Imagine you’re walking into Westminster wearing an I ❤️ DOGS t-shirt when you get stopped by security.
DOG SHOW COP: “Ma’am, we’re going to need you to cover your shirt.”
YOU: “Um… why?”
DOG SHOW COP: “It creates an unsafe environment for cat people.”
YOU [looking around for Allen Funt]: “This is a dog show.”
DOG SHOW COP: “That’s exactly the sort of inflammatory rhetoric we will not tolerate here at the beloved Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show.”
If that sounds like a perfectly reasonable exchange to you, welcome to the WNBA, where expressing support for women in women’s sports now makes you a raging, malicious transphobe.
(Who’s gonna tell them that the W in WNBA doesn’t stand for Woke?)
In case you missed the drama, on Sunday night, a mother and her 17-year-old daughter attended the now infamous Fever-Dream game wearing t-shirts from XX-XY Athletics, a company whose wildly controversial position is that a league created expressly to give women fair and equal athletic opportunities should be limited to [*checks notes*] women.
The mother-daughter duo reportedly paid a grand apiece to sit courtside and were quietly enjoying the game when WNBA security singled them out and informed them that their shirts were “offensive.” According to the women, they were given the choice of covering their egregious tees or leaving the arena.
Again, in case you glossed over the critical kernel of this story, the women’s shirts bore the biological shorthand for female and male. They did not say TRANS PEOPLE ARE NOT PEOPLE. They did not feature the words TRANS ATHLETES inside a giant red circle with an angry slash through it. They contained a grand total of zero threats, insults, or slurs. They said XX-XY. That’s it. To get from two sets of chromosomes to “they’re openly dunking on the entire non-binary athletic community” requires a level of self-absorption typically reserved for fitness influencers and Kanye West.
“Some transphobic [rhymes-with-brickheads] were again wearing XX-XY shirts at Sunday’s game between the Indiana Fever and Atlanta Dream,” wrote The Defector, a self-described “sports and culture website” that was founded because “the media is [rhymes-with-ducked] now.”
“Everyone knows what the XX-XY shirt—a truly ugly piece of merchandise made by a brand that raises money for organizations that seek to strip trans people of their rights—means when worn in public. It tells everyone that the person wearing it sees trans people not as human beings, but as targets whose very existence must be protested. It is one of the oldest and most basic forms of bigotry, the equivalent of a big sign reading, ‘Trans people not welcome.’”
Does it, Defector? Does it really?
Because last time I checked, supporting one group does not automatically constitute an attack on every group that isn’t that group. Does sporting a Taylor Swift hoodie in any way suggest that Selena Gomez fans are subhuman? Does a SAVE THE WHALES bumper sticker imply that the car’s driver despises dolphins and hopes they all get caught up in a giant tuna net made of razor wire? Is an I ❤️ NY tote bag insinuating that New Jersey sucks? (Whatever you might think of New Yorkers, as a native myself, I can tell you it is not.)
***Also I will add that I own several pieces of XX-XY merch—this pullover is my fave—and I can tell you that they are the softest, most well-constructed and thoughtfully designed articles of athletic wear I have ever owned. True story. And no, I’m not an affiliate or an ambassador.
Advocacy is not exclusionary. Preference is not persecution. And supporting a protected category for female athletes does not, by some mystical law of social justice, translate to hatred of transgender people. You have to add that part yourself.
Inserting malice somewhere it doesn’t inherently exist has become something of a national pastime. If you’re white, you’re racist. If you’re in a traditional marriage, you hate gays. If you believe in immigration enforcement, you’re xenophobic. And if you believe the rights that women fought for decades to secure should be protected, you obviously have a secret collection of transgender voodoo dolls you spend your days jabbing with burning needles. It’s a clever little rhetorical racket, really: invent the hatred, assign it to your opponent, and then congratulate yourself for bravely confronting it.
How do these whiny, woebegone wingnuts not understand the painfully basic concept of categories? I’m not even talking about biology; I’m referring to the simple, everyday system we use in nearly every aspect of existence to classify people according to things like age and ability. Classrooms. Youth sports. Weight classes. Special Olympics. Veterans’ organizations. Children’s menus. Nobody accuses the seventh-grade teacher of hating eight-year-olds because they aren’t allowed in her class. Nobody sees a senior discount and sues Denny’s for marginalizing millennials. We create categories because sometimes differences matter—for fairness, safety, competition, development, eligibility, or simply because that is the entire freaking point of having the category in the first place.
Women’s sports are not some baffling exception to this principle. The category is the purpose. It’s the feature. We didn’t build a women’s basketball league because ESPN had a weekly hour of programming it needed to fill; we built it because biological sex produces meaningful physical differences and female athletes deserve a competitive category of their own. Nobody would argue that a 6’8”, 240-pound biological man who admits he identifies as a biological man should be allowed to play in the WNBA, just as nobody would argue that someone who never served in the military but has seen every single episode of M*A*S*H should have access to VA benefits, or a 27-year-old—no matter how mature she may be—is entitled to AARP pricing. Exclusion from a category for which you don’t meet the defining criteria is not the same thing as exclusion from society. It’s not hatred or phobia or prejudice. It’s reality.
If you’re struggling to accept that, allow me to introduce you to the biggest sports scandal you probably never heard of.
At the 2000 Paralympics in Sydney, more than 4,000 athletes represented their countries as they competed for the coveted podium spots. Spain’s men’s “intellectually disabled” team annihilated the competition and took home the gold. There was just one teensy snag: 10 of the team’s 12 players reportedly faked their disabilities. An undercover journalist who’d joined the team exposed the fraud, and Spain was stripped of its medal. The fallout was so sweeping that the entire category disappeared from the Paralympics until officials could devise a reliable way to determine who actually qualified for it.
And guess what? Nobody responded, “Wow, the Paralympics hate neurotypical people.” Everyone understood the obvious: the protected category becomes meaningless the minute you erase the thing that made it a category in the first place.
In the case of the “transphobic tee” fiasco, the WNBA ultimately admitted that its security had screwed up.
“The WNBA is aware of interactions at last night’s game in Atlanta in which fans were asked by league security to cover their shirts,” the league said in a statement (posted nowhere publicly, FWIW). “This should not have happened.”
Riley Gaines, the 12-time NCAA All-American swimmer who’s become a powerful voice for women in sports, was not impressed by the half-assed apology.
“This is something Michael Scott would say in The Office,” she tweeted. “@WNBA is so unserious.”
Meanwhile, we’ve got actual WNBA coaches wearing “TRANS KIDS BELONG” t-shirts to games. I agree! They absolutely belong… on teams with other trans kids. Or perhaps on teams with other athletes who pee standing up. (They can even pick!) “We need to protect transgender athletes,” self-styled advocates insist. With all due respect… protect them from what? The devastating thought of playing against a field they can’t dominate by biological default? Because nobody that I know is saying or thinking “trans kids shouldn’t play sports.” This is literally about which category they can compete in. Trying to make it about anything else is like putting your pork chop on a fancy plate and calling it filet mignon.
I realize that, for the most part, champions of trans rights are operating completely without malice. They genuinely feel for kids who struggle with gender identity, who feel different or excluded, and who just want to be part of a team. I feel for them, too. I truly do. No decent person wants to see another human being bullied or ostracized. But kids can be spectacular little jerks to anyone who looks, acts, talks, walks, or dresses differently. They’ll destroy you for carrying the wrong backpack or wearing last year’s sneakers. (To be clear, I’m not endorsing this; just acknowledging it.) You think the dude in the dress demanding to use the girls’ locker room is somehow going to be magically exempt from the ruthless social hierarchy of adolescence?
And at what point did caring deeply about one group turn into not caring about the other at all? WHAT ABOUT THE GIRLS? They don’t belong? They don’t deserve protecting? Their opportunities, records, roster spots, safety, and scholarships are just collateral damage in the compassion wars?
What I love the very most about this story is how spectacularly the Feelings Police’s attempt to mute a message backfired. Had security simply left two women alone to watch basketball, a total of seventeen people might have noticed what they were wearing. Instead, the WNBA handed XX-XY the kind of publicity money can’t buy.
Well done, WNBA. If you’re not too busy, maybe you could send your security detail over here to try to shut down this Substack. I could use the free press.
Quick question: what in the hell are "trans rights?" Presumably, it's some unique set of rights, since they already have the exact same rights as everyone else.
So it really is that they want extra rights, over and above everyone else. To that I say, in the most charitable way it can be phrased: Get over yourself.
Where are all those liberal women from the 60’s and 70’s fighting for women’s rights??? Oh yeah, their dumb libtard asses are now fighting for men to have women’s rights