OPINION:
There has been a lot of talk lately about transgender athletes and the WNBA, but I have yet to hear anyone name what this conversation is actually about. It is not about protecting women. It is about humbling them.
I competed in NCAA Division II women’s basketball. Let me be clear about where I stand: I do not believe biological males should be playing in girls’ or women’s sports. But I recognize exactly what men like Royce White and Enes Kanter Freedom are doing when they say that they will “declare” for the WNBA draft as women.
They are not confused about their gender; they are running a troll, one built to force women to say out loud that men are bigger and stronger. And here is the thing nobody seems to admit: No woman is arguing otherwise.
Mr. White is a perfect illustration of the insecurity underneath all of this. He was picked in the first round in 2012 and his entire NBA career came to three games and a single shot: one jumper, which he missed. Zero for one, at the level he now insists he could dominate.
Yet Mr. White told reporters that WNBA players would “have nightmares” guarding him. He has bragged about his hand size and compared himself to Michael Jordan.
Mr. Jordan is my GOAT — greatest of all time. Royce White is not it. Not on the court and certainly not off it, where Mr. Jordan would never have lowered himself to a stunt like this.
If anyone here needs humbling, it is the man who went zero for one, not the women who actually made it.
That is the tell. Men like Mr. White see women’s success as a personal affront, a challenge to be taken on — when no player on that court is even thinking about them. They cannot stand the fact that women are out there sweating, competing, taking the ball strong to the rack and getting fouled — and not centering men.
I have lived a smaller version of this my whole life. When I played basketball — especially when I still had my college basketball body — I lost count of the men who had never played organized ball but wanted to challenge me to a game of one-on-one.
“I bet I could beat you,” they would say. They never challenged the guys who played college ball. They just wanted to prove they could beat a woman.
In graduate school, a man used to shadowbox around me on campus, saying, “Come on, I can take you.” I would keep walking. He later called me “the big bird,” the target everyone wants to take down. Just my presence registered as a challenge.
You do not hear this about women’s tennis, gymnastics, swimming or ballet. Women in those sports are extraordinary athletes too. But theirs are not contact sports, and men can still fold them into their picture of femininity.
Basketball is different.
It is coded as a man’s game, the sport that little boys grow up shooting in the driveway and dreaming about, so a woman excelling at it reads, to an insecure man, as an intrusion. I have even heard commentators decide which WNBA players are “acceptable” by whether they find them pretty enough. The male gaze decides who gets to compete.
And if any of this were truly about protecting women, someone needs to explain Clay Travis. The OutKick founder publicly offered $10 million for the WNBA champion Las Vegas Aces to play a boys’ high school team of his choosing. It fits a pattern I have heard for years: men insisting that any 14-year-old boy could take on professional women and win.
The goal is never safety; the goal is to make sure a grown woman is never ranked above a child.
You cannot claim that women must be shielded from stronger male bodies and then stake millions on staging exactly that matchup. It was never about protection. It was about humiliation.
Here is what these men miss. I played pickup against men constantly. They guarded me hard and made me better, but not one ever tried to hurt me. They were gentlemen who knew I wanted to get better.
Yes, men generally carry more muscle mass, bone density and lung capacity. That difference is why women’s sports exist as a separate category and why Title IX gave girls the chance to compete on their own terms
Women did not march for the right to beat men. We wanted the chance to play.
But an insecure man projects. He assumes that if he were dominating, he would walk around certain that he was better than everyone, so he decides the winning women feel that way about him — and he moves to put them in their place.
Women do not need ’putting’ anywhere. They are playing basketball. The men with the megaphones are the ones with something to prove, and everyone can see it.
• Princella D. Smith is a firm director and former NCAA Division II women’s basketball player.
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