> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://triple-threats-takes.ghost.io/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Enes Freedom and Royce White are LOSERS - URL: https://triple-threats-takes.ghost.io/enes-freedom-and-royce-white-are-losers/ - Published: 2026-08-24T16:00:51.000Z - Updated: 2026-08-24T16:00:52.000Z - Author: Ross Cadasse - Tags: WNBA Ten years ago, one of the easiest ways to disappear from the American sports conversation was to talk seriously about women’s basketball. Now, apparently, it is one of the easiest ways to get back into it. Over the last few years, and especially since the WNBA’s explosion in popularity, I have noticed a fascinating increase in the number of people who suddenly care deeply about protecting women’s sports. People who I cannot remember discussing WNBA salaries, charter flights, maternity protections, facilities, television coverage or anything else affecting women athletes now seem to have very strong opinions about the sanctity of the league. Maybe I missed all of their previous work. Maybe there are old Enes Freedom breakdowns of the Connecticut Sun’s half-court offence sitting somewhere on YouTube. Maybe Royce White has a 3,000-word scouting report on A’ja Wilson that I simply have not found yet. Or maybe women’s sports have become valuable enough that there is finally something to gain by fighting over them. That is what bothers me about what Freedom and White are doing. Before I go any further, I should probably explain the title. When I call Enes Freedom and Royce White losers, I am not talking about their basketball careers. Freedom played 748 regular-season NBA games, averaged 11.2 points and 7.8 rebounds and spent more than a decade in the league. Pretending he was some scrub who accidentally wandered onto an NBA court would be dishonest. White’s NBA career was obviously much shorter. He played three games and nine total minutes for Sacramento, although even his story is more complicated than that number makes it sound. He later became an MVP and champion in the NBL, and his dispute with the Houston Rockets over anxiety, mental-health accommodations and air travel was one of the more unusual player-team conflicts of its era. They are not losers because they were bad at basketball. They are losers because of what they are currently doing to women’s basketball. There is a real conversation to be had about transgender eligibility in elite women’s sports. I want to make that clear. The WNBA’s current language does not help itself. Public reporting on Article XIII of the league’s new collective bargaining agreement has consistently quoted one remarkably simple eligibility standard: only players who are women may play in the WNBA. What the publicly reported language does not appear to do is define “women” further, establish sex assigned at birth as the standard or provide a detailed transgender-eligibility framework. That is a legitimate policy problem. The league should clarify it. As [*The Guardian*](https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2026/aug/13/wnba-transgender-eligibility-bad-faith-statement?ref=triple-threats-takes.ghost.io)[ reported in its examination of the WNBA’s response to the controversy](https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2026/aug/13/wnba-transgender-eligibility-bad-faith-statement?ref=triple-threats-takes.ghost.io), the league also says there is no immediate transgender eligibility case in front of it. No transgender woman who was assigned male at birth has ever appeared on a WNBA roster. Those facts matter because Freedom and White are supposedly testing a policy that does not actually exist. The WNBA has not publicly written a rule saying that any person can announce, “I am a woman,” and immediately become eligible. There is an ambiguity. That is not the same thing. Freedom announced in August that he intended to make himself available for the 2027 WNBA Draft, presenting himself as a test of what he believes the league’s gender standard means. This was not even a new thought experiment. As [*People*](https://people.com/enes-kanter-freedom-says-he-is-declaring-for-2027-wnba-draft-amid-trans-athlete-debate-12037039?ref=triple-threats-takes.ghost.io)[ noted while covering Freedom’s 2026 declaration](https://people.com/enes-kanter-freedom-says-he-is-declaring-for-2027-wnba-draft-amid-trans-athlete-debate-12037039?ref=triple-threats-takes.ghost.io), Freedom had already publicly floated essentially the same WNBA hypothetical in 2023\. His framing then involved the idea of identifying as a woman and entering the WNBA as a protest against transgender inclusion in women’s sports. Three years later, the hypothetical became a declaration. White followed him. Except White somehow made the point even more obvious. While announcing his own plan, White explicitly tied his claimed female identification to the purpose of professional basketball, while also threatening a potential legal challenge if the WNBA refused to recognize him. His announcement came while he was running in Minnesota’s Republican Senate primary, as the [*New York Post*](https://nypost.com/2026/08/08/sports/ex-nba-player-royce-white-to-declare-for-wnba-draft-as-transgender/?ref=triple-threats-takes.ghost.io)[ reported on August 8](https://nypost.com/2026/08/08/sports/ex-nba-player-royce-white-to-declare-for-wnba-draft-as-transgender/?ref=triple-threats-takes.ghost.io). I do not need to make any claim about what either man secretly believes about his identity. They told us what they were doing. This was a test. And that makes their situation fundamentally different from the transgender people WNBA players such as Gabby Williams were actually talking about. Williams is probably the most revealing example of how ridiculous this entire news cycle became. On May 19, while participating in a media availability connected to a Pride and WNBA anniversary project, Williams spoke about LGBTQ+ rights and said she would welcome a transgender athlete as either a teammate or opponent. Then basically nothing happened. For almost three months. According to the [*San Francisco Chronicle’s*](https://www.sfchronicle.com/sports/article/valkyries-star-gabby-williams-old-trans-rights-22379116.php?ref=triple-threats-takes.ghost.io)[ reconstruction of how the clip went viral](https://www.sfchronicle.com/sports/article/valkyries-star-gabby-williams-old-trans-rights-22379116.php?ref=triple-threats-takes.ghost.io), Williams’s comments resurfaced roughly 79 days later when BrickCenter, a parody sports aggregation account built largely around sports “fails” and sponsored by a crypto-gambling company, reposted a short portion of her answer. It eventually received more than 10 million views. More importantly, the chronology disappeared. Williams spoke in May. Sophie Cunningham’s ESPN profile discussing transgender participation in women’s sports came in July. The Williams clip went viral in August. Freedom responded after that. White followed Freedom. Yet millions of people encountered Williams’s comments as if they were part of a fresh August confrontation. The internet reversed the timeline and then got angry at the timeline it created. That may be the part of this story that interests me most. Because I am not convinced this is primarily a transgender-sports story. I think it is an attention story. I think it is a story about what happens when women’s sports finally become culturally valuable enough that everyone wants to use them to say something about themselves. And I want to be fair to Freedom here because there is an important distinction. His activism is not new. Long before his NBA career ended, he was publicly challenging Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and speaking about political prisoners. [ESPN’s reporting connected to its ](https://www.espn.com/nba/story/%5F/id/26784150/kanter-leave-court-fight-begins?ref=triple-threats-takes.ghost.io)[*E:60*](https://www.espn.com/nba/story/%5F/id/26784150/kanter-leave-court-fight-begins?ref=triple-threats-takes.ghost.io)[ documentary ](https://www.espn.com/nba/story/%5F/id/26784150/kanter-leave-court-fight-begins?ref=triple-threats-takes.ghost.io)[*Enemy of the State*](https://www.espn.com/nba/story/%5F/id/26784150/kanter-leave-court-fight-begins?ref=triple-threats-takes.ghost.io) documented the threats surrounding his political speech, restrictions on his ability to travel and the consequences his activism had for members of his family. He later became an outspoken critic of China over Tibet and the Uyghurs. Whatever someone thinks about every position Freedom has taken since then, reducing his entire public life to “washed former player desperate for attention” would be lazy. If anything, that history is why this bothers me more. Enes genuinely has bigger fish to fry in Turkey. He knows what actual political repression can look like. So watching someone with that background reduce transgender identity to what is essentially a costume-based thought experiment about the WNBA is disappointing. The question is not whether Freedom is allowed to oppose transgender women participating in women’s sports. Of course he is. The question is why the WNBA needed to become his stage. White’s timing deserves even more scrutiny. He announced his WNBA plan on August 8 while running in Minnesota’s Republican Senate primary. The primary was August 11. Three days later. As [reporting on the election showed](https://nypost.com/2026/08/11/us-news/former-nfl-sideline-reporter-michele-tafoya-wins-minnesota-gop-senate-primary/?ref=triple-threats-takes.ghost.io), White eventually finished a distant third behind Michele Tafoya. Does that prove he entered the WNBA controversy exclusively for political publicity? No. I cannot prove what is inside his head, and I am not going to act like I can. But if somebody enters one of the country’s hottest culture-war debates three days before voters go to the polls, I think I'm not crazy for highlighting the timeline. Attention was at minimum an obvious incentive. This is where the history of the WNBA becomes extremely important because there is a version of this argument that treats LGBTQ+ politics as something recently injected into women’s basketball. That is almost completely backwards. The WNBA did not suddenly wake up in 2026 and decide to become queer. Queer people helped build the culture around the league. The history is actually more complicated, and more interesting, than saying the WNBA was perfectly progressive from the beginning. It was not. As [*Them*](https://www.them.us/story/wnba-30th-anniversary-lgbtq-evolution?ref=triple-threats-takes.ghost.io)[ documented in its history of the WNBA’s relationship with its LGBTQ+ community](https://www.them.us/story/wnba-30th-anniversary-lgbtq-evolution?ref=triple-threats-takes.ghost.io), early league marketing frequently emphasized heterosexual players, mothers, husbands and a conventional idea of “family-friendly” femininity even while lesbian fans represented a visible portion of the actual audience. The community arrived before the corporate acknowledgement did. That tension eventually produced one of my favourite pieces of forgotten WNBA history. In 2002, Lesbians for Liberty staged a kiss-in at Madison Square Garden. During a New York Liberty game, lesbian fans stood and kissed during timeouts as a protest against what they believed was the league’s reluctance to publicly acknowledge the community already supporting it. They were not attacking women’s basketball. They were not showing up because the Liberty offered a convenient stage for some completely unrelated political argument. They were fans. They were already buying tickets. Already watching. Already supporting the team. According to [*Them’s*](https://www.them.us/story/lesbian-kiss-in-protest-2002-wnba-new-york-liberty-activism-history?ref=triple-threats-takes.ghost.io)[ retrospective on the Lesbians for Liberty protest](https://www.them.us/story/lesbian-kiss-in-protest-2002-wnba-new-york-liberty-activism-history?ref=triple-threats-takes.ghost.io), they wanted the league to recognize lesbian couples, acknowledge Pride and stop treating an important portion of its own fanbase like something that could exist in the arena but not in the marketing. That difference matters. In 2002, queer women who actually supported the Liberty were fighting to be recognized by their own basketball league. In 2026, two former male NBA players can dominate national conversation around that same league by turning themselves into hypothetical WNBA players to challenge the type of inclusion those earlier fans helped build. That reversal tells you almost everything. The WNBA eventually changed. In 2014, [*TIME*](https://time.com/107263/womens-basketball-to-chase-the-lgbt-market/?ref=triple-threats-takes.ghost.io)[ reported on the WNBA’s decision to formally market itself to LGBTQ+ fans](https://time.com/107263/womens-basketball-to-chase-the-lgbt-market/?ref=triple-threats-takes.ghost.io), a move contemporary coverage described as the first league-wide campaign of its kind by a major American professional sports league. The distinction is important. The WNBA was not the first sports organization to ever hold a Pride event. It became a pioneer because LGBTQ+ inclusion eventually became part of the league’s institutional identity rather than an occasional promotion conducted by one franchise. And the players pushed that identity even further. Sue Wicks became widely recognized as the league’s first openly gay active player. Seimone Augustus became one of its most prominent openly gay superstars. Brittney Griner entered the league already publicly out. Layshia Clarendon later publicly identified as transgender and nonbinary, underwent top surgery and received support from the WNBA, WNBPA and New York Liberty. Clarendon was assigned female at birth, so their experience does not answer the current physiological and eligibility debate surrounding transgender women who experienced male puberty. But it answers another question. Is gender and sexual diversity some foreign ideology that outsiders recently brought into the WNBA? No. It is part of the league’s history. And that history matters because the people now claiming to protect women’s basketball are entering a space other people spent decades building. There is also a feminist sports-media argument underneath all of this that I think is even bigger than transgender eligibility. For decades, researchers have documented how women’s sports are marginalized not only by receiving less coverage but by receiving a different kind of coverage. Cheryl Cooky, LaToya Council, Maria Mears and Michael Messner examined three decades of televised sports news in their study [*One and Done: The Long Eclipse of Women’s Televised Sports, 1989–2019*](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/21674795211003524?ref=triple-threats-takes.ghost.io). Their larger point is important here. Media coverage does not simply document which sports people care about. It helps teach audiences what they are supposed to care about. Coverage creates familiarity. Familiarity creates storylines. Storylines create stars. And stars create audiences willing to return even when there is no controversy attached. That has historically been one of women’s sports’ biggest problems. Men’s leagues are covered because games happened. Women’s leagues have often needed an additional reason. A record. A scandal. An Olympics. A social issue. Something that makes the existence of women playing sports newsworthy enough to interrupt the regular schedule of men playing them. That is why this current moment feels so perverse. Women’s basketball spent decades asking the larger sports world to take it seriously. Now that the WNBA is receiving unprecedented attention, some people have apparently decided that the most interesting story in women’s basketball is two men. Think about how absurd that is. WNBA average attendance increased from roughly 6,600 in 2023 to nearly 9,800 in 2024 and almost 11,000 in 2025. More than three million spectators attended games in 2025. Expansion has accelerated. After Golden State entered at a reported $50 million expansion fee, Cleveland, Detroit and Philadelphia were announced at approximately $250 million each. [Associated Press reporting on the expansion](https://apnews.com/article/0a3d313baf917010f4d4d5ae0744ec7c?ref=triple-threats-takes.ghost.io) illustrates just how dramatically the price of entry into the league has increased. The players have also secured a transformational new labour agreement. [Associated Press coverage of the new CBA](https://apnews.com/article/2b56582d24d56d6cdeb0711e584cc7b9?ref=triple-threats-takes.ghost.io) detailed major increases in player compensation, while the team salary cap jumped from roughly $1.5 million to around $7 million. Women spent decades building enough leverage to get here. And Freedom’s response was eventually to advertise the WNBA’s new $1.4 million supermax while claiming that other male professional players were interested in trying the same strategy. That might be my favourite irony in this entire thing. The $1.4 million does not represent what some random new entrant would automatically make. It is a supermax. The clue is kind of in the name. But that almost makes the argument funnier. WNBA players and their union spent years building enough economic leverage to dramatically increase women’s salaries. Then a man arrived to “protect women’s sports” by pointing at the money women fought for and essentially saying: Look how much we could make. You cannot write the satire better than reality. There is also a cost to all of this even if I cannot show you a spreadsheet proving the controversy has cost the WNBA a specific amount of money. Detrimental does not have to mean fewer ticket sales. Sometimes the cost is attention. Sometimes it is labour. Sometimes it is security. Sometimes it is making women repeatedly answer for a hypothetical they did not create. The league has already had its anti-hate task force pulled into discussions surrounding transgender eligibility and online abuse despite saying it has no actual eligibility case before it. Demonstrations have followed Fever road games. According to [Associated Press coverage of the protests surrounding Indiana and Minnesota](https://apnews.com/article/6be219ac0daca951fc0d7b2cabc95f9b?ref=triple-threats-takes.ghost.io), supporters on opposite sides of the issue gathered outside games while players and coaches were repeatedly asked to address the debate. At another game in Atlanta, security incorrectly told spectators wearing both pro-trans and anti-trans shirts to cover them. The WNBA later acknowledged that the intervention should not have happened. That incident is revealing because nobody needs to believe in some giant conspiracy to understand the problem. The league now has arena staff making real-time decisions about political expression because a hypothetical eligibility question has moved from social media into the physical space surrounding games. And then there are the sex toys. Yes. We have reached the point in the defence of women’s sports where people are actively throwing sex toys onto the court during women’s basketball games. Natasha Cloud publicly condemned the people responsible after another game was interrupted in August. [*The Guardian*](https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2026/aug/22/wnba-sex-toys-thrown-court-natasha-cloud-basketball?ref=triple-threats-takes.ghost.io)[ reported on the repeated court disruptions](https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2026/aug/22/wnba-sex-toys-thrown-court-natasha-cloud-basketball?ref=triple-threats-takes.ghost.io), including claims that portions of the wider stunt culture were being connected to anti-transgender messaging. I want to be careful here. I am not blaming Freedom and White for every idiot who throws something onto a WNBA court. That would be unfair. But this is what happens when a sporting event stops being treated primarily as a sporting event and becomes a stage. People begin showing up less interested in basketball than in making sure their message gets captured by a camera. The athletes become background scenery. Kim Toffoletti, Caitlin McGrane and Sarah Reddan explored the consequences of that environment in their feminist study [*Not Just Trolls: The Experiences and Effects of Online Harm on Elite Women’s Sport Athletes*](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/21674795251412781?ref=triple-threats-takes.ghost.io). Their research treats harassment not simply as random internet noise but as a workplace issue capable of affecting athlete wellbeing, performance and economic opportunities. The feminist framing matters because it asks us to centre the women experiencing the environment rather than the people creating it. That seems like it should be an obvious principle for anybody claiming to protect women’s sports. Apparently it is not. When WNBA players say the environment around their league is becoming more hostile, they are not demanding that everybody adopt the same political beliefs. The players themselves do not even agree. Sophie Cunningham has publicly opposed transgender women participating in women’s sports. Cheryl Reeve strongly supports transgender inclusion. Stefanie Dolson has displayed a “Trans rights are human rights” message. Golden State coach Natalie Nakase has publicly framed transgender inclusion around belonging. Gabby Williams supports inclusion. Cunningham does not. According to the Associated Press reporting surrounding the Fever-Lynx game, Cunningham and Reeve even spoke face-to-face despite being on opposite sides of the issue. Both later described the conversation as civil. That is important. Because there are serious questions here. And serious disagreement does not require turning somebody else’s identity into a joke. Breanna Stewart probably offered the position I find most useful. While discussing the controversy in August, Stewart described inclusion as one of the WNBA’s strengths while also arguing that the league needs clarity and continued dialogue around eligibility, according to [reporting on her comments](https://nypost.com/2026/08/22/sports/libertys-breanna-stewart-weighs-in-on-wnba-trans-athlete-debate-rallies/?ref=triple-threats-takes.ghost.io). Those ideas can coexist. You can believe transgender people deserve dignity and belonging while also believing elite sports leagues require specific competitive standards. You can believe the WNBA’s current language is inadequate without pretending it says something it does not. You can even ultimately support a more restrictive eligibility policy. The science itself is not simple enough to make every disagreement disappear. A 2026 [systematic review and meta-analysis published in the ](https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/60/3/198.full?ref=triple-threats-takes.ghost.io)[*British Journal of Sports Medicine*](https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/60/3/198.full?ref=triple-threats-takes.ghost.io) examined the existing research on transgender and cisgender body composition and physical fitness. It found that transgender women retained greater absolute lean mass in some comparisons while measured strength and aerobic fitness were broadly comparable with cisgender women after gender-affirming hormone therapy. The researchers also stressed an enormous limitation. The available evidence involving elite athletes remains sparse. Earlier research has produced different findings. A [study involving U.S. Air Force fitness data](https://doi.org/10.1136/bjsports-2020-102329?ref=triple-threats-takes.ghost.io) found that some performance differences narrowed after hormone therapy while a running difference persisted after two years. Emma Hilton and Tommy Lundberg have taken a more restrictive interpretation. In their [*Sports Medicine*](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40279-020-01389-3?ref=triple-threats-takes.ghost.io)[ review of testosterone suppression and performance advantage](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40279-020-01389-3?ref=triple-threats-takes.ghost.io), they argued that some physical advantages associated with male puberty can persist even after testosterone suppression. Meanwhile, a [systematic review led by Joanna Harper](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8311086/?ref=triple-threats-takes.ghost.io) found that different physiological measures respond differently to hormone therapy, with haemoglobin changing relatively quickly while differences in lean body mass and strength can persist longer. Those findings should not be flattened into a slogan. Basketball is not a VO₂ max contest. Height matters. Reach matters. Explosiveness matters. Skill matters. Training matters. Transition timing matters. And the evidence involving elite transgender athletes remains limited. The honest answer is that competitive fairness is a real policy question. So is inclusion. Sports organizations have reached different conclusions because the problem is genuinely complicated. What the science does not justify is pretending that an unchanged former NBA player announcing a female identity specifically as a policy test is automatically equivalent to a transgender woman who has transitioned and is seeking eligibility under an established medical or competitive standard. Those are not the same factual situation. That is where Freedom and White lose me. Because if the argument is really about protecting women’s sports, I want to see the rest of the work. Where were you when players were fighting for better salaries? Where were you on charter travel? Facilities? Pregnancy protections? Media coverage? Online harassment? Expansion? Youth investment? That is not a gotcha. Someone does not become a fraud because he failed to publicly comment on every WNBA labour dispute. People are allowed to discover causes late. But “protect women’s sports” cannot become a phrase that means “I care about women’s sports exclusively when transgender people are involved.” Show your work. That standard should apply to everyone. Including people I agree with. The WNBA should write a clearer eligibility policy. Its players and union should have a meaningful role in determining it because these are their jobs and their competition. Scientists should be involved because the evidence is more complicated than either political side often admits. The league should not pretend that inclusive values eliminate every difficult competitive question. But none of that makes Freedom and White’s stunt profound. It makes it even more unnecessary. And before somebody asks, yes, there is one other problem with White’s plan. His conflict with the Rockets over anxiety, mental health and air travel was serious, and I am not interested in turning a legitimate mental-health issue into the joke. But if we are going to treat this WNBA declaration literally for five seconds, somebody should probably tell Royce that the WNBA road schedule still involves airplanes. A lot of them. The larger joke, unfortunately, is being played on the league. Women’s basketball finally reached a moment when people cannot dismiss it as a niche sport. The crowds are real. The money is becoming real. The television audiences are real. Expansion is real. The players have more cultural power than ever. And suddenly everybody wants ownership over what women’s sports are supposed to mean. That is not necessarily a bad thing. Growth brings disagreement. New fans will bring different politics. Players themselves will disagree. People outside the league are allowed to criticize it. But if you actually love women’s sports, the women playing them have to remain the protagonists. Not Enes Freedom. Not Royce White. Not me. The women. That is why the history of Lesbians for Liberty keeps coming back to me. They protested because they loved the league enough to demand recognition from it. They were already buying the tickets. Already watching the games. Already building the community. They wanted to belong to something they helped sustain. Freedom and White are doing almost the reverse. They are demanding that the WNBA become useful to an argument they brought with them. And maybe that gets clicks. Maybe it gets television appearances. Maybe it helps a political campaign. Maybe it gives somebody who has spent less time in the sports spotlight than he did ten years ago another reason to trend. I cannot prove what is inside either man’s head. I do not need to. I can judge the result. The WNBA is spending part of the biggest growth period in its history answering questions about two hypothetical players who are not actually WNBA players, in response to an eligibility crisis the league says does not currently exist, after a months-old clip was stripped of its chronology and fed into an algorithm that rewards outrage. Meanwhile, actual basketball is being played. That is the loss. And the people turning women’s basketball into their personal culture-war stage while claiming they are protecting it? Those are the losers. ## Sources [*WNBA Condemns ‘Bad-Faith’ Efforts to Fuel Transgender Player Debate*](https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2026/aug/13/wnba-transgender-eligibility-bad-faith-statement?ref=triple-threats-takes.ghost.io)[ — The Guardian](https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2026/aug/13/wnba-transgender-eligibility-bad-faith-statement?ref=triple-threats-takes.ghost.io) [*How Valkyries Star Gabby Williams’ Old Trans Rights Clip Went Viral*](https://www.sfchronicle.com/sports/article/valkyries-star-gabby-williams-old-trans-rights-22379116.php?ref=triple-threats-takes.ghost.io)[ — San Francisco Chronicle](https://www.sfchronicle.com/sports/article/valkyries-star-gabby-williams-old-trans-rights-22379116.php?ref=triple-threats-takes.ghost.io) [*Enes Kanter Freedom Says He’s Declaring for 2027 WNBA Draft Amid Trans Athlete Debate*](https://people.com/enes-kanter-freedom-says-he-is-declaring-for-2027-wnba-draft-amid-trans-athlete-debate-12037039?ref=triple-threats-takes.ghost.io)[ — People](https://people.com/enes-kanter-freedom-says-he-is-declaring-for-2027-wnba-draft-amid-trans-athlete-debate-12037039?ref=triple-threats-takes.ghost.io) [*Ex-NBA Player, GOP Senate Hopeful Royce White to Declare for WNBA Draft as Transgender*](https://nypost.com/2026/08/08/sports/ex-nba-player-royce-white-to-declare-for-wnba-draft-as-transgender/?ref=triple-threats-takes.ghost.io)[ — New York Post](https://nypost.com/2026/08/08/sports/ex-nba-player-royce-white-to-declare-for-wnba-draft-as-transgender/?ref=triple-threats-takes.ghost.io) [*Former NFL Sideline Reporter Michele Tafoya Scores Victory in Minnesota GOP Senate Primary*](https://nypost.com/2026/08/11/us-news/former-nfl-sideline-reporter-michele-tafoya-wins-minnesota-gop-senate-primary/?ref=triple-threats-takes.ghost.io)[ — New York Post](https://nypost.com/2026/08/11/us-news/former-nfl-sideline-reporter-michele-tafoya-wins-minnesota-gop-senate-primary/?ref=triple-threats-takes.ghost.io) [*From Kiss-In Protests to Ellie the Elephant: Why the WNBA Took 30 Years to Get This Gay*](https://www.them.us/story/wnba-30th-anniversary-lgbtq-evolution?ref=triple-threats-takes.ghost.io)[ — Them](https://www.them.us/story/wnba-30th-anniversary-lgbtq-evolution?ref=triple-threats-takes.ghost.io) [*Lesbians for Liberty: Looking Back at the WNBA Kiss-In Protest of 2002*](https://www.them.us/story/lesbian-kiss-in-protest-2002-wnba-new-york-liberty-activism-history?ref=triple-threats-takes.ghost.io)[ — Them](https://www.them.us/story/lesbian-kiss-in-protest-2002-wnba-new-york-liberty-activism-history?ref=triple-threats-takes.ghost.io) [*Women’s Basketball to Chase the LGBT Market*](https://time.com/107263/womens-basketball-to-chase-the-lgbt-market/?ref=triple-threats-takes.ghost.io)[ — TIME](https://time.com/107263/womens-basketball-to-chase-the-lgbt-market/?ref=triple-threats-takes.ghost.io) [*Kanter: “After I Leave the Court, the Fight Begins”*](https://www.espn.com/nba/story/%5F/id/26784150/kanter-leave-court-fight-begins?ref=triple-threats-takes.ghost.io)[ — ESPN](https://www.espn.com/nba/story/%5F/id/26784150/kanter-leave-court-fight-begins?ref=triple-threats-takes.ghost.io) [*WNBA Expanding to Cleveland, Detroit and Philadelphia*](https://apnews.com/article/0a3d313baf917010f4d4d5ae0744ec7c?ref=triple-threats-takes.ghost.io)[ — Associated Press](https://apnews.com/article/0a3d313baf917010f4d4d5ae0744ec7c?ref=triple-threats-takes.ghost.io) [*WNBA Players Unanimously Approve a New Seven-Year Collective Bargaining Agreement*](https://apnews.com/article/2b56582d24d56d6cdeb0711e584cc7b9?ref=triple-threats-takes.ghost.io)[ — Associated Press](https://apnews.com/article/2b56582d24d56d6cdeb0711e584cc7b9?ref=triple-threats-takes.ghost.io) [*Rallies Surround Fever-Lynx Game After Sophie Cunningham’s Stance on Transgender Athletes*](https://apnews.com/article/6be219ac0daca951fc0d7b2cabc95f9b?ref=triple-threats-takes.ghost.io)[ — Associated Press](https://apnews.com/article/6be219ac0daca951fc0d7b2cabc95f9b?ref=triple-threats-takes.ghost.io) [*Natasha Cloud Condemns “Weak” Men Throwing Sex Toys on to Court at WNBA Games*](https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2026/aug/22/wnba-sex-toys-thrown-court-natasha-cloud-basketball?ref=triple-threats-takes.ghost.io)[ — The Guardian](https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2026/aug/22/wnba-sex-toys-thrown-court-natasha-cloud-basketball?ref=triple-threats-takes.ghost.io) Cooky, Cheryl; LaToya D. 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