Indiana Fever's Sophie Cunningham has become a WNBA firebrand for her verbal and even physical defense of teammate Caitlin Clark. Getty Images See more of our coverage in your search results.
Add The New York Post on Google The Women’s National Basketball Association may claim to put women first, but the league sure has a funny way of showing it.
When its leaders aren’t giving prodigy Caitlin Clark the cold shoulder or turning a blind eye to her on-court mistreatment, they’re telling young female fans to go dribble a football if they insist that women’s sports should be free of male intrusion.
That’s what happened Wednesday when Celeste Keaton, co-owner of the Seattle Storm, publicly exploded at two teen girls for wearing T-shirts reading XX-XY — an implicit message that sports should be separated by sex.
Keaton allegedly called the pair “f–king insane” for their quiet protest at a game between the Storm and the Indiana Fever.
That’s right: This wealthy, influential woman saw two girls seated courtside respectfully advocating to keep women’s sports female — at a women’s basketball game featuring high-profile female stars, no less — and thought to herself, “I should berate them for their bigotry.”
But they’re in keeping with the kerfuffle that followed last week’s remarks by the Fever’s Sophie Cunningham, who has become a league firebrand for her verbal and even physical defense of Clark, her teammate.
Cunningham told ESPN that true empathy, widely seen as a core female strength, means not lying to those you love about observable reality.
“With that love is truth, being honest,” she said. “And I want to protect young girls in a locker room, or young girls in sport who shouldn’t have to go against biological men.”
The “truth” she referenced is that men and women are biologically different down to their DNA, bone structure, muscle mass and other indisputable attributes — and that trans women are biologically male.
And that, in truth, gender-inclusion policies have resulted in an invasion of young women’s spaces, opportunities, privacy and safety.
Under the pretense of compassion, young female athletes across the country have been subjected to an impossible playing field — and in some cases, voyeurism and sexist attacks.
Pressed by reporters in the article’s aftermath, Cunningham doubled down.
“I said what I said. I think it’s kind of common sense,” she stated.
Unlike the senior leaders of her sport, who are choosing cowardice as they kowtow to trans activists, Cunningham is acting like a guardian of the young.
She’s the big sister in this ugly scenario, looking out for girls’ welfare.
Her truth-telling is what inspired Keaton’s victims to show up for Wednesday’s game and display their solidarity.
No, it’s the matriarchs of the WNBA — comfortably aged out of the possibility that a man might take their titles and trophies — who are pulling the rug out from these girls.
They’ve already benefited from a long era of fair competition untainted by gender ideology.
They lived for years under the paradigm of Title IX (before the Biden administration bastardized it to include gender identity as a protected category).
But now that the zeitgeist is in favor of the “insane,” to use Keaton’s word, the elders are damning girls as hateful for not wanting to be forced to compete against gender-confused men with huge physical advantages.
And while some accuse the girls of inventing a problem, they’re not making this up.
The displacement of young women by mediocre male athletes claiming to be women is documented and widespread.
Annaleigh Wilson, one of the two teenagers involved in Wednesday’s confrontation, literally lost a state track meet title to a transgender-identifying male athlete two years ago.
You’d think Keaton would have the empathy to listen to Wilson, who has encountered an obstacle that would have been unfathomable to the sports world during Keaton’s youth.
The WNBA has rightly suspended Keaton for five home games and fined her an undisclosed amount for her inappropriate behavior — but the episode demonstrated what a joke the league has become.
When the financial stakeholders of a sport that has for decades lived in the NBA’s better-attended, far more lucrative shadow can’t agree that their players deserve the opportunity to compete with dignity and fairness, they’ve given the game away.
Feminist advocates laid the WNBA’s foundations.
They insisted upon the importance of a separate league for women, and fought to give women a chance to excel in their own category.
But the guilt-tripping of a small minority has them throwing away those years of progress for the girls who would follow them.
Hypocrisy, and self-sabotage, is apparently in the WNBA’s DNA.
Caroline Downey is a columnist at National Review and senior fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum.
