WNBA Won't Define "Woman" in Its Own Rulebook, and Now Everyone's Furious

The WNBA has a rule that says only women can play in the WNBA. It just won't define what that means.

That gap in Article XIII of the league's collective bargaining agreement has turned into the loudest offseason story in women's basketball, according to BBC Sport. The clause reads: "Only players who are women are eligible to play in the WNBA." No definition. No reference to biological sex or gender identity. Nothing.

Indiana Fever guard Sophie Cunningham lit the fuse last month in an ESPN interview, saying she wants to "protect young girls in a locker room, or young girls in sport who shouldn't have to go against biological men," according to BBC Sport. She later called it "common sense" to bar transgender athletes from women's sports. President Trump praised her. Vice President JD Vance called her "inspiring." Cunningham says she's "not a very political person," but she's been trailed by rallies outside Fever games ever since, per BBC Sport.

Then came the stunt. On August 7, former NBA player Enes Kanter Freedom announced on X that he was declaring for the 2027 WNBA Draft, writing, "If simply declaring who you are is all that's required, then I meet every single requirement necessary to compete in the WNBA," according to Advocate.com. Days later, Royce White, who is also running for U.S. Senate in Minnesota, said he'd do the same, telling Fox News, "I'm transgender. I'm a woman. I identify as sometimes identifying as a woman for purpose of basketball." White said he wants "fair treatment" and threatened a "huge legal battle" if blocked, per Advocate.com.

Neither man has been assigned female at birth, transitioned, or shown any documented gender identity beyond the declaration itself. They're testing whether the CBA's vague wording can be gamed by anyone willing to say the magic words.

The WNBA convened an "anti-hate task force" of team presidents and general managers to talk it through, according to CBS Sports. What came out was a statement, not a policy: "There are no immediate eligibility matters affecting the WNBA, and we strongly denounce the bad-faith efforts to use these topics to demean or marginalize others," a league spokesperson told the Associated Press, as reported by Advocate.com and CBS Sports.

Commissioner Cathy Engelbert had already sent teams a memo the same week two former NBA players filed their draft declarations, an apparent attempt to get ahead of the story, according to ABC News. She wrote that the topic is "complex and nuanced" and would be discussed further with team leadership, per ABC News and BBC Sport. No definition followed.

Grammy-nominated singer Tish Hyman posted a video on X saying, "Boycott em. Our girls deserve fairness in their sports and in the locker room," and adding, "Fuck the WNBA. And any other sports league that allows men to play with women," according to Breitbart and Yahoo Sports. She argues that any player defending a hypothetical trans teammate is "lying" about being comfortable with it, based on her own experience feeling that a male presence in a locker room "crosses our boundaries" and "disregards our privacy."

The strongest version of that argument isn't about hate. It's about consent and physical mismatch: women's professional sports exist as a separate category precisely because average male athletic advantages in strength, speed, and size would otherwise dominate the field, and locker rooms are private spaces built around biological sex. Cunningham and Hyman are both making a version of that case, and a reasonable supporter of women's sports would recognize it as a real concern, not a manufactured one.

The counterargument, laid out by CBS Sports, is that the WNBA has never had an openly transgender player, that no transgender woman has ever played Division I women's basketball, and that Kanter Freedom and White aren't athletes with a genuine gender identity claim. They're culture-war combatants using the league's silence as a prop. Sportico's legal analysis backs that reading: attorney Alan Milstein told the outlet any court reviewing a Kanter- or White-style eligibility claim would likely be "skeptical" about how genuine the identity claims are, and a team declining to sign either man wouldn't constitute illegal collusion under the CBA's Article XVI just because they were excluded.

The WNBA has a legitimate business and safety reason to clarify Article XIII, and Kanter Freedom and White are running a bad-faith troll operation rather than a serious eligibility challenge. The league's own statement said as much when it "strongly denounced" the bad-faith efforts, per Advocate.com, while still declining to write an actual rule.

The CBA is a negotiated document between the league and the WNBPA, meaning any real change requires union buy-in, not just a commissioner's memo, according to ABC News. Engelbert has scheduled ongoing conversations with team presidents, general managers, and the players association, but no timeline for an actual policy has been set. Until the league writes a definition into the CBA, this fight resets every time someone with a platform decides to test it again.