Why Do Transphobes Hate Women’s Sports So Much?

The WNBA should be in celebration mode. They celebrated their 30th anniversary this year with the league in rude health, with two new teams added to the league and three more arriving by 2030. Viewership numbers have increased, attendance is up, and many players have become household names to rival their male counterparts. But amid the never-ending forced “culture wars” and vile spread of transphobia that has been enabled by rich losers and weak governments, the TERF virus has shoehorned its way onto the basketball court.

A few talentless male losers whose names I won’t bother repeating here have decided to “declare” themselves for the 2027 WNBA draft by claiming that they are now trans women. Sophie Cunningham, one of the weakest players on the roster for the Indiana Fever (and former ring-girl for rapist Connor McGregor’s failed UFC comeback), has turned herself into a right-wing hero by rage-baiting against trans inclusion in women’s sports. Bolstered by both of these ploys for attention, anti-trans groups and media figures have tried to turn every WNBA game into a transphobic rally. For anyone wondering how many trans women play in the WNBA, the answer is zero.

I don’t think it’s much of a surprise that transphobes have latched onto sports as a convenient way to spread their hatred. For the uninformed and wilfully ignorant, the idea of trans people competing in any sport is an easy one to spin as an invasion of brute force and unfairness. This fantastical image of the cis man who undergoes years of hormone therapy and social exclusion just to cheat at women’s sports makes no sense for anyone who thinks about it for longer than ten seconds. It’s also not a thing that has ever happened (the creeps trying it now with the WNBA are, of course, not committing to the bit.)

The rhetoric that drives these has-beens, hacks, and mould victims is the notion that cis women are so pathetically weak and inferior to men that we must be coddled like toddlers. Our fragile little bodies and frazzled brains just cannot compete with all that testosterone, so we must be cloistered away from notions of equality in the name of safety. That’s why we’ve ended up smothered by scare tactics that have led to the most ridiculous of binary divides. Did you know that darts is a mixed gender sport, but now trans women can’t compete with other women, even though cis women play against guys all the time? Or that there’s a push to exclude trans women from chess, because apparently “male brains” are just better than us poor ickle women ones? The more we see this demand for exclusion, the clearer the message comes: there’s no respect for women’s sports because there’s no respect for women.

Make no mistake: the “concern” that all of these transphobes claim to feel regarding the safety of women in the sporting world is the thinnest of covers for their own misogyny. Nobody hates women of all kinds more than transphobes who claim they want to protect us, and that’s seldom been more obvious than it is in the discourse surrounding sports. What, you thought all those guys flinging sex toys onto the courts at WNBA games were doing so as an act of feminist solidarity? These are the same people who spent decades claiming that women’s basketball just isn’t a real sport, that they’re so much worse than the men, that their demands for pay equity were forced diversity. We hear these voices in football, claiming that the women’s game is a failure, or in ice hockey, where the PWHL is making strides while misogynists insist it’s failing. Athletes like Alysa Liu and Ilona Maher bring massive attention to their respective sports and the usual suspects claim it’s a scam.

And this doesn’t even get into the blatant racism and queerphobia of it all. The WNBA was built on the backs of queer women who were forced for many years to remain in the closet lest they hurt the league’s reputation. The Black women who helped to make the sport dominant have faced decades of hatred and claims that they’re secretly men. Indeed, the most notable anti-trans attacks in the sporting world have been directed at women of colour like Caster Semenya and Imane Khelif, largely because of how they look. The tired cries of testosterone levels that transphobes used to make Semenya and Khelif’s lives hell barely concealed the racism at the heart of their agendas. Dictating gender based on how one looks almost always hurts women of colour and queer women first.

Women’s sports have never been more visible or imbued with cultural and commercial clout. WNBA and PWHL games sell out. The new women’s baseball league has launched with incredible success. Matches that were previously never broadcast or only available at 3am on some obscure channel are now accessible to all. The number of people proudly calling themselves fans of women’s sports has dramatically increased. And then there’s the changes in things like commentators, with more women fronting coverage of games played by all genders. Sport is for everyone, and everyone watches women’s sports. No wonder misogynists are desperate to ruin it, and to the surprise of nobody, latching onto transphobia has given them an open door to dismantle decades of hard work.

Matt Gaetz and his weird eyebrows tweeted something recently about how women’s basketball was going to be so much better once they let men into it. That was at least an honest confession from one of the biggest creeps in the pack: they don’t want women’s sports to exist at all, and they’re proud to gloat about it. They think it’s so undeserving of respect that they can hijack it with no fuss and turn us all into a laughing stock. At the very least, they want to reshape spaces like the WNBA into sideshows, places that only serve their desires and agendas. It’s hardly a coincidence that their figurehead is not only a pretty cis white woman, but one whose playing record is currently sh*t. The elevating of mediocrity is crucial to transphobia.

All of this goes hand in hand with anti-choice legislation, with tradwife propaganda, and with the fetishising of hyper-skinny bodies. Transphobia is misogyny and always has been, and the attacks on women’s sports hurt us all. Excluding one minority from the pack makes it easier to get rid of another, and another, and another. And all for what? So that people who never watched the game in the first place can steal it, make it worse, then abandon it in favour of a new target? At its best, separate from corporate evils, sport is a uniting force that makes our world that much bigger. Transphobia is the opposite of that.