“Make the WNBA female again.”

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That was Enes Kanter Freedom’s recent Facebook slogan as he intensified his campaign around WNBA’s eligibility. A former NBA player who has refashioned himself as a prominent human-rights advocate—especially through his public criticism of the Turkish and Chinese governments—Freedom announced earlier that he would seek entry into the 2027 WNBA Draft. He has also floated himself as a future commissioner who could restore “fairness” to the league.

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But Freedom’s intervention does not seriously confront the difficult questions that sports-governance policy requires: collectively bargained eligibility standards, athlete privacy, and workplace rights of women players. Instead, it turns women’s professional basketball into the latest stage for an anti-trans political spectacle. Its premise is a joke at trans people’s expense: a former NBA player theatrically claims womanhood in order to invite the public to regard trans identity itself as fraudulent, opportunistic, or absurd.

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The real question is not whether the WNBA’s eligibility rules deserve thoughtful debate. The question is: who benefits when the WNBA is turned into an anti-gender culture-war spectacle?

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That question has become more urgent when another former NBA player, Royce White, joined Freedom’s performance. Both cis men have declared an intention to enter the 2027 WNBA Draft, framing their announcements as protests against what they call the league’s failure to sufficiently define the category of “woman.” White has stated that he “identifies as a transgender woman for the limited purpose of playing professional basketball.” The declaration makes clear that this is a stunt designed to make their claimed “womanhood” look like a loophole.

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The stunt depends on a distortion. The WNBA’s collective bargaining agreement states that only women may play in the league, although its public language does not further specify eligibility criteria. Commissioner Cathy Engelbert has said that player eligibility is collectively bargained and that the league would continue conversations with teams and the players’ union. The WNBA has also stated that it has no known transgender woman currently playing in the league.

 

Freedom and White are therefore not responding to the participation of an actual WNBA athlete or to an open roster dispute. They are manufacturing a hypothetical crisis and casting themselves as its indispensable protagonists. This is not a policy intervention. It is political theater—and political theater has an audience, an economy, and beneficiaries.

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Trans women, in this spectacle, become a political prop. Their identities are not treated as lived realities shaped by discrimination, medical gatekeeping, and public hostility. They are made into a rhetorical device through which cisgender men can perform outrage and claim moral authority. “Protecting women’s sports” becomes a moral alibi: a language that turns anti-trans contempt into the appearance of care for cis women.

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And who actually benefits from this performance?

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Royce White is among its clearest beneficiaries. The former NBA player and conservative political figure gains headlines, online attention, and relevance in a media ecosystem that rewards high-profile opposition to transgender inclusion. His sudden self-presentation as a defender of women’s sport is especially difficult to credit given his ongoing appeal of a domestic-abuse case involving his former wife and son. The WNBA stunt may not reveal his private motives, but it does function as an extraordinarily useful public repositioning: it helps recast a man confronting serious judicial findings of intimate harm as a guardian of women.

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Freedom benefits from the same attention economy. His “make WNBA female again” campaign converts a human-rights persona into a cultural-war brand. It offers him the visibility that outrage reliably produces: headline attention, social media circulation, television appearances, speaking invitations, follower growth, and partisan credibility. These forms of gains are political and reputational assets, and they matter especially for public figures whose influence depends on remaining visible and relevant.

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The sex-toy disruptions expose the commercial logic of this attention economy in its crudest form. They began in late July 2025, soon after the launch of a cryptocurrency meme coin called Green Dildo Coin. Over about two weeks, neon-green sex toys were thrown onto WNBA courts during at least six games, disrupting play and forcing athletes, officials, and arena staff to manage an act of sexualized harassment in their workplace.

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The group behind the coin later publicly claimed responsibility for organizing some of the incidents. Its representatives described the acts as “viral stunts” intended to draw attention to the new token, and said they wanted publicity without paying what it called an influencer “cabal.” The stunt was engineered as advertising: turning a WNBA game into a viral clip, attaching the coin’s name and color to the clip, driving online discussion, and converting visibility into speculative interest in the token. The coin reportedly nearly tripled in value during its first week.

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In 2026, the group reportedly claimed a further disruption and explicitly inserted itself into the controversy over trans participation in women’s sport. It threatened to continue interrupting games unless the WNBA adopted language defining women by “biological sex.” The group had moved from using misogynistic spectacle to market a meme coin to using that same spectacle to insert itself into the anti-gender culture war.

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These incidents might not seem equivalent, but they share the same underlying assumption: that women’s basketball is a resource to be extracted.

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Political figures extract relevance. Media platforms extract engagement. Crypto promoters extract financial attention. Misogynistic online communities extract amusement, status, and the satisfaction of forcing professional women players into an unwanted public joke.

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The WNBA Players Association had declared that its players would not be used as “political pawns.” Women’s basketball does not need men who claim to protect it while treating its players as scenery for political performance. Trans women do not need to be made into the symbolic enemy through which others build their brands. And the WNBA certainly does not need another spectacle.

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It needs the public—all of us—to recognize the spectacle for what it is and to stop rewarding those who profit by making women athletes and trans people pay the price.

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September 4, 2026