Why can’t people be normal about the WNBA?

A growth spurt and new hostility

0:00Just a heads up, y'all. This episode is going to contain some salty language, which means it's going to be some cussing. What's good, y'all? You're listening to Code Switch from NPR. I'm Gene Demby, and I want to talk to y'all about one of my favorite sports memories from recent years, right? So it was just before the pandemic, and my lady and a friend of ours, we were at the last winner-take-all game of the WNBA Finals. The Washington Mystics finally, finally got over the championship hump.

0:31They defeated the Connecticut Sun. They finally got their first trophy. The wait is over! For the very first time, the Washington Mystics are WNBA champions! The crowd was lit. The game came down to the very end. It was incredible. Like, everybody was buzzing as we walked back to the subway in Southeast D.C. For a long time, fans of the W have been shouting from the rooftops about the league. Like, we're trying to get everybody in. We're not gatekeeping at all.

1:02So watching the WNBA finally break into the big time, as a long-time fan, it's been like, welcome, y'all. Thank you for joining us. And then, in 2024, the thing happened. Kaitlyn Clark. The Indiana Fever select Kaitlyn Clark, University of Iowa. The league was already on fire, but Kaitlyn Clark was gasoline. She helped bring record eyeballs to women's college basketball.

1:34And so when she came to the W, a big vocal fan base came right along with her. And all that new attention has made things tricky. When hearing about death threats, players and their loved ones getting doxed. So people looking up the home addresses or work addresses of players and their loved ones and posting it to social media. It's actually real-world danger that players are having to confront just for being part of the game.

2:06Y'all know Odette Youssef. She's our play cousin. I'm NPR's domestic extremism correspondent. I actually had a fun assignment on the domestic extremism beat this summer. A fun assignment. Most fun I've had on the beat, which was I got to go to the Chicago Sky at the end of July against the Connecticut Sun. So all those new eyeballs on the W, they have forced teams to change how they think about protecting their players.

2:39And that's why Odette, who covers extremism and political violence, was covering a Chicago Sky game. Because that was where the Sky was unveiling a new partnership with an organization that exists to fight radicalization to violent extremism. The popularity of the WNBA has just soared over the last couple years. But along with that, there has also been a documented rise in abuse, harassment, and threats that WNBA players have been receiving.

3:16The WNBA's rise has been fueled as much by a love for hoops as for the politics of it all. The league is obviously predominated by women who are black or queer or both, and who are also really politically outspoken. And all of that helped draw in lots of new liberal fans. But it also helped make the W a target of conservatives. And the volume of that tension has really ratcheted up this year. Like, TV viewership is up 12% just from last season.

3:49The value of WNBA franchises has jumped up by 59% since last year. So the money, the attention, it's all a pot, ready to boil over. It has made it sort of a perfect target for people who are sort of conflict entrepreneurs or agitators along sort of conservative cultural issues right now. This season, Republican lawmakers in Congress have been calling for investigations into the WNBA's referees because they say that Caitlin Clark, who has become a darling of the MAGA set, that she's been getting fouled too hard by other players, specifically because she is white and straight.

4:34You've got anti-trans activists showing up at games because they say that the WNBA is filled with quote-unquote biological men. Some of those protesters have gone so far as to step onto the court to confront WNBA players. And so what we've been seeing are sort of these stunts sometimes at the games where these people in the audience, sometimes they're affiliated with companies, sometimes they're affiliated with organizations, basically trying to use the arena literally as a platform to get a political message across.

5:09There have been these green dildos, you know, like sex toys, like thrown on the courts.

5:15Can we say, can we say dildos on NPR? Listener, we about to find out together. The WNBA has been going through a lot and that's what we're getting into today, y'all. How the biggest league in women's sports became a battleground in the culture wars. And what the WNBA is going to do about it.

Finding a safe sporting space

5:40Frankie De La Creta remembers their first WNBA game very clearly. My earliest WNBA memory is taking myself as an adult to my first WNBA game. I did not grow up watching basketball. When I started sports writing in the like early 2010s, I wrote about men's sports because it's what I knew. These days, Frankie is an independent journalist who covers sports and gender. But I started writing a lot more about athlete activism and someone told me I should check out the WNBA because they, even before Colin Kaepernick had ever taken a knee,

6:19the players were having media blockouts to protest police brutality against the black community. And they had full teams kneeling for racial justice. Other sports just had one or two people. And so I drove myself down to like a daytime Connecticut Sun game, like two hours in the middle of the day. It was like 1030 in the morning. It was me and a bunch of kids from camps. But it was the best experience I'd ever had in a sporting venue to the point that I left there and decided that I was going to change my entire career and only cover women's sports and the WNBA.

6:54It was the most positive vibe I'd ever had at a sporting event. I think when you are someone who has any kind of marginalized identity and you go to especially mainstream men's sporting events, I think there's always a question of whether that space is for you, whether you're fully safe there. As someone who, you know, spent a long time identifying as a woman and then a trans person, as a queer person, these are spaces where you're sort of always looking over your shoulder. You're never quite sure if the heckling is about you.

7:25Getting questioned about why you're even there by yourself. These are things that I dealt with as a sports fan and it just was kind of part of how it went. But I think this was the first time I was in a space that felt like it was for me and that felt positive, not as a fan, but it felt like everyone was rooting for kind of all the players on the court, even if they had a team that they wanted to win. Yeah, it was really moving. Like I cried. Wow. Okay. I mean, it's kind of, you just mentioned how much safer you felt in that space than you felt going to events.

7:57For men's sporting events. It's kind of hard to imagine now, but it wasn't that long ago that the many queer players in the league were not out. The league was kind of doing this fig leaf around the players' sexual identities. Can you take us back to those days?

Marketing sexuality in early days

8:13What was the league's marketing like back then? When the league started back in 1997, they did not have any openly queer players like from the beginning. And the teams were really focused on, I think, kind of twofold marketing of their players. One was the idea that this was a family-friendly league, that this was somewhere you could bring your children. And so they really played up the stories of straight players who had husbands, things like that.

8:45They were much more likely to highlight those players. But the other thing that they were concerned with was making their players look kind of traditionally conventionally feminine and attractive in a very straight way. So appealing to the straight male gaze, essentially, because for a long time in sport, there's been this idea that the only people who want to watch sports are men. And because women's sports are seen as like second tier and not as, you know, quote unquote good as men's sports, that the only way men will want to watch women play sports is if they think those women are hot.

9:21So that really drives a lot of the marketing that we see kind of throughout history with women's sports. But you told me this sort of like fig leaf, polite fiction that the league was leaning into. And that changed a lot after Brittany Griner came into the league in 2013. She was like the six foot eight phenom. I remember these videos of her in high school, like Duncan. She was masked. She was never really in the closet. So what was the reaction to her in college and then the W? And how did that change the way that people talked about gender and sexuality in the W?

9:53Brittany Griner is interesting because she's not the first openly queer player in the league, but she's the first like big name who comes in openly queer from college and really refuses to play the game, essentially, that the WNBA is asking her to play. You had players like, you know, Sue Wicks was the first openly gay WNBA player back in the late 90s. But then you had players like Sue Bird and Diana Taurasi, who would come out later in their careers, come into the league around, you know, in the early 2000s.

10:27And they will talk now about the way they were marketed, the feminine clothes they were being put in. You know, Sue Bird was on a red carpet with Backstreet Boy and Nick Carter. These are things that they were agreeing to do because they felt it was their responsibility to promote the league and for the league to succeed. And if they didn't go along with this and the league failed, it would somehow be their fault. And Brittany Griner, for better or for worse, really couldn't hide who she was and didn't want to. And so she's really interesting because she comes in, she like pretty much immediately gives an interview to Elle magazine where she tells them that the WNBA has these required makeup classes for rookies that she refused to participate in.

11:09Yeah. And there were some features about her, you know, being a lesbian and being exactly who she is. And you do start to see a little bit of a shift around that time. You start to see Pride Nights being much more regular. Most of the teams begin to have them. And I think what you also have, just the beginnings of it this time, is social media for the athletes where they can control a lot more of their public image, especially because if you think about it, the WNBA is not getting a ton of media coverage at this time.

11:39And so the players are really much more in control of what they're putting out publicly. And so they can present themselves how they want to stylistically. They can post themselves with their partners if they want to and like kind of quietly come out without making some big announcement. And so that's really where you start to see a lot shifting for the players. So you have these tensions in the league around the way the players present themselves, the way the league wants to present the players. But you said that this is a place that feels like really safe, right? It's like a really fun, like very vibey nights out.

12:11And that was always my experience too at WNBA Games. You say that it was a few years ago that you and your partner were going to WNBA Games and you noticed this big vibe shift. Like, what did you notice? What did you, what was happening?

The 2024 visibility and backlash

12:272024 is a turning point for the league in terms of really visibility and mainstream awareness, because you have two very high-profile players entering the league from college. You have Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese. And they were, the media really made them a rivalry in college, even though there really was no need to do that. Right, they don't play, they didn't play the same conference, they don't play the same position, so they never guard each other. It was, yeah, it was very strained, yeah.

12:59Very different players, but the media really latched onto this as a rivalry that the players never really even, you know, bought into. But again, because Angel Reese is black and Caitlin Clark is white, some of the worst bad faith actors really latched on, and it became very based in, like, racist dynamics very quickly. And Caitlin Clark became kind of the face of the sport and entered the league and became the face of the league in her rookie season.

13:33And whether or not Caitlin Clark has any, like, I don't know what her political leanings are or what her personal views are, but she is a white. And she very much attempts to sort of, like, be coy about those things. She, like, she doesn't embrace necessarily the people who wrap themselves around her, but she doesn't disavow them either. Yeah, she really likes to try to stick to basketball and not really talk about the off-court issues, which, you know, again, you can look at that in sort of a generous way and say she's kind of been put in a position that I really don't envy.

14:07And the less generous reading is if people were using me to project the kinds of ideas which we can talk about that her fans are often projecting, I would feel compelled to say something and be very much, like, not in my name.

14:22But she is white and, you know, feminine and straight and the kind of conservative right-wing cultural shift shift that I think we've had in this country over the last few years really saw her as an avatar for a lot of their white supremacist grievances. Because the women's basketball and the WNBA as a whole have, you know, for a long time been a predominantly black league.

14:56And the best players in the league are majority black. And, you know, people who are, you know, the right-wing white supremacist viewed people see a white woman who is succeeding in a majority black league and they're going to latch on to that as their kind of way in to the—I'll use the word fandom very loosely. Most of them cannot name more than one or two players. But that is the kind of people that started coming to, specifically, I'd say, Indiana Fever games.

15:29And I think it's important to say that it is not all Fever fans at all. The Fever have been in the league since 2000. So, you know, they have a long history of having, you know, great fans. But a lot of the people who came in in 2024, specifically to be Caitlin Clark fans, have brought a lot of toxicity with them. And it has completely changed the vibe at the games that they play in, whether they're at home or they're traveling on the road. How would you describe the WNBA's reaction to its new fans,

16:04the sort of post-Caitlin Clark influx of fans? And how have the old fans, the earlier fans, felt about that? How have they meshed or not meshed with each other? I think the WNBA is severely miscalculating here because I think there was a video, actually, outside Barclays Center where there was one of those anti-trans protests and people were asking those people to name five WNBA players.

16:36And they could only name, you know, Caitlin Clark and Sophie Cunningham. And then you go to the other side where the trans people were joyously dancing in blowing bubbles. And they could name way more than five players because they're actually fans of the league. And I think that the league, in attempting to not alienate the new fans who might be very politically different than the fans who have been there a long time, I think is a mistake. Because A, I think they're going to alienate their longtime fans. And they already are. You can hear fans talk about not feeling as safe.

17:08Um, I know trans fans who have been almost unable to watch games since a lot of this has come up because what had once been a sense of a place that made them feel safe and accepted no longer feels that way. And it's like a become, you know, a place where those outside politics have infiltrated. But those longtime fans are also the ones who are going to buy season tickets. They're going to buy your merch. They're going to invest in your league. The people who can't name a WNBA player besides, you know, one or two,

17:42um, these are not the people that are going to stick around. They're not the people that are going to spend money to keep your league going. And so I think it's a really big miscalculation on the part of the league. And I think it demonstrates a lack of understanding about who their audience is and who their audience should be. You have players who just by nature of being women are already marginalized in some way. And so your players are also people who are, going to be impacted by this toxicity. And in, you know, inviting these kinds of fans to,

18:13and saying that you want them to feel welcome at your games. It's not just that your marginalized fans are going to feel less welcome. It's that your players also feel less safe.

18:23When we come back. Right now, we are in a moment in this country where when you say you are being inclusive to all, actually means you're being exclusive to some, right? You cannot be inclusive to people who have made their campaign about turning public spaces to be exclusive to another group of people. That's coming up. Stay with us, y'all. Gene, and it's just me this week, Code Switch.

Security measures and threat assessments

18:57The WNBA has become a big deal in the world of pro sports, y'all. And all of that attention has brought with it a lot of scrutiny and a lot of ire toward the players. Odette Youssef, who covers extremism for NPR, told me that WNBA players have been getting death threats, their families have been doxxed, and you have anti-trans groups that have been protesting at WNBA games, both outside and in the stands. And Odette says a lot of the players and people around the league feel that the WNBA should have probably seen all this coming.

19:30They've been aware of it for the last couple of years. So like in 2025, the WNBA started a campaign called No Space for Hate to try to sort of push back against some of the toxic rhetoric. And even before that, it was offering a service to its players to use this sort of AI-enabled tool to delete abusive comments from social media. Despite this, it sounds like the abuse has continued to increase. You know, this is what players have been saying. And so what's unique about the Chicago Sky's approach now

20:05is that they are adding additional protective measures by these partnerships with these two sort of counter-terrorism or violent extremism-oriented outfits. And they're trying to sort of confront the issues that are driving this abuse from a really holistic perspective, like trying to get really upstream of the problem, but also address the downstream sort of issues where it's gotten to the point where there's indication online

20:38that somebody may be planning like a real-world threat against, you know, players. How does the league and how do the people doing these threat assessments separate out the sort of like, again, the sort of background radiation of like anti-women sentiment out there from stuff that is like, we need to act on this. This is actually like a credible threat that requires, you know, ramped-up security and maybe like a more proactive, like maybe even law enforcement response. Yeah, so the organization that's doing

21:11that sort of downstream monitoring for the sky is called Moonshot. And it was created 10 years ago actually to help governments fight terrorism. The tools that they developed for that purpose are now being used to monitor like social media activity targeting players on the Chicago Sky team. They are tracking what the threats are, who is behind these threats. They're looking into the backgrounds of these people. If it sounds like something is imminent, then they elevate this to the team

21:43and, you know, this might activate a law enforcement response. But what you're asking about sort of just the casual misogyny that we live in in this world, the sky is recognizing that equally as a problem. And so that's why they have also partnered with PERL, which stands for the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab, which is based at American University. But what PERL's work does is it tries to sort of address radicalization

22:14kind of before it even happens. What I think is the really important work that PERL has identified here is that its founder, Cynthia Miller Idris, has been studying how misogyny relates to public violence. So we often think of casual misogyny as just sort of like the way the world is. Misogyny in its violent forms when it comes to domestic abuse or intimate partner violence, we often think of that as a criminal and perhaps but a household issue.

22:45We don't think of it as a threat to public safety. But what Miller Idris has documented, and she has a new book about this, is that 60% of basically mass shootings that happened in the U.S. since 1949, the perpetrators of that violence have a documented history of domestic or intimate partner violence. Oh, wow. And, you know, and what I find very interesting about this as well is that, you know,

23:17covering domestic extremism, I often focus on, like, ideologically driven violence or religiously driven violence. Right, right. But there's, you know, that doesn't always, like, include, you know, just mass shootings that may not be tied to an ideology or a religion, right? And what I find interesting about this sort of reveal that misogyny is a common factor that is found both

23:48in the violent extremist violence and also in the non-ideological violence. It's a common factor to both. Okay, since we're talking about gender, though, how much of the vitriol and the violent threats that we're seeing around the League are specifically related to all these anti-trans protests around the WNBA? I mean, this whole, like, anti-trans campaign around the WNBA is also just so, in my view, manufactured because, you know, the WNBA does not have

24:18any trans players right now. Like, it hasn't had trans players. Like, there's this sort of conservative culture narrative that's sort of being superimposed on the WNBA, I think because of its popularity, I think because it does put highly accomplished, powerful women, like, into the public sphere. Like, it's just a good vehicle, I think, these people find for, like, furthering this narrative. But it's not a natural fit

24:49because, you know, the WNBA hasn't really had to navigate that issue of actual trans players in the sport. I think that what we're seeing with the League right now is very similar to what we saw with universities, you know, a year or two ago when they were caught in sort of this maelstrom of controversy around campus anti-Semitism and stuff like that. I think they did not realize that some of the criticisms

25:20were coming from just bad faith actors, people that just wanted to, frankly, take down universities. I don't know if the League has even recognized that yet. I think it needs to sort of figure out what its values are. Right now, we are in a moment in this country where when you say you are being inclusive to all, actually means you're being exclusive to some, right? You cannot be inclusive to people who have made

25:51their campaign about turning public spaces to be exclusive to another group of people. Do you know what I mean? Absolutely.

26:02Anti-trans activists have been popping up at WNB games all summer long, right? Both in the arenas and outside the arenas. And a lot of them have been rocking these shirts that read XXXY, you know, like the sex chromosomes. XXXY, as it turns out, is the name of this fledgling sportswear company that also says that it's dedicated to keeping trans athletes out of women's sports.

Anti-trans protests at games

26:26So I asked Frankie De La Creta about this. Let's step back and talk about why they're even at the games in the first place. For sure.

26:36I guess it's been about a month now. Fever, oh, here we are with the fever again. Fever guard Sophie Cunningham gave an interview to ESPN in which she expressed her belief that trans women should not play women's sports.

26:55And, you know, she doubled down on those comments a few days later in a press conference because once she gave that interview, the fever went on a road trip. And what happened was a bunch of anti-trans groups started showing up and like rallying outside of the fever road games in solidarity with Sophie Cunningham. Yeah, in support of Sophie. And so XXXY Athletics put itself on the scene very quickly. It is a group that is

27:26on its surface a transphobic apparel company. They sell shirts. It's run by a woman named Jennifer Say who used to be a gymnast and she was an executive at Levi's who kind of famously left that job over COVID precautions. And in the last couple years she's really shifted into the idea that women's sports needs to be protected

27:56from trans women. Huh. I mean, we know that there are no trans players in the league. There are estimated to be maybe 10 trans athletes across the half million people competing in collegiate sports.

28:13Like, I'm curious of why you think that anti-trans moral panic that the WNBA is experiencing right now has been such a sticky sort of touchpoint for all these other cultural war issues. Like, what is it about transphobia that makes it a useful gateway into these other sort of conservative countries? I think a couple things are happening here. It's kind of a perfect storm of nightmares that have happened. I think, first, the WNBA is the highest profile league that transphobic,

28:45anti-trans groups have been able to latch onto, and so the visibility is going to be a lot more. Also, as mainstream media continues to interview them as if their position is an appropriate one, it gives them credibility when they are not treated as a hate group, when they're not treated the way that we might treat someone wearing a swastika or the Proud Boys or a Klan gathering, because to me as a trans person, that is how that feels. We're talking

29:15about actual bigotry and the belief that this group of people shouldn't have the same human rights as another group. it legitimizes them, and so the WNBA is a big platform for them to be able to do that. But I think what's actually really insidious about being the target is that transphobia is rooted in white supremacist ideas of who is allowed to be a woman and what a woman should look like. Those beliefs have negatively

29:46impacted black and brown and non-Western women throughout history, so what you have is a league in the WNBA that is full of black women, seven-foot-tall women, masculine women, women who don't fit kind of the traditional markers of conventional white Western ideas of womanhood, and so I don't think it's surprising that transphobic ideas around the acceptable kind of woman are coming and impacting this league.

30:17And I think the last piece that I will say is I think in some ways the lack of its ability that the league had for a lot of years really protected it. Like it wasn't as successful as it should have been because of racism and homophobia and misogyny. And once it becomes successful, the flip side of that is it really does become a different kind of victim of those ideas. And the fact that you have a league that is all women, predominantly black women, largely queer women, who have been successful and

30:47they don't need men to do it and their product is not necessarily for men. I think that's a threat to the status quo. And so it's not just about protecting women's sports, it's actually about dismantling them from the inside. I have to ask you about Enes Kanter. As a diehard hoop head, I have to contextualize him a little bit. Enes Kanter is a Turkish basketball player. He played at the University of Kentucky. He had a long career in the league, good offensive player, terrible defensive player, which is why he's not in the league anymore.

31:17But because he's a Turkish, he'd been outspoken about Erdogan's leadership of Turkey, that made him sort of an accidental political figure. And he'd been adopted by a lot of conservative people in the United States. And part of his sort of like conservative, like rightward drift, I don't even know if it was a drift, but part of this sort of his becoming more ensconced in that certain kind of politics has been taking up this anti-transmantile. And that was a long preface to get to the point where to talk

31:47about how your boy Ennis Kanter showed up at a WNBA game, basically confronted the players. He said he was going to try to enter the WNBA draft. The league said they were not going to let him do that recently. But he said he was going to try to enter the WNBA draft because he felt that the league needed to do something about biological men entering the WNBA, which of course is not a thing. So it was kind of a publicity stunt, but it was also really angering to a lot of the players and a lot of the fans. He just like walked us through what you saw in Cantor's

32:19response to it, I guess. Yeah, and Royce White, also a former NBA player, which I'll use that term very loosely. The reason I bring him up in this is because Ennis Kanter showed up to a Sky game and stepped over the baseline onto the court and essentially threatened the players and had to be removed from Wintrust Arena. He's now banned from Wintrust Arena, and I think what's important about both that behavior and somebody like Royce White

32:50being supported by the anti-trans groups is that these groups say that they want to quote-unquote protect women and girls, and you have Royce White who his wife and kids have a lifetime order of protection against him. Do you know how bad you have to be? How much of a danger you have to be for somebody to be granted a lifetime order of protection against you? So that's him. And then you have Enes Kanter who's literally stepping on a court and putting the players in actual physical danger. That is not protecting them either. And so it's

33:21very hypocritical to have groups who say we're concerned about the safety of women and girls to side with these two men who have been active threats to the safety of women and girls. I've been very disappointed in the fact that the league has said that Enes Kanter's behavior is not enough to grant him a league-wide ban at games. I think that was such a gimme and such an easy move for them to make. I've been disappointed in the WNBA leadership at various points. I think it

33:52never should have gotten to the point that it's at. I think they could have shut it down pretty quickly after Sophie Cunningham's comments and just kind of said there's no trans women playing here. We have a policy that works and we support the community feeling safe at games. That would have been enough and they didn't do that and I think it's just been a complete abject failure of leadership on the part of WNBA Commissioner Kathy Engelbert at this point and the fact that she's now put her players in

34:22danger by not taking a harder line and you have it's not just online trolls which they really like to say right. Anytime there's hatred or abuse directed at the players often the league or the coaches or whoever will kind of pivot to trolls but that really takes it takes away it removes the accountability it removes the humanity from the fact there are actual people who are doing these things and showing up to games that's not online that's not a troll that's a real threat and

34:53so I think the WNBA needs to really take a stand here to protect not just their fans but at this point also their players. Frankie de la Cretas is an independent journalist whose work focuses on the intersection of sports and gender and they're the author of the Out of Your League newsletter. Their most recent book is called Hail Mary the Rise and Fall of the National Women's Football League. Thank you Frankie. Thank you.

Credits and production team

35:19And y'all that is our show. You can follow us on Instagram at NPR codes which that's all one word and this episode you're listening to was produced by Xavier Lopez with help from Noragil and it was edited by Jasmine Romero. Our engineer was An Lee Wong and we would be remiss if we did not shout out the rest of the codes which master right? I mean that's Christina Kala and Jess Kung and Kayla Lattimore and Leah Dinella and Dahlia Mortada and B.A. Parker and Courtney Stahn and Barton Girdwood and Yolanda Sanguini and Maya Dangerfield and

35:49me I'm Gene Demby. Be easy y'all.