WNBA DECLINES TO CHANGE VAGUE ELIGIBILITY RULES AFTER MEETING ON TRANS PLAYERS

There is no realistic objection that the American left wing can make, since they have maintained that merely “identifying” as a woman makes one a woman. If Kanter and White claim to be women, then they are women who can play in the WNBA until the WNBA says otherwise. After all, the WNBA had a “transgender” player who retired in 2024, Layshia Clarendon (a biological woman), who identified as she/her/him/his/they/them simultaneously and interchangeably.

The WNBA is in favor of self-identification being the standard for allowing boys to play against (and change alongside) girls, as evidenced by the league celebrating two boys who dominated girls’ track in the state of Connecticut. Therefore, self-identification must be the standard for the WNBA, too.

That brings us to the biological differences between WNBA players and men. Kanter was listed at 6’10”, making him taller than all but one player in the WNBA (New York Liberty center Han Xu stands at 6’11”). As you could guess from a basic height distribution, there are plenty of men in the NBA even taller than Kanter, including 7’4” centers Victor Wembanyama. One of the chief biological differences between men and women is that men are taller on average, and that even holds true for the top height ranges, which would make up the two professional basketball leagues.

More than that, though, is the athletic advantage. Despite being in the WNBA for four years and towering over everyone in the league, the aforementioned Han Xu has never dunked a basketball in a WNBA game. The all-time leader in dunks is 6’9” Brittney Griner, who has consistently towered over the league and thrown down 27 dunks over a 13-year career (seven of those dunks were done in the league’s All-Star game, where the defense is more lackadaisical). Griner hasn’t dunked in a regular-season or playoff game since 2023.

Griner is an all-time great in the WNBA. Kanter, during his NBA career, was a solid if unspectacular starter. The two are of similar height, and Kanter had the challenge of playing against men taller than him, while Griner has almost always been the tallest player on the court, often by a considerable margin. And, despite all of that, Kanter has thrown down 274 dunks over an 11-year career. Even normalizing for games played, you can see the difference: Kanter dunked the ball about once every three games, while Griner has dunked the ball about once every 15 games.

In fact, as of Aug. 6, 2026, there have only been nine players to dunk in a WNBA game, totaling 39 dunks between them. Griner is the only one with more than two. Only two other active players have dunked a basketball: 6’6” Jonquel Jones and 6’6” Dominique Malonga, with one each (and with Malonga’s coming in the All-Star game as well). For comparison, in the NBA just last season, over 450 players recorded a dunk, with over 125 of them recording more dunks in just that season than Griner has over her entire WNBA career.

When you combine the height and athletic differences, you get a world where seeing a dunk in a random boys’ high school basketball game is more common than seeing one in a random WNBA game. The difference in athleticism between 16-year-old boys and fully grown women is so great that you can witness high school boys destroy backboards on a random Thursday night in a way that WNBA players and fans could only dream of witnessing in a women’s game.

The athletic difference is so great, in fact, that women’s college basketball teams consistently use male practice players to push and challenge the women’s teams. Those are men who played high school basketball and could have, at best, played low-level Division 1 college basketball, going up against the best women’s college basketball players on the planet. In contrast, you do not see the Duke men’s basketball team practicing against female players to push themselves.

This difference in athletic realities is not limited to basketball. Even the lowest level of testosterone typically found in men is four times greater than the highest level found in women, and testosterone suppression does little to close that gap. World Rugby performed a study to evaluate allowing “transgender women” in women’s rugby and concluded that men are, on average, “stronger by 25%-50%, are 30% more powerful, 40% heavier, and about 15% faster.” In a contact sport like rugby, this would lead to a 20%-30% increased chance of injury for a female rugby player tackled by her male “transgender” counterparts.

In track, high school boys consistently run faster than the women’s world record in 100-meter, 200m, 400m, 800m, 1500m, and 1600m races (among others). Male Olympic weightlifters who weigh less than 148 pounds consistently out-lift the world records set by the 330+lb strongwomen who make up the top women’s weight division. Famously, the U.S. Women’s National Team, made up of the best female soccer players on the planet, lost 5-2 in a game to a team of boys under the age of 15.

THE WNBA’S TRANSGENDER CONUNDRUM: WHAT DOES THE ‘W’ STAND FOR?

If the best, or even random, male high school athletes consistently outperform the athletic feats of the best female athletes to ever walk the planet, it stands to reason that a given high school boy who decides to “identify” as a girl will have an enormous athletic advantage over his competitors in girls’ volleyball, soccer, basketball, track, swim, or any other sport. And yet, that is what the WNBA has supported for the nation’s female athletes, celebrating as boys waltz into and dominate girls’ sports at the high school level.

It would be only fair, then, that the WNBA throw the doors open for men among its own ranks, so that the athletic difference between the WNBA’s top athletes and someone like Enes Kanter Freedom can be put on display for all to see, just in case the analysis above is not quite convincing enough.