The participation of trans women in women’s sports is one of those issues where I have some sympathy, in the beginning, for those on the political right. After all, prohibiting trans women from participating is not rejecting their rights to live their lives as they choose—it is about preserving a level playing field.
But the right has so co-opted this issue that the rules which are actually in place to preserve the competitive integrity of women’s sports are ignored. Contrary to the entire premise of the bizarre Daily Wire film Lady Ballers, I (a cisgender male) could not claim that I am a woman and join the WNBA (aside from the fact that I’m not good enough at basketball to do so)—women’s sports leagues have long engaged in testosterone regulation in order to assure that trans women—people assigned male at birth who transition to and identify as female—do not have an unfair competitive advantage. I admittedly do not have the biological knowledge or even scientific language fluency to dig into the nuances here—I merely want to establish that there arenuances here. I have heard smarter people than I am argue that people assigned male at birth who go through male puberty have size advantages that most people assigned female at birth do not have, and I am willing to hear out those arguments. I am not willing to hear out “guys are just gonna dress as women so they can dominate women’s sports”—this is demonstrably not the case.
High-level women’s sports have been in a battle for respect my entire life—it was once considered perfectly acceptable to ridicule women’s basketball or soccer as an inferior product that nobody in their rights minds would watch. And what seems to have led to an uptick in popularity, one which predates the phenomenon known as Caitlin Clark, is that women’s sports have been marketed less as a cause—a good thing for good liberals to applaud as a means for equality—and more as a fun thing to watch which features high-level athletes who truly care about the results. Caitlin Clark is a perfect example of this—it would be naïve to pretend that her whiteness and her girl-next-door looks do not play a role in her marketability, but she is hardly the first women’s basketball player to fit into those categories. What separates Caitlin Clark is her transcendent performance—the all-time leading scorer in NCAA Division I college basketball, male or female, she is an electrifying shooter who became notable for scoring on contested shots well beyond the three-point arc and is a brilliant passer. The most frequent comparison in the men’s game is Golden State Warriors future Hall of Famer Stephen Curry, and while Curry is a better defender, the parallels are not hard to see.
I am a fan of Caitlin Clark for the same reason I am a fan of Steph Curry (even if Warriors dynasty fatigue has complicated that somewhat)—she has an exciting style of play that is fun to watch. When the Indiana Fever drafted her at #1 overall in April’s WNBA Draft, it was the correct decision on basketball grounds.
But the transition to the professional game was a difficult one for Caitlin Clark. This is not unique to Clark—the WNBA is arguably the toughest major league in the United States to crack. There are only twelve teams—40% of what the NBA has—and because high-end salaries are far lower relative to the salaries of younger, cost-controller players than in major men’s leagues, teams have far less incentive for roster churn. Charli Collier, the #1 overall draft pick in the 2021 WNBA Draft, only lasted two seasons in the WNBA and has not played in the league since 2022. As maligned as Anthony Bennett was as a #1 overall draft pick in the NBA, he still lasted twice as long. The WNBA is brutally difficult—that Caitlin Clark is 15th in the league in points per game and fourth in assists, in a world of fair expectations, would be considered an accomplishment.
The United States women’s basketball team has not lost a game in Olympic competition since 1992. They have not lost a competitive game at all in a full generation—since 2006. While the men’s team will enter Olympic play this summer as Gold Medal favorites, some of the best players in the world, including Nikola Jokic, Luka Doncic, and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander will be playing on other teams; that’s not even to mention the potential terrifying French duo of Rudy Gobert and Victor Wembanyama. It is well within the realm of possibility that any of these guys could take over a game and defeat the United States. It would be astonishing for the women’s team to lose, as they have compiled a twelve-player roster intended to spark copious amounts of fear in any country so unfortunate as to have to compete against them.
Every player on the United States team has been a WNBA All-Star no fewer than two times. All but three players have been on the All-WNBA first team (and likely would have been had they not been forced to compete with their Team USA teammates) and only Kahleah Copper, a three-time All-Star and WNBA Finals MVP, has never made at least a second-team All-WNBA. Probably the worst player on the team in terms of current talent is Diana Taurasi, a forty-two year-old five-time Olympian with a credible WNBA GOAT case—ten first-team All-WNBAs plus four second-teams and an MVP award—who is largely there as a veteran leader (she is over eight years older than the next-oldest player on the team). The two most dominant players in the WNBA today, two-time MVPs A’ja Wilson and Breanna Stewart, will be there. This team is built for Dream Team-like dominance.
The Dream Team, the 1992 men’s Olympic basketball team that was the first to employ professional players and which dominated its competition, had its own share of roster controversies. The presences of Larry Bird and Magic Johnson, two players that are among the twelve greatest players of all-time (never mind the twelve greatest American players of 1992), were criticized as the two had been hobbled by health issues (Bird by back injuries; Johnson by his HIV diagnosis several months earlier). The absence of Isiah Thomas, the heated rival of team stalwart Michael Jordan, raised eyebrows. And arguably as infamously was the presence of Christian Laettner, who had recently completed his college career at Duke and had never played a minute in the NBA. He would eventually go on to a competent if uninspiring NBA career (he is the only member of the roster who is not in the Hall of Fame as an individual player), but he was purely ceremonial in the Summer of 1992. A final spot had come down to fellow recent college star Shaquille O’Neal, and while the future NBA legend Shaq would stick out less in hindsight, neither player was there to actually play meaningful minutes. They were simply representatives of the college game.
The men’s team had a similar spot in 2004, when Emeka Okafor made the roster. But unlike the Dream Team, this marked a low point for the United States team, as they had to settle for a Bronze Medal following losses to Puerto Rico, Lithuania, and Argentina in the tournament. From that point forward, the men’s team refocused and wasted roster spots were no longer tolerated. The women’s team has never faced that level of reckoning, but they have maintained that same competitive spirit. It’s not that they would refuse a college player so much as they are going to grab the twelve best players available to them and prepare to step on the throats of the competition. And Caitlin Clark is not one of those twelve players.
Had Caitlin Clark made the U.S. Olympic team, she would have been by far the youngest player on the team. Her absence has garnered headlines in a way that the absences of fellow recent #1 overall picks (both of whom have been All-Stars) Rhyne Howard and Aliyah Boston, or the absences of fellow 2024 draftees Cameron Brink and Angel Reese (both of whom would have filled a more pressing positional fit than Clark) have not. The youngest player on the roster serves as a pretty clean comp to Clark—New York Liberty star point guard Sabrina Ionescu. Like Clark, Ionescu bypassed super-programs like UConn or South Carolina and played college ball relatively close to home (in Ionescu’s case, hailing from the Bay Area and attending Oregon). Like Clark, Ionescu was a three-time all-conference collegiate player who went on to become the #1 overall pick in the WNBA Draft. Like Clark, Ionescu is known for her sensational shooting and leadership at the point guard position. Like Clark, not that such things should matter in the context of this conversation, Ionescu is a white, heterosexual woman who is in a relationship with a fellow alum of her college athletics program (Ionescu is married to Hroniss Grasu, a now-free agent NFL offensive lineman who ironically has twice been teammates with Darren Waller, a tight end whose estranged wife is Ionescu’s Olympic teammate Kelsey Plum). And like Clark, Ionescu was not named to the United States Olympic team following her WNBA debut. Like Ionescu, I suspect Clark will get her chance the next time the Olympics come around.
Had the Olympic team included Caitlin Clark, it likely would have come at the expense of the aforementioned Ionescu or Plum. But neither of these women—both white and both heterosexual, despite repeated claims that Caitlin Clark is some sort of superminority in the WNBA—are often cited in relation to Clark’s presence. The right has opted not to critique the inclusion of these relatively similar types of players, nor even of Diana Taurasi, but instead has focused on the least stylistically similar player to Caitlin Clark on the entire roster—Phoenix Mercury center Brittney Griner.
Brittney Griner has, for reasons both comprehendible and baffling, long been a lightning rod for those on the political right, which until recently had not especially inhibited a pro career followed by a fan base whose furthest right elements tend to have roughly the politics of Hillary Clinton. Early in her WNBA career, Griner was charged with domestic violence. In 2020, Griner led national anthem protests across the WNBA. And in 2022, following an arrest (and subsequent extreme sentencing) in Russia for drug smuggling charges (by most accounts, she erroneously carried a vape and was not intending to distribute illegal substances), she spent nearly a year in prison before returning to the United States as part of a prisoner exchange.
Griner, even if you (like me) do not mind the national anthem protesting and can easily disregard the drug charges as more about international political leverage than the actual sins of an individual, is not a perfect representation of all that is good with the world thanks to the domestic violence charges, if nothing else. But it’s also impossible to hear the conjecture about Griner and not recognize that the intensity of vitriol towards her is not primarily about her politics, but about her identity. Griner is, and since college has been, openly gay. At 6’9”, she is extremely tall even by the standards of basketball players. And while many WNBA players, including many LGBT ones, have celebrated their femininity, Griner has openly modeled for Nike menswear.
I shouldn’t have to say this, but I should reiterate: Brittney Griner is a cisgender woman. Online lunatics have claimed otherwise for years and it has roughly as much validity as that rumor that Kurt Cobain faked his own death and reemerged as Rivers Cuomo of Weezer, an anecdote that is much more amusing if you neglect that there were many years of the documented existence of Rivers Cuomo before Cobain’s death. This is admittedly a subjective observation, but facially, she doesn’t even especially look masculine. The entire case that she is somehow skirting the system is based on the vibes that some people have about a woman that is deemed insufficiently feminine. Breanna Stewart is married to a woman, but she also dresses “like a woman”, so she doesn’t receive as much scrutiny.
The irony in Brittney Griner being cisgender is that, for those who decry trans women as having an unfair advantage in terms of size, a player like Griner whose game is so predicated on physical size would be more vulnerable than anybody to lose her job, if trans women were all magically so dominant on the court. If this were about protecting all cisgender women, those claiming to be all about protecting women’s sports might see Griner as somebody worthy of protection. Instead, they see her as an enemy.
Of course, citing Brittney Griner, the only center on Team USA (A’ja Wilson and Breanna Stewart, both 6’5”, are power forwards, though I expect that one will play some nominal center during the tournament), when trying to make room for a six-foot-even point guard whose primary on-court criticisms center around her relative lack of physicality, reveals an ignorance about women’s basketball so thorough that it is impossible to get the impression that anybody who sincerely believes it has ever watched a basketball game before. Caitlin Clark played the maximum number of college games she could have played last season and playing in regular season WNBA games less than a month and a half later. Fatigue alone is a reasonable argument against putting a recent college player on the Olympic court.
You should disregard what those who have not followed the WNBA actively for years have to say about Caitlin Clark’s Olympics omission, including me. There is an overwhelming consensus among WNBA experts, which is that Caitlin Clark, awesome as she is, has not yet proven herself worthy of a spot in the Olympics. And as with those who assumed Caitlin Clark would enter the league and flat-out dominate the sport, claiming her superiority seems flat-out disrespectful about the level of talent in the sport as a whole.
And when the Stephen A. Smiths of the world dismiss Caitlin Clark’s absence as a missed marketing opportunity for the sport, it not only disrespects those who made the team but it undermines the talent of Caitlin Clark as a publicity stunt, rather than as a great athlete in her own right. Caitlin Clark, for her matter, accepted not making the team and said that it would fuel her going forward. Clark has been openly reverential to those who came before her—one of the more notable moments of her late Iowa career was when she got to meet her idol, Minnesota Lynx legend Maya Moore. Caitlin Clark understands women’s basketball as well as anybody, and she understands that the WNBA and the United States Olympic women’s basketball team are not institutions that she would ever hope to transcend. Being the greatest player in the WNBA is what Caitlin Clark wants and watching her strive for it should be a lot of fun for years to come. Just let her do it.
But the right has so co-opted this issue that the rules which are actually in place to preserve the competitive integrity of women’s sports are ignored. Contrary to the entire premise of the bizarre Daily Wire film Lady Ballers, I (a cisgender male) could not claim that I am a woman and join the WNBA (aside from the fact that I’m not good enough at basketball to do so)—women’s sports leagues have long engaged in testosterone regulation in order to assure that trans women—people assigned male at birth who transition to and identify as female—do not have an unfair competitive advantage. I admittedly do not have the biological knowledge or even scientific language fluency to dig into the nuances here—I merely want to establish that there arenuances here. I have heard smarter people than I am argue that people assigned male at birth who go through male puberty have size advantages that most people assigned female at birth do not have, and I am willing to hear out those arguments. I am not willing to hear out “guys are just gonna dress as women so they can dominate women’s sports”—this is demonstrably not the case.
High-level women’s sports have been in a battle for respect my entire life—it was once considered perfectly acceptable to ridicule women’s basketball or soccer as an inferior product that nobody in their rights minds would watch. And what seems to have led to an uptick in popularity, one which predates the phenomenon known as Caitlin Clark, is that women’s sports have been marketed less as a cause—a good thing for good liberals to applaud as a means for equality—and more as a fun thing to watch which features high-level athletes who truly care about the results. Caitlin Clark is a perfect example of this—it would be naïve to pretend that her whiteness and her girl-next-door looks do not play a role in her marketability, but she is hardly the first women’s basketball player to fit into those categories. What separates Caitlin Clark is her transcendent performance—the all-time leading scorer in NCAA Division I college basketball, male or female, she is an electrifying shooter who became notable for scoring on contested shots well beyond the three-point arc and is a brilliant passer. The most frequent comparison in the men’s game is Golden State Warriors future Hall of Famer Stephen Curry, and while Curry is a better defender, the parallels are not hard to see.
I am a fan of Caitlin Clark for the same reason I am a fan of Steph Curry (even if Warriors dynasty fatigue has complicated that somewhat)—she has an exciting style of play that is fun to watch. When the Indiana Fever drafted her at #1 overall in April’s WNBA Draft, it was the correct decision on basketball grounds.
But the transition to the professional game was a difficult one for Caitlin Clark. This is not unique to Clark—the WNBA is arguably the toughest major league in the United States to crack. There are only twelve teams—40% of what the NBA has—and because high-end salaries are far lower relative to the salaries of younger, cost-controller players than in major men’s leagues, teams have far less incentive for roster churn. Charli Collier, the #1 overall draft pick in the 2021 WNBA Draft, only lasted two seasons in the WNBA and has not played in the league since 2022. As maligned as Anthony Bennett was as a #1 overall draft pick in the NBA, he still lasted twice as long. The WNBA is brutally difficult—that Caitlin Clark is 15th in the league in points per game and fourth in assists, in a world of fair expectations, would be considered an accomplishment.
The United States women’s basketball team has not lost a game in Olympic competition since 1992. They have not lost a competitive game at all in a full generation—since 2006. While the men’s team will enter Olympic play this summer as Gold Medal favorites, some of the best players in the world, including Nikola Jokic, Luka Doncic, and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander will be playing on other teams; that’s not even to mention the potential terrifying French duo of Rudy Gobert and Victor Wembanyama. It is well within the realm of possibility that any of these guys could take over a game and defeat the United States. It would be astonishing for the women’s team to lose, as they have compiled a twelve-player roster intended to spark copious amounts of fear in any country so unfortunate as to have to compete against them.
Every player on the United States team has been a WNBA All-Star no fewer than two times. All but three players have been on the All-WNBA first team (and likely would have been had they not been forced to compete with their Team USA teammates) and only Kahleah Copper, a three-time All-Star and WNBA Finals MVP, has never made at least a second-team All-WNBA. Probably the worst player on the team in terms of current talent is Diana Taurasi, a forty-two year-old five-time Olympian with a credible WNBA GOAT case—ten first-team All-WNBAs plus four second-teams and an MVP award—who is largely there as a veteran leader (she is over eight years older than the next-oldest player on the team). The two most dominant players in the WNBA today, two-time MVPs A’ja Wilson and Breanna Stewart, will be there. This team is built for Dream Team-like dominance.
The Dream Team, the 1992 men’s Olympic basketball team that was the first to employ professional players and which dominated its competition, had its own share of roster controversies. The presences of Larry Bird and Magic Johnson, two players that are among the twelve greatest players of all-time (never mind the twelve greatest American players of 1992), were criticized as the two had been hobbled by health issues (Bird by back injuries; Johnson by his HIV diagnosis several months earlier). The absence of Isiah Thomas, the heated rival of team stalwart Michael Jordan, raised eyebrows. And arguably as infamously was the presence of Christian Laettner, who had recently completed his college career at Duke and had never played a minute in the NBA. He would eventually go on to a competent if uninspiring NBA career (he is the only member of the roster who is not in the Hall of Fame as an individual player), but he was purely ceremonial in the Summer of 1992. A final spot had come down to fellow recent college star Shaquille O’Neal, and while the future NBA legend Shaq would stick out less in hindsight, neither player was there to actually play meaningful minutes. They were simply representatives of the college game.
The men’s team had a similar spot in 2004, when Emeka Okafor made the roster. But unlike the Dream Team, this marked a low point for the United States team, as they had to settle for a Bronze Medal following losses to Puerto Rico, Lithuania, and Argentina in the tournament. From that point forward, the men’s team refocused and wasted roster spots were no longer tolerated. The women’s team has never faced that level of reckoning, but they have maintained that same competitive spirit. It’s not that they would refuse a college player so much as they are going to grab the twelve best players available to them and prepare to step on the throats of the competition. And Caitlin Clark is not one of those twelve players.
Had Caitlin Clark made the U.S. Olympic team, she would have been by far the youngest player on the team. Her absence has garnered headlines in a way that the absences of fellow recent #1 overall picks (both of whom have been All-Stars) Rhyne Howard and Aliyah Boston, or the absences of fellow 2024 draftees Cameron Brink and Angel Reese (both of whom would have filled a more pressing positional fit than Clark) have not. The youngest player on the roster serves as a pretty clean comp to Clark—New York Liberty star point guard Sabrina Ionescu. Like Clark, Ionescu bypassed super-programs like UConn or South Carolina and played college ball relatively close to home (in Ionescu’s case, hailing from the Bay Area and attending Oregon). Like Clark, Ionescu was a three-time all-conference collegiate player who went on to become the #1 overall pick in the WNBA Draft. Like Clark, Ionescu is known for her sensational shooting and leadership at the point guard position. Like Clark, not that such things should matter in the context of this conversation, Ionescu is a white, heterosexual woman who is in a relationship with a fellow alum of her college athletics program (Ionescu is married to Hroniss Grasu, a now-free agent NFL offensive lineman who ironically has twice been teammates with Darren Waller, a tight end whose estranged wife is Ionescu’s Olympic teammate Kelsey Plum). And like Clark, Ionescu was not named to the United States Olympic team following her WNBA debut. Like Ionescu, I suspect Clark will get her chance the next time the Olympics come around.
Had the Olympic team included Caitlin Clark, it likely would have come at the expense of the aforementioned Ionescu or Plum. But neither of these women—both white and both heterosexual, despite repeated claims that Caitlin Clark is some sort of superminority in the WNBA—are often cited in relation to Clark’s presence. The right has opted not to critique the inclusion of these relatively similar types of players, nor even of Diana Taurasi, but instead has focused on the least stylistically similar player to Caitlin Clark on the entire roster—Phoenix Mercury center Brittney Griner.
Brittney Griner has, for reasons both comprehendible and baffling, long been a lightning rod for those on the political right, which until recently had not especially inhibited a pro career followed by a fan base whose furthest right elements tend to have roughly the politics of Hillary Clinton. Early in her WNBA career, Griner was charged with domestic violence. In 2020, Griner led national anthem protests across the WNBA. And in 2022, following an arrest (and subsequent extreme sentencing) in Russia for drug smuggling charges (by most accounts, she erroneously carried a vape and was not intending to distribute illegal substances), she spent nearly a year in prison before returning to the United States as part of a prisoner exchange.
Griner, even if you (like me) do not mind the national anthem protesting and can easily disregard the drug charges as more about international political leverage than the actual sins of an individual, is not a perfect representation of all that is good with the world thanks to the domestic violence charges, if nothing else. But it’s also impossible to hear the conjecture about Griner and not recognize that the intensity of vitriol towards her is not primarily about her politics, but about her identity. Griner is, and since college has been, openly gay. At 6’9”, she is extremely tall even by the standards of basketball players. And while many WNBA players, including many LGBT ones, have celebrated their femininity, Griner has openly modeled for Nike menswear.
I shouldn’t have to say this, but I should reiterate: Brittney Griner is a cisgender woman. Online lunatics have claimed otherwise for years and it has roughly as much validity as that rumor that Kurt Cobain faked his own death and reemerged as Rivers Cuomo of Weezer, an anecdote that is much more amusing if you neglect that there were many years of the documented existence of Rivers Cuomo before Cobain’s death. This is admittedly a subjective observation, but facially, she doesn’t even especially look masculine. The entire case that she is somehow skirting the system is based on the vibes that some people have about a woman that is deemed insufficiently feminine. Breanna Stewart is married to a woman, but she also dresses “like a woman”, so she doesn’t receive as much scrutiny.
The irony in Brittney Griner being cisgender is that, for those who decry trans women as having an unfair advantage in terms of size, a player like Griner whose game is so predicated on physical size would be more vulnerable than anybody to lose her job, if trans women were all magically so dominant on the court. If this were about protecting all cisgender women, those claiming to be all about protecting women’s sports might see Griner as somebody worthy of protection. Instead, they see her as an enemy.
Of course, citing Brittney Griner, the only center on Team USA (A’ja Wilson and Breanna Stewart, both 6’5”, are power forwards, though I expect that one will play some nominal center during the tournament), when trying to make room for a six-foot-even point guard whose primary on-court criticisms center around her relative lack of physicality, reveals an ignorance about women’s basketball so thorough that it is impossible to get the impression that anybody who sincerely believes it has ever watched a basketball game before. Caitlin Clark played the maximum number of college games she could have played last season and playing in regular season WNBA games less than a month and a half later. Fatigue alone is a reasonable argument against putting a recent college player on the Olympic court.
You should disregard what those who have not followed the WNBA actively for years have to say about Caitlin Clark’s Olympics omission, including me. There is an overwhelming consensus among WNBA experts, which is that Caitlin Clark, awesome as she is, has not yet proven herself worthy of a spot in the Olympics. And as with those who assumed Caitlin Clark would enter the league and flat-out dominate the sport, claiming her superiority seems flat-out disrespectful about the level of talent in the sport as a whole.
And when the Stephen A. Smiths of the world dismiss Caitlin Clark’s absence as a missed marketing opportunity for the sport, it not only disrespects those who made the team but it undermines the talent of Caitlin Clark as a publicity stunt, rather than as a great athlete in her own right. Caitlin Clark, for her matter, accepted not making the team and said that it would fuel her going forward. Clark has been openly reverential to those who came before her—one of the more notable moments of her late Iowa career was when she got to meet her idol, Minnesota Lynx legend Maya Moore. Caitlin Clark understands women’s basketball as well as anybody, and she understands that the WNBA and the United States Olympic women’s basketball team are not institutions that she would ever hope to transcend. Being the greatest player in the WNBA is what Caitlin Clark wants and watching her strive for it should be a lot of fun for years to come. Just let her do it.
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