Victor Penney:
I’ve never been a fan of the Women’s National Basketball Association, but it’s been difficult to ignore lately and for all the wrong reasons. There has been a slew of wild headlines surrounding the league and the best way to summarize everything boils down to two words: dumpster fire.
This is a serious problem for the WNBA because if the main focus is on the chaos instead of their product on the court, then they’re doing something wrong, unless they want to be known as a carnival sideshow. Ultimately, though, the issue isn’t about professionalism or even women’s basketball. What really matters here has nothing to do with athletics and everything to do with what it means to be human and God’s divine plan for creation.
The genesis of this recent gong show stems from comments by one of the league’s most polarizing stars. During an interview with ESPN in late July, Indiana Fever guard Sophie Cunningham addressed her stance on biological men playing in women’s sports.
“I got a lot of negative feedback about me hating trans,” she told the outlet, claiming that she has “never” made anti-transgender comments, which sounds fine and honest enough. What really triggered her opponents was the follow-up line: “I think that I am here to extend love … And I want to protect young girls in a locker room, or young girls in sport who shouldn’t have to go against biological men.”
It doesn’t take a rocket surgeon to do the cultural math on this one: when you have an athlete nicknamed “MAGA Barbie” and she throws a truth bomb onto the front lines of an ideological battlefield, the result will always be nuclear.
In response to the interview’s release, a handful of supporters showed up outside Sophie’s next game in Seattle while her detractors booed her inside the arena. She was jeered in Canada, too, when the Fever squared off against the Toronto Tempo, but the story doesn’t end there.
Two former NBA players, Royce White and Enes Kanter Freedom, jumped into the fray, claiming to be trans and publicly declared their intentions to enter the 2027 WNBA draft. As expected, they faced plenty of backlash online and White took to social media to address his critics. Here’s an excerpt from a post he made on X in late August: “Everybody was all pride this inclusion that until Roysha (Royce) popped on the scene, now it’s get surgery, take hormones, wear a dress? The hypocrisy is astounding!”
Yes, it is.
Freedom, meanwhile, was ejected from a WNBA game. When the Indiana Fever was visiting the Chicago Sky, Enes was there; he had a seat near one of the baskets and was wearing a T-shirt that read: “Woman noun. Adult human female.” I love it when clothing makes more sense than gender activists, don’t you? Late in the third quarter, Sky guard Natasha Cloud confronted Freedom, and after a heated exchange, security escorted him out of the building.
All that aside, the WNBA’s labour agreement with the players’ union states that only women are eligible to compete in the association, and reports say White and Freedom won’t be allowed in the upcoming draft. Do you know what’s funny, though? A transgender athlete has already played in the league. Layshia Clarendon, a biological woman, spent 11 seasons in the WNBA and was the first active player to openly say she identified as transgender and non-binary in late 2020. Confusion now hath made his masterpiece.
The league assigned a task force back in August to address the transgender question in response to the theatrics from White and Freedom, but so far, they haven’t come out with a set of eligibility requirements or an official definition of what a woman is.
What a mess. This is what happens when we abuse and reject God’s gifts of life and sexuality: it always leads to spiritual mayhem with assaults on divine revelation, and those of us who want to adhere to the Faith become targets. Saint Anthony of the Desert once predicted this exact kind of lunacy: “A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him, saying, ‘You are mad; you are not like us.’” I think it’s clear – he was right.
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