Enes Kanter Freedom, then a player for the Boston Celtics, is pictured in a 2021 file photo. Kanter Freedom on Friday declared his own eligibility to be considered in the 2027 WNBA draft. (Maddie Malhotra / Getty Images)
By Joe Saunders August 7, 2026 at 1:16pm
It appears the WNBA is getting closer to put up or shut up time.
Former NBA star Enes Kanter Freedom — a player who is no stranger to controversy — announced on the social media platform X on Friday that he is declaring himself eligible for next year’s WNBA draft.
“After careful consideration and reviewing the current eligibility guidelines, I am officially declaring myself a WNBA prospect,” he said.
After careful consideration and reviewing the current eligibility guidelines,
I’m officially declaring myself a @WNBA prospect.If simply declaring who you are is all that’s required, then I meet every single requirement necessary to compete in the WNBA.
My team and I have… pic.twitter.com/msncUZUT1J
— Enes Kanter FREEDOM (@EnesFreedom) August 7, 2026
“If simply declaring who you are is all that’s required, then I meet every single requirement necessary to compete in the WNBA,” Kanter Freedom said.
“My team and I have carefully examined the WNBA eligibility criteria and governing framework surrounding self-identification and inclusion.”
And what are those “eligibility criteria”?
According to the Fox-owned Outkick Sports, the league’s collective bargaining agreement reached in March declares that, “Only players who are women are eligible to play in the WNBA.”
But in an era when too many sports personalities — including coaches in the WNBA itself — pretend to be uncertain about what exactly the word “women” means, that throws the door open for all manner of supposed “transgender” players to try to pass themselves off as women for the purposes of infiltrating the WNBA.
And Enes Kanter Freedom’s pitch on Friday is going to make that clearer than ever.
The WNBA does not list criteria for determining who qualifies as a “woman,” according to the fact-checking website factually.co.
Its biggest name to speak out on the subject, the Indiana Fever’s Sophie Cunningham, has been subjected to insults — “MAGA Barbie” — and hasn’t even been backed up by her own coach.
But Cunningham understands that women’s sports need to be protected from men claiming to be women to take advantage of the inherent physical superiority that comes with having XY chromosomes.
Every sane person understands it, and even the questionably sane — like French “women’s” basketball player Julie Tetart — all powerfully muscled 6 feet, 3 of him — understand it.
Those who claim otherwise are the deliberately obtuse, like WNBA owner Celeste Keaton or the perennially annoying former women’s soccer star Megan Rapinoe.
And then there’s a certain Supreme Court justice who begged off defining “woman” — her very own biological gender — on the grounds that she’s “not a biologist.”
Will a WNBA team draft Enes Kanter Freedom?
Well, Kanter Freedom is certainly no biologist, either. But what he is is an athlete good enough to play in NBA, the world’s dominant basketball league, and a human being courageous enough to call out that league’s pacts with the devils in communist China, even when that got him into trouble with the biggest name in the sport.
And with Friday’s troll of the WNBA, he’s putting a glaring light on a weak spot in the league’s oh-so-nuanced wokeness and essentially pushing it to define what exactly it means when it says, “Only players who are women are eligible to play in the WNBA.”
Is he going to be taken seriously and considered for the WNBA draft? Almost certainly not.
This is a political publicity stunt. And the WNBA has to understand, even if it can’t admit it, that its sole legitimacy as a sport comes from the fact that it’s for “women” — the “W” in its title being a big clue.
But even as a publicity stunt, it raises serious questions about what the WNBA actually believes and why. And how it can and will formulate rules to reflect that.
In short, it’s getting closer to put up or shut up time. And the WNBA is running out of clock.
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Joe has spent more than 30 years as a reporter, copy editor and metro desk editor in newsrooms in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Florida. He’s been with Liftable Media since 2015.
Joe has spent more than 30 years as a reporter, copy editor and metro editor in newsrooms in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Florida. He’s been with Liftable Media since 2015. Largely a product of Catholic schools, who discovered Ayn Rand in college, Joe is a lifelong newspaperman who learned enough about the trade to be skeptical of every word ever written. He was also lucky enough to have a job that didn’t need a printing press to do it.
Birthplace
Philadelphia
Nationality
American
