246. What is up with the WNBA? Saying the Secret Part Out Loud

If you are old enough to have been born at a time when you were taught that there were only two genders, you might want to read my recent article on Gender and Dysmorphia. I wrote it with extra gentle care for the older folks out there (like me) that might find this all very confusing. As part of the ten years (from 2010 to 2020) when I was intensely studying the behavior of people using dating apps, I surveyed ~250,000 women. My goal was to achieve the same sort of consumer behavior expertise that I possess when it comes to gaming populations.

In the process of doing this research, I learned a tremendous amount about a wide range of people, many of whom had very different origins and cultures compared to the one I grew up in. Having been born, raised, and educated in very progressive Santa Monica California, this gave me an open mind. Still, there was so much to learn and I made communication errors early on while learning the language of so many disparate groups.

Protecting Women and Trans Folk

In my view, the central focus of the WNBA controversy is the need to protect physically vulnerable groups, here specifically women and trans folk. As my readers know, I’m particularly passionate about protecting children as I could have used more protection when I was a kid. The focus of the WNBA controversy is gender and trans gender rights, protections, and privileges.

As I spent years coaching elite women’s track teams, including key members of the USA Olympic women’s squad, I have a lot of experience here and strong feelings. Men have extraordinary advantages over women in almost all sports, with the only exceptions being those that are entirely skill based like marksmanship. Those advantages aren’t just from muscular strength, there are also key differences in the bones, respiratory and nervous systems between men and women. Men evolved to fight and had to acquire characteristics that made it likely they would survive conflict with other large mammals and reptiles.

Simultaneously, all that comes at a cost. Men require between 25% and 50% more food to maintain than women do. So as Robert Heinlein pointed out in his iconic Starship Troopers novel (which I first read over 50 years ago), women make more efficient starship pilots as they require less food and have faster reflexes (due to being smaller, so shorter nerve conduction times).

As competitive 14 year old boys out perform elite professional female athletes in sports like soccer and basketball, women can’t compete without special protections. That has taken the form of entire sports leagues and programs that exclude men. This made sense at the university level where the objective of sport was to teach sportsmanship, discipline, and teamwork to tomorrow’s leaders. This breaks down at the professional level where, presumably, the goal is to run a profitable business. Female teams and leagues almost never break even, depending on subsidies pulled from men’s sports organisations. Individual athletes in golf and tennis (where skill matters a lot) are the rare exceptions.

Not having to compete against men is a huge advantage and privilege afforded to lady athletes. This got complicated with the introduction of testosterone to athletes in the 1950s, and with growth hormone in the 1980s. This allowed female athletes with “male characteristics”, and performance. Eventually there was an effort to prevent this exploit but for decades the situation was quite unfair. Of course body builders in Venice Beach and Muscle Beach (in Venice), where this all began and where I was born, were hitting the juice pretty hard. My close friend and mentor Joe Sanceri told me that a major supplier was Sylvester Stallone before he got into movies. What was more controversial was the occasional professional lady lifter that would take T. At least the men found it a lively topic of debate.

Of course today, regular people are free to take a wide variety of hormones that can alter or augment their gender and physical performance. One of my professors at UCLA in 1988 predicted to us that the synthesis of erythropoietin was going to cause mediocre athletes to start breaking records. Then we got Lance Armstrong, and everyone at UCLA knew what he was up to from the beginning.

The use of gender affecting hormones can have therapeutic effect for those that suffer from Gender Dysphoria. I wrote a paper recently about Gender and Dysmorphia to help explain this complicated subject to my readership. For those that feel one gender mentally, but appear a different gender in their bodies, this is an accepted way to sort that out. By using hormones, one can “Transition” to the proper gender. Back when athletes were masculinizing in the mid 20th century, that was a side effect, not a feature.

One can feel the “other” (non-cis) gender without having Dysmorphia, or not having enough Dysmorphia to make them want to alter their bodies in a chemical Transition. In my case I “feel” about 60% female and 40% male. I like my body, I’m proud of the work I’ve put into it, and present as quite male. I have no desire to “Transition” for myself or others. Even if I did, how would my body and clothes need to look for someone who has intense feelings of both genders? We generally call this “Non-Binary”, at least that’s the term I use. I’m only attracted to people who pass as female, and even that’s rare. So I can fairly be called “straight” and I’m also on the asexuality spectrum.

I don’t think it’s my business to tell others how to view me. I accept any and all pronouns. You can even call me “It”. I think it’s great if people can express to others what gender they feel they are, but I don’t think anyone has the authority to force pronouns onto other people. Sure it can be a bit rude to “off-gender” someone, but I run into hundreds of rude people every time I leave my house, it’s not that big a deal, and I don’t tell people how to live their lives.

Now realize that choosing your gender is a preference. Just like having a religion. For people who have intense enough Gender Dysmorphia, they can go to therapists and get an official diagnosis. Then their preference becomes potentially a handicap, and now is afforded legal protections in some places. I see Autism a bit the same way. The consensus seems to be that I’m somewhere on a “Spectrum”, but I’m so high functioning that people will vastly underestimate me if they believe certain stereotypes. Because there is so much diversity, in regards to gender and neurology, I think it’s best to just recognise when someone is far enough from “normal” to warrant alerting people that you are atypical. I’m atypical in a lot of ways. I will let employers know about those ways, but I don’t claim handicap and don’t expect any sort of special accommodations or privileges.

And this is where things get complicated, not just culturally, but also legally and economically.

Gender Privilege

While I’m about to get brutally honest about Gender Privilege, almost everything here could apply to psychological, racial, class, or anything remotely biological that might cause someone to demand special treatment. This is really the central problem and conflict affecting the WNBA right now.

Any time a person demands special treatment, or demands that others alter their behavior or freedoms to accommodate them, they are taking something away from others around them. Thus any sort of privilege is not innocent. If I need a wheel chair to get around, I’m going to need special accommodations that the community/society will have to provide if I’m expected to do all the things that able bodied people can do. This will cost the community money, and maintaining those accommodations will continue to cost money every generation. An inclusive society will make honest good faith efforts to accommodate others with things like handicap parking and ramps.

When all of us can end up in a wheelchair at some point in our lives, it is an easy sell to create that infrastructure. The brutal truth is that humans are an extremely diverse species. Almost everyone has some sort of deficit. I have super hearing and can hear earthquakes ~10 seconds before they arrive. I hear in the infrasonic range, like elephants and whales. It wasn’t confirmed until the Navy tested me in my 20s as part of an aviation physical. The tech had never encountered this before and had fun testing me. Does that mean I can tell other people to limit their infrasonic noise for my benefit, when it’s something they don’t even know is there?

That would be silly. My position is that if you care about the people around you, you consider their diversity and needs and make an effort to accommodate them, especially if they are humble about their needs. Humble as in, not placing large demands on others that will end up being expensive in terms of labor or other resources. Unfortunately, some people will weaponize their disabilities, or even fake them to gain advantage. If you consider “race” to be a disadvantage/disability in this context, you can see why people would get upset if someone that was ~0.1% Native American demanded (and actually received) special privileges and economic benefits for claiming they were Native. Yes, here I’m using Elizabeth Warren as an example. Someone more qualified didn’t get to go to university because of her selfishness.

So, in the context of sports, we can consider women to be disadvantaged or even disabled in this context. They are a protected class, legally, and enjoy economic privileges. This is the cultural and legal context. I’ve served elite lady athletes faithfully for much of my life, and was grateful for the opportunity. One of my athletes, Jackie Joyner-Kersee, her legs are as big as my chest. And she has two of them. She is arguably the strongest women that has ever lived. She could rip my legs off and beat me with them. Of course she never would, she’s one of the sweetest people I’ve ever met.

Clearly there is nothing weak about Jackie. But, she is a protected class (female) in sports and thus doesn’t have to compete with men. There aren’t a lot of men that can compete with her, but if she had to compete with men she wouldn’t be winning in competition.

That protection has economic value, which I’m about to discuss further. Those that sue on the grounds of “fairness” and “equality”, they often don’t really want these things. Or, a better way of saying it is that for every 9 people who are humble and want things to be fair, there is always going to be one opportunist that weaponizes the compassion of others for their own benefit.

When I first came in contact with Trans folk, initially I found them a bit weird or even scary. I grew up watching M.A.S.H. on TV, with Corporal Klinger cross dressing to try to get out of the army in Vietnam. It was understood that Klinger didn’t have what we would call Gender Dysmorphia today. They just had a healthy survival instinct.

I have dear friends who are Trans, one of which I nursed after a related surgery when no one else would help her. I’ve been attacked and lost jobs because I have Trans friends. But I’ve also been attacked for defending cis women I work with, and also patients. To me any sort of civil rights activism involves self sacrifice. If it doesn’t, it’s probably opportunism. Real activism is painful. Today we are awash in opportunists.

Weaponizing Gender Identity

I’m extremely proud of my great grandmother Dorothy and her sister who were early pioneers in women’s rights. They were competitive swimmers at a time when women were not allowed to compete. They weren’t even allowed to swim, they were expected to just float around in big dresses. In the water. Her and her sister Emma were the first white people to swim to Catalina from Santa Monica. There was no press there, they just did it because they could. That’s all it was about. They didn’t want special privileges, they just wanted to be able to swim like the men did.

Similarly, women should have the ability to do sports without getting mauled by much stronger men. But good intentioned special privileges that made that possible were just waiting to be ruined by opportunists. When sports went “pro”, money got involved. Opportunists weaponized their privilege by using institutional power to force people to give them even more money.

Lady soccer players sued and got a big pile of money. The WNBA has a new collective bargaining agreement (CBA). Now the ladies are going to earn about five times what they used to. If the WNBA was already unprofitable, where is all that money coming from? I’m sure you already figured it out, it’s coming from the NBA.

A couple conditions that are worth noting:

• The more people who watch the WNBA, the more money the lady players will get.

• Women can now make more than the men, under certain conditions.

Now imagine that you are a bad NBA player. Perhaps so bad that no one wants you in the NBA. You are unemployed, because you are an actual loser (in basketball). You are non-competitive. But… you happen to know that even a 14 year old boy could beat the women in the WNBA. If you are 6 foot 8 inches and have some (poor) NBA experience, imagine what you could do if you could somehow now play in the WNBA?

And how much money you would make!

You see what I’m getting at. But of course the WNBA would never allow such a thing. But if they did… their ratings would 10X (or even 100X) immediately. A few guys in the WNBA would just stomp on everyone. But audiences watching auto racing love when the cars crash. That would be the most exciting thing in women’s basketball since… forever!

In pro wrestling, people get paid to throw matches and get stomped on. It’s all business. And, it’s big business. The more the women complain about getting stomped on, the higher their ratings. Women might even start watching the WNBA. Meanwhile, the players will be crying all the way to the bank. Because the higher the ratings, the more money they make.

Enter Enes Kanter Freedom and Royce White.

These um, people, were rejects in the NBA. Now they’ve gotten fully in touch with their feminine side and are declaring themselves as gender female. There is no rule that this requires them to transition or take any hormones. They don’t even have to dress differently. They also don’t have to suffer from Gender Dysphoria. Gender is personal, it’s a preference. Now they suddenly prefer to be female. I prefer to be somewhere in the middle, that’s why I identify as Non-Binary (NB).

But Enes and Royce are now declaring as full female. Listening to Royce White describe himself themselves as a black MTF trans lesbian (they still like women) is master class. Royce missed his their calling until now. They should have been an actor. Royce has done his their homework. They have all the talking points down. I didn’t see them slip up once. Completely straight faced.

It is my understanding that the WNBA went into emergency meetings. Sure they could stop all this by just adopting the rules the Olympics will have for the 2028 Olympic Games regarding gender. But this is business baby.

If they can get away with it, they will stall and let these two new lesbians run some Harlem Globetrotter theatrics for a while. It would be the best thing that ever happened to WNBA ratings. In full WWE style, they could even plan in advance to toss some of the ladies around. They could cut themselves like they do in the WWE to make it look like a slaughter. Heck, I would be lying if I said I wouldn’t watch that. For historical purposes of course.

Repercussions

I look down on men who transition in order to compete in women’s sports. That’s just poor sportsmanship. More importantly, it brings a lot of negative attention to people who have Gender Dysmorphia who just want to live their lives in peace and don’t want to hurt anyone. Similarly, I don’t agree with women using testosterone to transition to men if they are going to stay in women’s sports. If I was a woman, I’d be saying “If you got the T, don’t play with me.”

The conversation about gender in sports has needed to happen for a long time. The conversation about whether Trans folk should be allowed to exist needs to be had also. I shouldn’t get fired just because a Trans friend met me at work at the end of the business day so that we could go get dinner.

But it happened.

Every time an opportunist rubs it in everyone’s face that someone has a privilege that they don’t, people get bent. Trans folk don’t want to slip into women’s sports and exploit female privilege. Female privilege is powerful stuff, but there are much more low key ways to enjoy that. There will always be a few bad apples that will ruin it for everyone else. I look down on those people. I try not to judge, but this is one of those places where I do.

I don’t put Enes and Royce in that category. These two are, the way I see it, talented circus performers like the Harlem Globetrotters. Still, they are going to do harm to Trans folk. That community will suffer backlash, at a time when they are fighting to be allowed to exist. Not special, just allowed.

As for the WNBA and other women’s pro sports, there is a solution for them also. Just as I use asymmetrical matchmakers in my games to vastly boost revenues, they can create something similar in their sports games. Maybe each team is allowed 3 AMAB’s (Assigned Male at Birth: men) on a co-ed team. If just three AMAB’s dominate a team, make it a single AMAB. If a women’s professional sports league doesn’t have enough consumer interest to be viable, we should get rid of them. If we turn them into a circus, and suddenly there is interest from consumers, then to me the problem is solved.

Olympic teams are different. I don’t like when money gets too involved in the Olympics. I’ve got stories. Qualified pre- and potential Olympians should get state sponsorship so they can focus on representing their country. Or have the state sponsor women’s sporting leagues. But to me taking money from the men to pay the women is just not fair. Men are better in sports, and more fun to watch. People pay for that. Women vastly out-earn men in sex work. Do we need to take money from women to give to male sex workers to make things fair? I think that would be just as silly. But let’s decide just how far we have to pretend there is equality in situations where there isn’t. Men are at a huge disadvantage on dating apps. Should we make women pay more than men to make up for that? If any date generated from a dating app required the woman to pay for the date, I think that would be an amazing social experiment.

I’m actually a bit fond of socialism. And all of this, everything I discuss here, is socialism. Do we want to live in a socialist society? Where everything is subsidized, even things that George Orwell didn’t imagine? It’s a very serious question, and one that Enes and Royce are forcing us to confront whether we like it or not. The answer could be yes, but let’s not live in that world and pretend we aren’t.

If you enjoy being subsidized by others, but get angry when you are taxed to subsidize someone else, you aren’t a capitalist or socialist. You are an opportunist.

As a reminder, everyone in this Shakespearian play is a critical actor. None of them are “bad people”. They are all playing a role in getting us to confront our own biases, forcing us to face hard truths.