From Olympic boxing to the WNBA, gender ideology is colliding with the basic realities of athletic competition
Cristiano Ronaldo told an interviewer this past weekend that 2026-27 could be his last season. I half-expected him to add: “As a man.” But he’s unlikely to show up in the Irish Women’s Premier League, for now. Yet there’s a European flavor to the latest ‘thing’ to hit the American sports scene, where two men have ‘become women’ in order to prove a point.
Slam Dunk for Woke
The Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) has never had a more remarkable season than the current one. There was DiJonnai Carrington’s bad sportswomanship in posting “White Privilege” on her X account shortly after being ejected from a game for clotheslining Sophie Cunningham, and the ensuing racebaiting and stupidity that accompanied it. However, it was the latter woman who suffered the wrath of the wokerati when she said in a July ESPN article that she wants to protect little girls from having to compete against or undress in locker rooms next to “biological men.”
The ‘cause’ was taken up by grifters of all persuasions, the provocateurs who genuinely whip up fear that there’s a flood of men identifying as women for the fun of it, and the just-as-demented mob who believe that what you identify as matters more than using a single brain cell. Cunningham, for her part, has been an ally of the LGBT community, and many players in the WNBA have backed her. However, the wokerati weren’t with her.
Earlier this month, 6-foot-3 center Julie Tétart, who destroyed the 2nd tier of French pro basketball last season, stated that if an offer to play in the WNBA were to come in, it would be considered. The biological male, who averaged 21.2 points and 20.2 rebounds per game in 2025-26 has never played in the NCAA or any top European league. In fact, just a few years ago, ‘they’ were an average player in the 5th tier of French men’s basketball. After coming out as a transwoman in 2021, Tétart took off three years from the sport before returning to play for the Monaco Basket Association as a woman.
The grifters on all sides took delight in pushing Julie’s willingness to play in the WNBA because their rules state that you simply have to be a ‘woman’ to be eligible. And that’s when “this sh1t just got real” to quote Martin Lawrence in Bad Boys 2, when two bad boys entered the scene.
Farce imitating Farcical Fiction
I can’t vouch for Bad Boys 2 as I didn’t see it, but I can tell you that 2002’s Juwanna Mann is way too close to the mark for anyone who loves the sport. In the fictional version of what is transpiring now: a down-on-his-luck male basketball player slaps on some lipstick and a wig to earn a place in the top women’s league. In today’s real world simulation, two former NBA players, Royce White (35) and Enes Kanter Freedom (34),have said they’re women, or identify as such for the purposes of playing basketball, and have declared for the WNBA draft in 2027. And it could only be these two, for now, who would do such a thing.
Freedom is a Swiss-born Turkish player taken 3rd overall in the 2011 NBA Draft by the Utah Jazz. The 6-foot-10 center played 11 years in the NBA, averaging 11.2 points per game. In 2016, he called Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan the “Hitler of our century” and became the subject of arrest warrants from Ankara. He has slammed China, supports Israel, and after getting US citizenship, said that he plans to run for Congress in 2028.
Minnesota-born White was the 16th overall pick in 2012 by the Houston Rockets but only played three NBA games, for the Sacramento Kings. With self-confessed anxiety issues, a fear of flying, and decades of issues with the law, the 6-foot-8 power forward has also slammed China, joined Black Lives Matter protests, and as a Republican Party member, tried to win the nomination to run for Congress in 2022, ran for Senate in 2024 and lost a primary race in 2026. Unlike Freedom, he has criticized Israel for its response to the October 7 terror attacks.
‘Some are more equal than others’
Both former NBA players claim to be doing it out of concern for women, forcing the WNBA to clarify what it means by ‘woman’. While White has previously criticized the “pervasive effect” of the LGBTQ community on society, in Freedom’s draft declaration, he said he is not mocking or disrespecting “any community or personal choices.” The last two words sent the wokerati into a meltdown.
“He’s saying that being gay is a choice,” a caller to ESPN New York radio station fumed, before stating that she still supported “her” opportunity to play in the WNBA. I was surprised that the host didn’t pick up on Freedom being a “he” when describing being homosexual as a choice, but “her” with reference to being allowed to play in the WNBA.
It’s that very clear dichotomy in this discussion that is most disturbing. Even before US President Joe Biden entered his final year in office, a majority of his fellow citizens were rejecting the notion that “biological men,” as Sophie Cunningham described them, should be allowed take part in women’s sports. This was the case even as illiberal media outlets like CNN, WaPo, and the New York Times were calling men who had actually undergone full sex-change operations transphobes for daring to protect girls and women in sports.
It reached a peak at the Paris Olympics in 2024 when, to keep up the ‘Russia bad’ narrative, Western nations lined up to remove the International Boxing Association (IBA), the governing body of amateur boxing, from controlling that sport at the games and replacing it with a makeshift outfit called World Boxing (WB). As a result, Algerian boxer Imane Khelif, banned in 2023 by the IBA for failing a gender test, punched to gold in the women’s category. Only for WB to, exactly a year later, threaten Khelif with a competition ban unless the boxer underwent a newly instated gender test. Khelif, in response, took WB to court to be allowed to compete without gender testing, failed and in March this year decided to return to professional boxing.
The diminishing mob demanding that transwomen’s rights be respected in sports didn’t seem to have an issue with women potentially getting punched in the head by people who failed gender tests. At the time Khelif refused to undertake a new gender test last year as mandated by WB, on Capital Sports, I used the same phrase that I was told by a British sports coach in relation to doping, “Never take a test you’ll fail.” And that is what the WNBA is facing now, a test it will fail, no matter what.
Time of reckoning for women’s sports
Speaking with Capital Sports, transgender ex-elite athlete Kristen Worley labelled moves such as those by Freedom and Royce as “opportunistic” and that it would be “played upon by extremists.” The Canadian, the first athlete to go through the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) Stockholm Consensus gender verification process, has long been an advocate for shining a light on the devastating effects that actual transitioning has on the body. Men posing as women just to compete is “simply wrong on all levels,” Worley stated.
Kristen is right about extremists jumping on the mess, an entirely predictable mess that every sports body is about to face. On June 1, 2025, the English Football Association, complying with a UK Supreme Court ruling, banned transgender women from competing in official women’s football across England. It caught flak for a while, but the decision was based on defining the term ‘women’ as ‘biological women’ [those born as women] and not ‘assigned male at birth’. Quickly closing the loophole and being brave enough to face down the initial wave of wokerati outrage worked, English football, for men and women, continues to flourish.
Former Capital Sports guest Jennifer Sey, who has been an outspoken critic of undefined gender policies in sports, called the situation with the WNBA “hilarious” and applauded the ex-NBA players, calling it “necessary” to highlight absurdity in policy flaws and that it will force the WNBA to “clarify biological female eligibility.” The ex-US champion gymnast was the driver for change in safeguarding the health and wellbeing of young gymnasts in the US and exposed the horrendous wrongdoings of her nation’s governing body after multiple sex abuse scandals.
Slam Dunk or Flagrant Foul?
The WNBA are currently in committee mode to try find an escape route. They are “feeling embattled,” one official reportedly told US sports personality Stephen A. Smith, who blamed the organization for leaving “the door open for it to happen.” In such a state, it might be difficult for the organization tasked with running the biggest female sports competition in the world to think rationally.
On August 13, a week after Freedom and White declared for the WNBA draft, and Julie Tétart announced that an invite to the league would be welcomed, the WNBA task force made a public statement. Rightly, in many senses, they denounced “bad-faith efforts” to use the situation to “demean or marginalize others.” Anyone with a sense of decency would agree that there were grifters and troublemakers using a flawed policy for their own gains. But then, they basically did something impossible in basketball, they scored an ‘own basket’.
“There are no immediate eligibility matters affecting the WNBA,” they stated.
I phoned a current WNBA player, who formerly played in Russia, for her take on the taskforce’s statement.
“It’s making a mockery of our league, our game, us [as] players. Like, come on, I’m seriously gonna go up for rebounds with Enes Kantor? What next, MJ [Michael Jordan] becomes Michelle?”
On a serious note, she pointed out safety concerns. “When someone gets hurt, those idiots saying diversity is our strength and guys are now girls, and stuff, will they pay medical bills, [because] they’re damn expensive, you know?”
You would hope that the WNBA would take a stand, like the English FA, for common sense. But hope is lost in this current simulation, and the ruling by Golf Australia on August 21 could embolden the WNBA mandarins to fudge. Golf Australia, having in 2016 ruled that players who passed through puberty as males were not allowed to compete as females, suddenly threw the rule out the window. Now, trans women can play in female pro events if their testosterone levels are within certain limits and within medical guidelines. However, in non-elite amateur competition, you can enter based on gender identity.
A former colleague, who works as a teaching professional at a golf course in Germany, messaged me today, saying simply “Bring back Crocodile Dundee!” I think even Paul Hogan would have his work cut out trying to make sense of the mess Down Under. As for trying to rescue the WNBA, it looks like Woke 2.0 is already underway.
