point.
It could determine whether 3/10 of a second remained on the game clock.
But apparently, defining who is eligible to play in the Women's National Basketball association requires a task force, listening sessions, internal conversations, and perhaps a thesaurus.
At some point, ordinary people look at this and say, what are we doing?
Title 9 was enacted 54 years ago.
That is not ancient history.
Women watching this program remember when girls athletic program programs were an afterthought.
Women remember when female teams received the leftover equipment, the inconvenient practice times, the inferior facilities, and whatever funding, if any, remained after the boys programs were taken care of.
Title nine helped change that.
It told schools that girls and women were entitled to equal athletic opportunities, not symbolic opportunities. Not participation trophies, real teams, real competition, real scholarships, real facilities, and real institutional support.
It took decades of work to build what female athletes have today.
And now, barely a half a century later, women are being asked to explain why the category created to protect them would continue to be reserved for them.
I find that astonishing.
And I will tell you something else that baffles me.
I am no longer entirely sure what the word feminist is supposed to mean.
I grew up understanding feminine feminism as the principle that women are equal in human dignity and entitled to equal treatment under the law.
Women should be educated.
Women should own property. Women should vote. Women should pursue careers, serve in leadership, participate in sports, and make decisions about their own lives.
And believe it or not, this has all only been happening in the last 50 some years. Especially having our own property, our own checking accounts, being able to take out loans.
Feminism did not require us to pretend that men and women were physically identical.
It required society to stop using those differences as an excuse to treat women as inferior.
But today, one version of feminism seems unable or unwilling to define the very people it claims to represent.
I have to ask, if feminism cannot define a woman, whose right is it defending?
If female athlete cannot say this category belongs to biological women without being called hateful, what exactly happened to women speaking their truth?
If feminism means that women must surrender their boundaries whenever those boundaries conflict with someone else's identity, then that is not liberation.
That is another demand that women place themselves last. And I'm here to tell you we need to step up and start defending our position.
Women have heard that demand before.
Be agreeable. Do not make anyone uncomfortable. Do not be difficult. Do not say no too firmly. Make room. Be compassionate.
Accommodate everyone else. And if the accommodation costs you something, try not to mention and take that spoonful of poop and swallow it with a smile.
Now we have brought that same expectation into athletics.
Share the locker room, share the roster, share the scholarship, share the podium, share the record. And above all, do not object because your objection may hurt someone's feelings.
But the woman who loses that roster position has feelings.
The girl who loses the scholarship has a future.
The athlete who loses the record spent years training for it.
Why is passion demanded from her but so rarely extended to her?
That is why Sophie Cunningham's statement matters.
Cunningham did not say she hated transgender people. She said that love must include honesty and that young girls should not have to compete against biological males.
That is an entirely reasonable position shared by millions of Americans.
Yet some people immediately assigned her a complete political identity.
She has been called Maga Barbie, even though she describes herself as politically in the middle.
Apparently once a woman says that female sports should be for females, the Internet registers her to vote, selects her political party, chooses her church or denounces or for God forbid, if she actually does practice a faith and probably decides what she ate for breakfast.
And then there's Caitlin Clark.
I am not going to claim that I can read the mind of every WNBA player or tell you precisely why any individual player may dislike her. I cannot prove that neither can anyone else.
But it is impossible to ignore the tension surrounding a young woman who brought unprecedented attention, audiences and money to this very same league.
Clark does not present herself as a political activist.
She is white, she's heterosexual. She is immensely popular and focuses primarily on basketball.
Some fans believe that she does not fit comfortably within the political and cultural identity that parts of the dumbbe and BA have embraced.
Charles Barkley said this week that some WNBA players do not appear to like Caitlin Clark or Sophie Cunningham.
He suggested that jealousy, race and sexuality may all play some role, while honestly acknowledging that he could not prove precisely how much each factor contributes.
That is the responsible way to frame it.
We should not accuse individual players of motives we cannot establish. But we can ask whether a league that speaks constantly about diversity is equally comfortable with ideological diversity.
Does inclusion include women who disagree?
Does it include women who are politically moderate or conservative?
Does it include women who support transgender rights but draw a boundary at female athletic competition?
Or is diversity celebrated only when everyone arrives at the same approved conclusion?
The WNBA has every right to speak about politics and social issues.
But once a professional sports league chooses to become a cultural and political voice, it cannot suddenly complain that politics has entered the arena when someone raises a question it does not want to answer.
Enos Cantor, Freedom and Roy Sweit used satire to force that question.
I do not have to approve of every part of their performance.
Cantor's confrontation with Natasha Cloud became unnecessarily personal and distracted from the legitimate issue, which actually is a shame the Chicago sky was entitled to address conduct it considered disruptive or threatening inside its area. Absolutely.
But underneath this spectacle, the question remains who is eligible to compete in the women's league?
The WNBA responds that no transgender women has ever played in the league. But that is a question mark as to when we didn't think transgender athletes were going to compete in women's swimming event and that has occurred.
We didn't think that women were required now to share locker rooms with biological males, whether they identify as a trans woman or not. They that still had the equipment of a man.
This is just precisely when responsible institutions establish policies before the conflict occurs.
We do not wait for the building to catch fire before deciding whether it needs an emergency exit.
We do not wait until Election Day to decide who is eligible to vote. And we do not wait until after a disputed player takes a roster position to decide what the eligibility requirements were supposed to be.
Clear rules protect everyone.
They protect female athletes from losing opportunities. They protect transgender individuals from being used as political weapons during improvised crisis.
And they protect the league from accusations that it is changing standards depending upon who applies.
The answer does not have to be cruel.
I truly and earnestly believe transgender people deserve dignity.
They deserve personal safety. They deserve protection from harassment and violence.
They deserve the freedom to live their lives.
But none of those truths requires us to erase biological sex from competitive athletics.
Respecting someone's identity in society is not the same as guaranteeing eligibility for every protected category.
That is the distinction the WNBA must finally be willing to make. And perhaps the most frustrating part of this debate is that most Americans already understand that distinct distinction.
They're not sitting at home filled with hatred, and they are definitely not scratching their heads in bewilderment of what is a woman.
They understand why there are separate men's and women's sports.
They know why a high school boy cannot simply announce that he belongs on the girls team.
They know that bodies matter when human beings are running, jumping, lifting, swimming, colliding and competing.
They also understand that kindness does not require abandoning common sense. The average American is not confused. Our institutions are afraid to say out loud what ordinary people already know.
So when is enough enough?
It is enough when women are told that defending our boundaries makes us hateful. It is enough when a civil rights movement created to protect women can no long comfortably use the word female. It is enough when a biological women are expected to surrender opportunities so that institutions can advertise that they are compassionate.
And it is enough when the people entrusted with leading women's sports are more willing to criticize women like Sophie Cunningham than to clearly define and defend the female category.
Women fought too hard to enter the arena to be told 54 years later that asking the arena to remain open for women is an act of exclusion. It is not.
It is fairness. It is truth. And it is the entire reason women's sports exist.
We can respect transgender people. We can protect the dignity of every human being, and we can preserve women's sports for biological women.
Those principles are not contradictory.
No matter how many task force it takes the umb, the WNBA to figure that out. Respect everyone, protect women, and tell the truth. That is where I stand.
I'm Alina Gonzalez Dockery, and this is we the People, thanking you for joining us.
Until next time, good night.
