Enes Kanter Freedom’s WNBA stunts are classic male entitlement

‘Woman. Noun. Adult human female’.

That was a tshirt worn by former NBA player Enes ‘Freedom’ Kanter in August, as part of a series of anti-trans stuns relating to women’s basketball which culminated in him being ejected from Game 3 of the finals last night.

In a video, where he said he’d been denied entry to the game in Atlanta, he was wearing a similar tshirt, reading ‘what is a woman?’.

Kanter was clearly planning a stunt reminscent of the one a few months ago, when he took it upon himself to sit courtside in, wearing a T-shirt bearing a well-known anti-trans dogwhistle, smirking at cameras. 

Thankfully, he was escorted on that occasion too after a confrontation with Chicago Sky guard Natasha Cloud, who took issue with his presence. 

Kanter, alongside fellow player Royce White, reacted to that incident by declaring that they intended to enter the 2027 WNBA Draft while claiming to identify as women.

However, just yesterday they received an answer to his bad faith challenge to join the WNBA, where he was told he could not join because he is indeed a man.

He immediately celebrated on social media as if this was some sort of victory – as if wasting everyone’s time isn’t a sign of classic male entitlement.

The policy has not changed, and his pointless obsession is not with the public support of any athletes competing in the WNBA.

His stunts come after Indiana Fever guard Sophie Cunningham told ESPN earlier this year that she was opposed to trans participation in women’s sports.

All of them ignoring the fact that no trans woman has ever played in the WNBA.

It is absolutely wild that people are angry over something that isn’t happening.

It’s almost as ridiculous as the men who showed up at a WNBA game last Friday to throw sex toys on court in an apparent protest, following on from similar stunts last year which were apparently merely pranks. 

Yes, that really happened. I’m not sure how throwing dildos at women trying to play a sport they love is protecting them, but maybe I’m missing something.

In the weeks before the game, Kanter publicly declared himself eligible for the WNBA draft, according to his own interpretation of the league’s rules. 

His stunt, which came with the mandatory insistence that he was going to use the women’s bathroom, is absurd – if you have to manufacture a problem to ‘prove’ your point, you’ve just proven it doesn’t exist.

The hypocrisy of men disrupting a women’s basketball game under the guise of ‘protecting women’ paints the real picture – their apparent need to control women.

As the WNBA expands and grows in popularity, buoyed by the success of athletes like Coud and Caitlin Clark, more and more men seem to be looking to muscle in women’s sport. 

That, in my view, is the true motivation behind anti-trans movements like this.

It’s an excuse to keep asserting dominance over women, to put them in their place and tell them how, who and what they can and cannot be. And in order to make their point, the views of the women involved, like Cloud, are ignored. 

Luckily, the WNBA have stopped him in his tracks.

Because if we look at the real challenges facing women in sport, trans inclusion certainly isn’t one of them and people should be putting their time and energy into the things that genuinely affect it.

According to the Women’s Sports Foundation, founded by tennis legend Billie Jean King, those challenges include a lack of opportunities for girls in sport, rising costs and transport barriers, a lack of supportive coaching and sporting environments, and wider social factors.

So instead of fixating on the handful of trans athletes competing at an elite level in one of the many sports in the world, I would like to see these protestors direct their attention and energy somewhere that actually matters.

Because it really seems like they haven’t a clue about what’s really happening.

A video circulating on social media from the latest protest showed an interviewer asking anti-trans protestors to name five female basketball players. 

To no one’s surprise, most of them couldn’t, whereas pro-trans protestors reeled off names, clearly real fans. 

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After the game in August, Natasha Cloud posted: ‘To every trans kid/person, you are a part of MY community & tribe. You belong. You’re loved. You’re seen. You’re perfect as you are & you will always be protected by me.’

She’s right – the only people who are affected by this are the kids watching it unfold. The trans kids who want to imagine a future.

Meanwhile, the actual work of supporting women in sport goes undone. Nobody is turning up outside an arena to demand equal pay, proper funding for grassroots girls’ programmes, or safeguarding that genuinely protects athletes from abuse. 

But making a scene in a T-shirt is quick, and gets plastered all over social media for attention and bigotry.

The threat to women’s sport is not trans people, but a movement that has turned their unhealthy obsession with gender identity into their personality and dressing it up as ‘fairness’ and ‘protection.

On both sides of the Atlantic, they are aided by swathes of the political and media ecosystem that are all too happy to offer a courtside seat.

So instead of buying a transphobic T-shirt, creating a social media circus around your own gender identity or chucking dildos onto the court at a women’s basketball game, you could attend and cheer them on as a fan, or campaign for women’s rights.

Because otherwise you’re just making yourself yet another problem that women in sport have to deal with.

Do you have a story you’d like to share? Get in touch by emailing Ross.Mccafferty@metro.co.uk. 

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