A Women's League That Can't Define a Woman?https://pjmedia.com/eric-florack/2026/08/16/a-womans-league-that-cant-define-a-woman-n4956195I'm watching the bit with the WNBA and Caitlin Clark.
I've come to a conclusion that I suspect will cause some friction. That conclusion is that the WNBA tends to favor black lesbians, and clearly Clark isn't one of the club.
Yeah, OK, I know, I know. I hear the flamethrowers warming up already.
But, let’s look at the people directly involved with this mess. We'll start with Cathy Engelbert, the WNBA commissioner. She’s white, and has what has become in recent years an alarmingly conventional corporate background at Deloitte.
In her very first WNBA conference call as commissioner, Engelbert was asked specifically about diversity. Her answer was unequivocal. She described diversity and inclusion as a major part of her work at Deloitte and said she wanted to bring that "lens" to the WNBA. ... Engelbert choosing to lead with that language, unprompted, in her very first press conference as commissioner, is a real signal about what she considers core to the job.
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Sheila Johnson, for another example, is a black woman and co-owner of the Washington Mystics. She, along with her ex-husband, formed BET back in 1980, which ended up getting sold to Viacom for around $3 billion. ... Forbes currently estimates her wealth at about $1.2 billion. When Johnson bought into the Mystics in 2005, she was quite explicit about the demographic imbalance she saw in professional sports.
At the time, she said that black people made up roughly 70–80% of the players but only about 5–10% of decision-makers, and she specifically said she wanted her ownership position to open doors for other black women in sports leadership. That is significant, because it establishes that racial representation in the WNBA's institutional leadership wasn't an accidental byproduct. It was something Johnson said she consciously wanted to change, and we certainly have no cause to doubt her statement.
While those goals expressed by both Engelbert and Johnson cannot be argued with on the surface, it seems that the WNBA has rather obviously developed an institutional culture in which race, sexuality, and progressive political identity have become sufficiently intertwined that a player who doesn't fit that cultural template, such as the shockingly white, female, traditional Catholic with strong family ties Caitlin Clark, can be targeted. ... She can be treated as an outsider and even an enemy with some impunity—despite, in reality, being the single most commercially valuable player in the league.
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So we can say with reasonable confidence: roughly one-quarter to one-third of the WNBA's players are publicly out LGBTQ, depending on methodology.
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The AP reported in July that the Clark controversy had brought race, gender and sexuality to the forefront of discussion about the WNBA, while players themselves were expressing frustration with league leadership, apparently disagreeing with Caitlin Clark's life choices. That disapproval extends to the basketball court, as you see here:
And here’s where Engelbert has to play both sides. She needs Clark on that court, being the league's biggest draw, bar none. Observing from the sidelines, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver has suggested recently:
The player who may be doing more than anyone else to bring mainstream America into the WNBA is also a player who doesn't necessarily conform to the cultural identity of the institution she's helping to enrich.
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I offer the thinking that nobody's coming to WNBA games to support a political ideology. They're coming to watch people who can play basketball. Clark seemingly is the one best able to do that. And the ones better equipped to play ideological games than they are basketball are objecting, and even attacking the ones with genuine ability in the actual game.
So here's where the league that built its entire modern identity around inclusion, self-definition, and progressive vocabulary finds itself: unable to answer the single most basic question its own rulebook depends on. What, precisely, is a woman? Cunningham forced the question. Kanter and White just made it impossible to keep dodging that question. Meanwhile, Caitlin Clark continues to suffer physical abuse on the court.
The WNBA, IMO, is facing a trilemma:
* Are they a feminist sports triumph?
* Are they about women playing professional basketball?
* Are they a black-lesbian fortress?
The first two are compatible, but players and
misleadership want to be the
incompatible latter. The trilemma has been made acute by Caitlin Clark excelling and Clark and Cunningham being major attendance/viewership and revenue drivers (e.g. their jerseys are among or are the top-sellers). If Clark and/or Cunningham "shrug" the WNBA will be injured in their $$$, and their NBA subsidizers might be less than happy.
