“Under the Trump administration, we will protect the proud tradition of athletes, and we will not allow men to beat, injure and deceive our women and our girls.
– Donald Trump while signing him Keep men from women's sports Executive Order, February 5, 2025
“Our girls.” The line lands like a parody. Grotesque and amazing. President whose Politicians regularly harm womenPositioning himself as a guardian of “our girls”.
This is the absurd theater of American politics in 2025: female sport as a shield and a sword in a battle that has little in common with athletics. What has become clear is that Maga does not like female sport; It loves them like a proxy. This is a stage when old fears about sex and power can be reproduced, abbreviated in a cultural war, which has nothing to do with the quality of the games that play.
And Wnba, whose finale begins on Friday as Las Vegas Aces Collide on the Phoenix Mercury – continues to pull in trenches. The players are tired. Aizh Wilson said this bluntly: “People love to use us as an example, like a highlight, but in fact they do not look at how we play.” The debates about the trance of sportsmen, Kaitlin Clark receives pollution or “protection” of women's sports, rarely include votes that women really play.
When these voices are ignored, the vacuum is filled with nonsense. And instead of protecting female sports – or even help, increasing financing in secondary schools or social teams – most of the law seems to want to disrupt it. Take, for example, the right voices, such as Clay Travis and Tomi Laren, which both supported Holding men outside women's sports. They believe that women should be protected in sports, But he laughed When sex toys were thrown into the courts During Wnba games this season. (The players did not find it funny and, apparently, did not make a 12-year-old girl who was amazed at one of the toys.)
Travis is especially yelling. Despite his care for athletes, in 2023 He said it would be $ 1 million The fact that the champion in the high school of good boys “absolutely smokes” WNBA champions. There was no payment, only the noise from the dying radio. This clip was distributed in conservative media and became a point of conversation, fixing the ideology. This type of discourse does not protect and does not raise the athletes, it reduces them.
I regret that I fell in love with poison myself in childhood. My dad, and not a cruel person, or some critic for armchairs (he played the ball in New York playgrounds and more than held his own) -adhered to the same views as Travis when it came to the ability of Wnba players. He absorbed him, as so many men did, and handed it to me without hesitation. This happens everywhere: On the boards of ads Reliable Returning in 2009When 25,000 anonymous Avatars on Texags quarreled in the void on this issue. My sadness is that my poppies reduced the female game and did not even realize that it repeats someone else's mockery. Sorrow increases, knowing that the strongest person whom I knew – physically and mentally – was my mother.
Why not just celebrate what you need to play on a professional level? Judging by the female game, as “less” simply because it does not look like the fact that NBA or Male College is completely missing the matter. The measure should be the quality of performance, the intelligence of the gaming production, the creative methods in which women bend the game around their skills. When you separate it from these comparisons, you see Wnba For what it is: elite hoops, determined by their own standards.
In addition, the older I became, the more the ball I watched, the absurdity it became clear: 90% of high school players awkwardly, the maladroat and is over with the organized basketball after graduation. Meanwhile, Wnba requires clarification: passage, shooting, dribbling at an elite level. Obviously, men, of course, are more and stronger on average. But the gap between adult women who play professionally, and a teenage team with, possibly, two decent players, not that the bullets pretend, that this is so. Difference? Lifue work and players who do not rely solely on strength and height (although there are many in WNBA).
While the conservatives were stuck, paraphrasing the same tired hypotheses, the female game developed right in front of them. Ten years ago, the Wnba teams on average amounted to about 15 three -point per game; Today, many are starting closer up to 25-30, with an increase in efficiency. The revolution of three points changed how the league plays, connecting the gaps between the styles of the male and female game and demonstrating the flexibility of the league.
This is what always struck me about the crowd of “protection of women of sports”: they actually do not watch games. Gallup 90% of the Republicans (and 40% of the democrats) are found that trance sportsmen should play only in teams that correspond to their tribal sex. More S&P Global Reports about the unfamiliar truth: only 18% of adults follow women's sports, the period. Men make up Most of the spectators of WNBABut those who watch do not use it for a political ghost. If they were, they would not slander these women like them.
Hypocrisy is striking, especially those who constantly call on to keep the sport separately on the floor. As the Ebony Dumas, the former bore of the I Division I college and one of the sharpest voices on the Wnba X: “W was always rooted in the basic principles and basketball principles of the old school is that it separates it from NBA. They do not rely solely on athleticism. The middle part is still a key part of the game, and the intensity at both ends is not exclusively. ”
And people look. Wnba Viewestorship This season they reached a recordFemale Final Final NCAA 2024 Combined menThe trading products flew, and the screens lit up, the proof that interest is not only on TV, but also in how fans appear on the game. And yet, Critics said that no one watchedThe field and yet Critics said that no one caredField
The distribution between the tangible growth of the league and the way it still says about the runs deeply. Instead of celebrating increased competition, a scream too often reduces female basketball to lazy hypothetical. Or Gloomy comments About the race and sexuality. Sharada hides reality: Wnba Expansion in the bay area And Toronto And amazing Richer media transactionsField
This is the background for Trump's Line about the “protection of our girls.” This is not protection – this is a projection. He does not protect Wnba athletes selling arena. He protects the chimera, the stage where women's sport is a requisite in an endless game of complaints.
Meanwhile, the league is on fire. The ball moves, the triples fall, athletes develop in such a way that no hypothetical can capture. And the more politicians and experts come about “our girls”, the more obvious the gap between their cultural theater and women who actually be shaken becomes obvious.
There are no “our girls” and “your girls.” There is just a game.
