Inclusion leading to implosion

Indiana Fever coach Stephanie White claimed she’s “not educated enough from a scientific standpoint.” The Minnesota Lynx’s Cheryl Reeve wore a light blue T-shirt that stated “Trans kids belong” under her white sport coat when her team faced the Fever. And the Golden State Valkyries’ Natalie Nakase claimed that sports are “about allowing everyone to be their authentic selves” (as opposed to, you know, actually winning games).

Each of those WNBA coaches, in her own way, preached the gospel of “inclusion” in response to Fever guard Sophie Cunningham’s stance against letting male athletes compete in women’s sports.

That gospel is utter hogwash, and OutKick founder and commentator Clay Travis has a brilliant plan to expose it. I’ll get to that.

First, though, I must point out that sports are, by their nature, exclusive. Let’s use basketball as an example: Every WNBA team has a roster limit of 12 players. That means teams had to cut some players before the season to comply with the roster size requirement. Some players get cut during the season to make way for other players.

Each team can only put a maximum of five players on the court. That means seven must sit to start the game. And none of those players is guaranteed playing time: Most teams only use their top seven or eight in heavy rotation.

At the end of the season, only one player is named Most Valuable Player, and only one team hoists a championship trophy.

What are all those things if not exclusions?

Those on the left try to pretend that including so-called “transgender” players is no big deal because there are so few of them. However, there are half as many teams in the WNBA (15) than there are in the NBA (30), and NBA teams have a 15-player roster limit. This means there are 270 more jobs for elite male pro basketball players than there are for female players—more if you count all the teams in the G League, the NBA’s minor league, for which the WNBA has no equivalent.

Since there are substantially fewer opportunities for women than men in pro basketball, keeping WNBA teams—and college and high school women’s teams, too, for that matter—exclusively female is not only important, but necessary. So-called “inclusion” of male athletes who claim to be female will only reduce the already limited number of opportunities for female players.

Woke coaches and players in the LGBTQ-friendly WNBA know this—even if they won’t admit it. They’re like retired soccer star Megan Rapinoe in that regard: The lesbian who led the U.S. women’s national team to multiple Women’s World Cups has argued that excluding trans players will cause “women and girls (to) suffer the most.” (To which I ask Ms. Rapinoe: How? The mental gymnastics it takes to reach such a ludicrous conclusion must be exhausting.)

Which is why I fully support OutKick commentator Clay Travis’ seemingly satirical—but apparently real—proposal to create a WNBA expansion team called the Nashville Balls. (Yes, there’s a double entendre there.) The team would consist entirely of trans players and would play a full 44-game regular season schedule, plus the playoffs, should it qualify. The assumption is that the Balls would not only qualify, but walk away with the league title, thereby showcasing to the world what a horrendously bad idea letting men displace women in sports is.

In the alternative, Travis proposes that the WNBA’s current champion, the Las Vegas Aces, play a state champion boys’ basketball team from one of America’s more populous states, such as Florida or Texas, with the winner taking home $10 million. Such a game would not be unprecedented: Earlier this year the University of Washington’s women’s soccer team, which won the 2025 Big Ten Conference crown, lost 2-1 to an under-14 boys’ team. And in 2017, the women’s national soccer team lost 5-2 to the under-15 development team for FC Dallas of Major League Soccer.

“We’ve seen this movie before,” a conservative online content creator known as Salty Tattooed Mama said in a recent video.

Neither the WNBA nor the Aces would likely go for either proposal. They wouldn’t want to suffer the national public embarrassment likely to ensue.

“Why do they act like women can’t beat young boys?” Salty Tattooed Mama asked in a mocking voice. She then answered her own question in normal tones: “Because history has proven that they can’t. That’s not an insult to women—that’s just the receipts.”

Still, to the coaches and players in the WNBA who insist that inclusion of trans athletes trumps the need to protect girls’ and women’s sports—not to mention private spaces such as locker rooms and restrooms—I say this: Put your money where your mouths are. Face a team of boys or men. Broadcast it on ESPNW so a national audience can see the results. See how well that goes for you.

And if you still feel led to bring men into your sport when the game doesn’t go your way, have fun watching your league disappear.