Our girls theater: how the right claims to protect women’s sports while attacking them | WNBA

“”Under the Trump administration, we will defend the proud tradition of female athletes, and we will not allow men to beat, hurt and deceive our women and daughters. “”

– Donald Trump at the signing of his men who prevent men of the Women’s Sports Executive Order, February 5, 2025

“Our daughters”. The line lands like a parody. Grotesque and striking. A president whose policies regularly harmed women, positioning himself as guardian of “our daughters”.

It is the absurd theater of American politics in 2025: female sports as a shield and sword in a fight that has little to do with athletics. What has become clear is that the Maga movement does not like female sports; He loves them like a proxy. This is a step where old fears concerning sex and power can be reconstructed, shortened in a cultural war that has nothing to do with the quality of the hoops played.

And the WNBA – whose finals start on Friday while the AS of Las Vegas are faced with the Phoenix Mercury – continues to be dragged in the trenches. The players have enough. A’ja Wilson said it frankly: “People like to use us as an example, as a punchline, but they don’t really look at us.” Debates on trans athletes, Caitlin Clark being increased or “protecting” female sports rarely include the voices of women who really play.

When these voices are ignored, the void fills with nonsense. And rather than protecting female sports – or even helping by increasing funding in secondary schools or social teams – a large part of the law seems to want to tear it away. Take, for example, right -wing voices such as Clay Travis and Tomi Lahren, who both supported the men who kept the men from the female sports bill. They believe that women should be protected in sport, but laughed when the sex toys were launched on courts in WNBA matches this season. (The players did not find her fun, nor probably the 12 -year -old girl who was struck by one of the toys.)

Travis is particularly blatant. Despite his concern for female athletes in 2023, he said he would have bet $ 1 million that a good high school champion for boys “would absolutely smoke” the WNBA champions. There was no payment, only the noise of a dying radio. This clip circulated through conservative media and has become a subject of discussion, hardening in ideology. This type of discourse does not protect or raise female athletes, it decreases them.

My regret is that I fell in love with the poison myself when I was a child. My father – not a cruel man, or a armchair critic (he played ball in New York playgrounds and more than held on) – held the same views as Travis with regard to the capacities of WNBA players. He had absorbed him, like so many men, and did it to me without thinking. This happens everywhere: on electronic babibllards in 2009, when 25,000 anonymous avatars on texags were elegant in a vacuum on the subject. My sadness is that my pops have decreased the female game and did not even know that he was repeating someone else’s sneer. Sadness is increased knowing that the strongest person I know – physically and mentally – was my mother.

Why not just celebrate what it takes to play at a professional level? Judging the female game as “less than” simply because it does not look like the NBA or the male collegiate ball completely lacks the point. The measure should be the quality of the execution, the intelligence of the creation of games, the creative ways of women fold the game around their skills. When you separate it from these comparisons, you see the WNBA for what it is: Elite Hoops, defined by its own standards.

In addition, the more I get older, the more I looked at the ball, the absurdity has become clear: 90% of secondary players are awkward, clumsy and finished with basketball organized after obtaining the diploma. WNBA, on the other hand, requires refinement: pass, shoot, dribble at an elite level. Obviously, men are naturally larger and stronger on average. But the gap between adult women who play professionally and a teenage team with perhaps two decent players is not what detractors claim that it is. The difference? A working life and players who do not only count on strength and size (although there are many in the WNBA).

While the conservatives are stuck reviving the same tired hypotheses, the female game has evolved right in front of them. Ten years ago, WNBA teams have an average of around 15 points to three points per game; Today, many launch closer to 25 to 30, with an effectiveness climbing next to it. The three -point revolution has transformed the way the league is played, fill the gaps between the styles of male and female play and presenting the malleability of the league.

This is what has always struck me about the “Protect Women’s Sports” crowd: they don’t really watch games. Gallup noted that 90% of Republicans (and 40% of Democrats) say that trans athletes should only play in teams that correspond to their birthday relations. However, S&P Global reports a foreign truth: only 18% of adults follow female sports, period. Men are the majority of the WNBA audience, but those who look are not those who use it for political soaking. If they were, they did not denigrate these women as they are.

Hypocrisy is astounding, especially by those who constantly call to keep sports separated by sex. As Ebony Dumas, a former university baller of division I, and one of the most incisive voices of WNBA X, said to me: “The W has always been rooted in the fundamental principles and the principles of old -fashioned basketball – this is what separates it from the NBA. They are not only done on athletics. The environment is always a key element of the game, and the intensity on both ends is not born. ”.

And people look. The WNBA viewer has reached a record this season. The last female final of the 2024 NCAA exceeded men. The goods stolen and the screens were on, the proof that the interest is not only on television, but in the way the fans present themselves for the game. And yet the criticisms said that no one looked. And yet the criticisms said that no one cared about it.

The disconnection between the tangible growth of the league and the way in which it still talked about depths. Instead of celebrating increased competition, Yapping too often reduces female basketball to lazy hypotheses. Or lamentable comments on race and sexuality. Charade obscures reality: WNBA develops in the Bay and Toronto region and striking richer media agreements.

This is the backdrop of Trump’s line on “protection of our daughters”. It is not protection – it is projection. He does not defend WNBA athletes selling arenas. He defends a chimera, a stage where female sports are accessories in an endless grievance game.

Meanwhile, the league burns. The ball moves, the three fall, the athletes evolve in a way that no hypothetical could capture. And the more politicians and experts post on “our daughters”, the more obvious the gap becomes between their cultural theater and women in reality.

There are no “our daughters” and “your daughters”. There is just a game.