Enes Kanter Freedom stands 6-foot-10 and spent over a decade in the NBA. Royce White was a power forward for the Houston Rockets and the Sacramento Kings. On August 7th, Kanter Freedom announced he now "identifies as a woman." On August 19th, White followed suit, posting on X under the name "Roysha" and writing, "My genitalia is my business. Haters better bow to a beautiful Black kweeen like Roysha!"
Both men entered the 2027 WNBA draft.
The WNBA took approximately zero seconds to figure out these were not, in fact, women. The league declared both players ineligible, issuing a statement that it "is not going to give oxygen to efforts designed to mock the league or use this topic to demean and marginalize others" and that it "will not allow outside pressure or manufactured controversy to dictate league processes."
So the WNBA can tell when a biological male isn't actually a woman. Good to know. Someone might want to ask the league why that standard applies to former NBA players making a political point but not to every other biological male who wants to compete against women.
The league's collective bargaining agreement specifies that only women are eligible for the draft. But as Front Office Sports reporter Colin Salao noted, the CBA contains no language defining sex or gender identity. Which means the WNBA just made a biological determination it claims doesn't exist — using criteria it refuses to put on paper.
Kanter Freedom didn't stop at the draft declaration. On August 23rd, he showed up courtside at Wintrust Arena in Chicago for an Indiana Fever versus Chicago Sky game wearing a black t-shirt that read "WOMAN noun. adult human female." He'd joined a small rally outside the arena beforehand in support of Fever guard Sophie Cunningham, who sparked the entire debate last month when she told ESPN she opposed transgender girls and women competing in women's sports.
With 1:22 left in the third quarter, Chicago Sky guard Natasha Cloud — age 34, same as Kanter — scored inside, did a chest bump with teammate Aicha Coulibaly, then walked directly toward Kanter and began yelling and pointing at him. Video showed Kanter standing with his arms out, taking one step onto the court before security intervened. He was ejected.
Cloud later posted on social media: "To every trans kid/person, You are apart of MY community & tribe. You belong. You're loved. You're seen." During the confrontation Cloud told Kanter, "She's not gonna sleep with you." Kanter responded, "I am not trying to sleep with her. I'm just here to protect women and support her."
Sky coach Tyler Marsh backed Cloud afterward, saying, "I told her that we all embrace her as someone that protects our team and protects people that need to be protected." He added: "If you come to a game you should probably come to enjoy the basketball, and that seems pretty simple to me." Sky forward Azura Stevens dismissed the incident as "just a fan incident" that security handled.
Fever star Caitlin Clark sidestepped the entire thing: "I didn't see it, we were talking about the next play in our huddle, so I think that's probably a question for Chicago." The Sky won 113-90.
The WNBA's position, stripped of the PR language, is this: We know biological sex is real. We used it to make this ruling. But we won't write it into policy because that would require saying out loud what we just demonstrated — that there is a meaningful, observable, competitive difference between male and female athletes.
Kanter Freedom and White forced the league into a binary it's been trying to avoid. Either biological sex determines eligibility, or it doesn't. The WNBA just ruled that it does. They'd simply prefer not to apply that standard consistently.