Sophie Cunningham Is Pointing To The Death Of The Irony That Is Men In Women's Sports
Notes on the WNBA controversy and the historical process of ideological collapse
“The problem is that the grown-ups in the room have turned into cowards, and they are all running away from the fantasists”, Sir Trevor Phillips said in an interview with The Telegraph last week. “When I was a student, one of the things we fought for was that women could operate independently of men. Now, according to this new fantasy world, the one thing women cannot do is decide when they want to be separate from men. It’s not just outrageous, it’s insane.” Or: ironic.
Fantasists have indeed run amok with ‘gender identity’ and ‘self-ID’, inflicting a form of insanity on western societies for more than a decade. Male fantasists have treated these putative human rights as an excuse to cheat at female sports. Self-described liberal feminists excuse and even promote this travesty in the name of ‘inclusion’, an historical irony that the Women’s National Basketball League exemplifies by failing to define the word ‘woman’ in its eligibility rules.
The WNBA is the wokest professional sports league in America. It also would not exist without the financial support of the all-male NBA, a second layer of irony. When Enes Kanter Freedom and Royce White, both retired NBA players, declared themselves WNBA prospects last week, they were calling a bluff that the league had spent a week making in its dispute with Indiana Fever star Sophie Cunningham.
Too many layers of irony have collapsed the supporting pillars of cognitive rationalization. If ‘trans women are women’ and gender is fluid, then Royce White can indeed be “transgender” if he says so. “I’m a woman” is all he needs to say, and he has said it. “I identify as sometimes identifying as a woman for purpose of basketball, professional basketball.” According to the reigning ideology of trans-ness, that is enough.
The WNBA says that only “players who are women” are eligible, but the league also maintains a political pretense that some men can be women if they say so. Royce White says he is so. Stunning! Brave! Anyone who calls him a troll is clearly a racist white supremacist policing black and brown bodies.
Admittedly, it has been fun on social media. We get to turn all the idiotic language of woke inclusivity gibberish back on those who enforced it, before now. We get to mock their book of rules by holding them to it. This is the moment that too many layers of irony are too heavy for ideological structures to support, so that all the arguments that were made in favor of men in women’s sports over the previous decade collapse upon themselves.
Enes Freedom has not mocked anyone. He has instead argued that if self-identification is enough to meet the league eligibility rule, then it applies just as easily to himself as herself as it does to anyone in the world. Needless to say, advocates of ‘transgender sports inclusion’ are aghast that their own rule is being used this way. Mr. Freedom is however a brown man, so they are policing ‘her’ body, according to their own book of rules, now.
Adding one more layer of irony, the WNBA is chartered in New York City, where the law lets these men sue if they are denied. In a Friday memorandum obtained by the Associated Press and other outlets, WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert told league clubs that a task force of team presidents and general managers will discuss the issue this week. Because the eligibility rules are set by collective bargaining, the entire league must agree to any new policy clarifying what is a woman, the perennial ironic question that ‘gender identity’ advocates refuse to answer.
‘History as irony’ is the dominant modern historiographical and cultural predicament. We have adopted a self-aware, skeptical stance that dissolves earlier naïve confidence in coherent plots or objective meaning, leaving us guided by relativism, often in a satirical or pessimistic tone. According to historian Hayden White, it is when that ironic apprehension reaches its fullest, most complete expression that we are able to break with irony and return to a story that has earnest meaning.
I have no crystal ball. However, the WNBA is poised to follow the Women’s Tennis Association, the International Olympic Committee, and 27 Republican-controlled state legislatures in protecting the female category this week. Maybe. If that happens, it will mark the collapse of this ironic era of elite silencing of dissent and the beginning of a meaningful society-wide dialogue about female sports categories. In a word, it would be historic.
