Oh, the real situation works. But the metaphor was awkwardly presented.
No one is going to draft this Clay Travis guy anyway. All he wants is attention.
The link in the OP indicates that Travis is suggesting he wants to buy/operate an WNBA franchise, not play for one.
The OP also mentions two former NBA players who have apparently applied for the draft, but all they likely want is attention, and trolling, too.
Yeah, I think I got confused between the “wanna play” and “wanna buy” assholes.
It would be political suicide for any team to draft Kanter and White.
All that said, what exactly is the WNBA stance right now on transgender athletes? Are they requiring rigorous proof of transition, or do they indeed have a “you just got to claim you are a woman and you are a woman” stance?
Who cares? Are there any elite trans basketball players?
'Zactly.
Thinking that WNBA ought to have a policy is simply falling for the RW propaganda panic that a plague of trans folks are invading all of sports.
The plague is imaginary. The need for a policy is imaginary. The goal is to fill gullible heads with trans-panic.
Evidently at least some people are falling for that garbage.
I can see a benefit to coming up with a policy now. If the WNBA waits until there’s a particular transgender athlete who has the talent and desire to join the league, and only then decides on who is eligible, a lot of attention is going to come down on that individual. They could decide the rule now and it would be purely on the merits of the issue. That would save a lot of stress on the first player to come along.
The downside is that however the league decides it will bother some people. I’m sure they don’t want to alienate some portion of their fans for an issue that may never arise.
Setting a rule in the absence of an actual example leads to bad rules – people often fail to think of how things might actually play out. We could be setting rules for people who were born in low-gravity places (the Mars colony!) and thus grew taller. But we aren’t. And in general, setting rules for things that have never happened is bad practice, because it distracts you from more important priorities. And also, yes, any rule would probably alienate someone, over an issue that might never arise.
Your last two posts here are so on point! Seriously, you’re fighting the good fight.
The WNBA has quite logically not even thought about it because it never came up and is very unlikely to. Elite basketball players don’t just spring out of the ground; they are developed either in US colleges or equivalent European minor leagues, and those leagues don’t have transgender players. Nobody just does some shooting drills at the local gym and becomes a professional basketball player. It’s as significant a concern as the security challenge of protecting the arenas from marauding unicorns.
No team is going to draft Enes Kanter Freedom (his actual name, apparently) even if he could score 90 points a game because he wouldn’t accept the job, and even if he would accept the job no team would want a stupid performative dickfuck on the team who’d cause ticket sales to drop to maybe 120 fans a night, and if they DID want him and he DID play, the fans would throw wrenches at him.
Distract, distract, hate, wedge issue, hate some more, anti-woman propaganda, self promotion, general assholery, hate, distract.
I’m not sure that’s true. There are plenty of rules in sports that cover rare events that hardly ever happen. There are also people who look for loopholes they can exploit to gain an advantage.
Maybe you’re right and a real case will never come up, and the league’s decision to duck the issue will turn out to be correct. But if there ever is a transgender athlete who truly wants to play in the league, she’ll find herself at the center of a very contentious political issue, and subject to a lot of scrutiny and stress. Will a rule made for her then be applied to the next transgender woman, or will the league decide on a case-by-base basis?
The guys who are pulling this stunt are jerks. I don’t think they have any intention to play; just trying to force the league to take a stand and make a rule banning them. I can kinda see their point. Sports put rules in place in advance so everyone knows where they stand and what to prepare for.
That will be true whether or not they make a rule now.
In my humble opinion, the best rules are developed by treating the first instances case-by-case, and then looking for patterns and guidelines, after you have a sense of the real issues that will arise.
Yes, but I think the scrutiny and stress will be less if there’s an eligibility rule in place, and the league sticks to its decision.
The WNBA is a for-profit enterprise, right? They’re not accountable to the public, and they’re not subject to any regulatory organization. They can just make their hard-and-fast rule “Anyone’s eligible if we say they’re eligible”. They can also say “Anyone’s eligible if they’re the sort of person who will result in ticket sales to the games”. And then, if the issue ever does come up, they can look at what surveys say about what ticket-buyers want (which might be different from what surveys say right now), and make decisions based on that.
Truly is trans, wants to play and is good enough to be drafted. The likelihood of that ever happening isn’t high.
Case by case for such unusual edge cases would be fine by me.
They’re accountable to the public to the extent that they need people to buy tickets and watch the games on television. Any decision is going to alienation some group, which is probably why the league hasn’t made a decision and would like the issue to go away. That’s probably also why the male players are trying to force the issue.
It would suck if a transgender woman put in the years of training and practice to be good enough to play in the league, and only then did they make the decision that she couldn’t.
I think the way the league is handling it now would make it more likely that a transgender player (should the occasion ever come to pass) would be allowed in. Waiting until there’s a face on the issue would make it harder to exclude her. No one would want to be seen turning away someone who had worked so hard to be included. Maybe that’s part of the calculus for why those male players are pushing the issue now.
Ironically, dodging the issue may make it less likely for a transgender player ever to come along. Would you put in the years of work and sacrifice if you knew there was a chance the league could just declare you ineligible when the time came?
The WNBA has made a decision; only women are eligible. There’s no ambiguity. What more needs to be ruled on?
The asshats that are making a spectacle aren’t making the point they think they’re making.
IMHO, what the WNBA is doing is what we often suggest in our online communities: DNFTT.
[ do not feed the trolls ]
It’s hard, and no, it doesn’t always work, but not engaging in the blatantly dishonest gotcha game is probably the best possible response.