I wish Enes Kanter Freedom did not take the bait from Chicago Sky’s Natasha Cloud.
During a game last week against the Indiana Fever, she shouted vulgar comments at the former NBA player, who was sitting in the crowd behind the basket.
He chirped back and showed off his massive wingspan and his T-shirt, emblazoned with the definition of the word “woman” (“adult human. female”).
Kanter Freedom was booted — and promptly became the story.
Critics have said that he’s using the protect women’s sports movement for clout. But some are using him to rewrite history.
Take, for example, The Athletic columnist Jerry Brewer, who wrote that Kanter joining the movement is a “man’s alibi” to “exclude.”
That’s ironic because, just a few sentences later, Brewer excluded all the women who are fighting this very battle.
“If the trans athlete debate were an organic, fully woman-led controversy, it could have prompted meaningful conversation, empathy in the pursuit of solutions and thoughtful measures taken after an extended process,” he wrote.
Either he been living under a rock or he’s willfully ignorant. My money is on the latter.
From the start, this has been an “organic, fully women-led” movement. Unfortunately, the ladies who have stuck their necks out haven’t been met with “empathy” or “meaningful conversation.”
They’ve been berated, dismissed and called transphobic.
It’s easier for the hypocritical be-kind brigade to call these women names instead of dealing with biological reality that shatters their bizarre progressive ideology.
Just ask the four high-school girls from Connecticut who, in 2020, after suddenly being smoked on the track by two boys identifying as girls, filed a lawsuit saying the boys’ participation was a Title IX violation.
It was tossed before being revived on appeals three years later.
Then came Riley Gaines, who was forced to compete against and change in a locker room with UPenn’s Lia Thomas. She came out against the obvious farce and was immediately slammed as a bigot and harassed by a mob of activists at San Francisco University.
On an episode of “Real Time with Bill Maher,” then-Congresswoman Katie Porter said Gaines was doing it for the “likes and clicks.”
To this day, the 12-time All-American is mocked by critics as a bitter loser.
Thomas’ teammate Paula Scanlan, who had to share a locker room with Thomas, was told by her school to seek therapy if she was uncomfortable with a 6-foot-4 dude and his penis in her locker room.
Jennifer Sey, a former Levi’s executive and US gymnast who founded the activewear company XX XY, has also been called a right-wing grifter for speaking up for girls.
In February, Indiana Fever guard Sophie Cunningham was asked about males in women’s sports by an ESPN reporter. Her very compassionate and common-sense comments about protecting women’s sports led to her being called — say it with me now — a transphobe.
When this all started, many of these women tied themselves into knots to explain that they love trans people but biological differences are real. And in sports, that matters.
But no amount of throat-clearing saved them from being attacked by activists screaming that “trans women are women” and, therefore, entitled to women’s spaces.
Many, many people quietly agree with Cunningham and Scanlan and Gaines. But they see what happens to people who raise their voice.
Does Brewer know about the middle-school girls in West Virginia who were banned from competition after protesting a male participant? Has he heard about the Vermont high-school basketball team punished for forfeiting a game against a school with a male on the team? How about marathoner Natalie Daniels, who was harassed and kicked out of her running club after criticizing the Boston Marathon for allowing males who identify as women to compete in the female category?
Or the female-founded Independent Council on Women’s Sports (ICONS)? Has he heard of a woman named Martina Navratilova? JK Rowling?
He should read up on Washington high schoolers Francis Staudt and Ahnaleigh Wilson.
Staudt faced harassment for sitting out a hoops match against a team with a male player. Wilson, who was beaten in track by a biological male, found herself berated at a Seattle Storm game by co-owner Celeste Keaton after she dared to hold up a sign thanking Cunningham.
“Our decision to speak up has been costly,” they wrote for The Hill this week. “We have been called hateful, transphobic, bigots and bullies. We have both been harassed online and in person.”
There are far too many brave chicks to count. In fact, at many points in this debate, I have asked: Where are the dudes? Why won’t they help?
This has always been an organic fight from women. Brewer, like many in sports media, just didn’t want to listen.
