Open letter to the Women’s National Basketball Players Association:
Maybe you’ve forgotten, but the first letter in WNBA is W, and the union that claims to represent its players is W.
Which stands for “Women’s.”
Simply put, the league was created to give female basketball players a professional league of their own — one in which they can compete for roster spots, contracts, playing time, endorsements, and championships.
By extension, the union was created to protect them. Protect their jobs. Protect their working conditions. Protect the opportunities they spent their lives earning.
Yet on one of the most consequential questions facing women’s athletics, where is the Women’s National Basketball Players Association?
Where is the unequivocal policy stating that the jobs reserved for female professional basketball players will remain reserved for female athletes?
Where is the union demanding clarity from the league? Where is the union standing up for the women whose dues finance its operations?
And why should those women have to wonder where their own union stands?
There is an unavoidable contradiction here.
You cannot credibly represent the employees of a women’s professional sports league while refusing to define who qualifies to compete in that women’s league.
The whole point of gender-specific sports is to recognize that physical differences between males and females can matter enormously in athletic competition.
If those categories have no meaningful boundary, then what exactly is the union protecting?
We all know the answer. As is too often true of unions representing workers in every economic sector, the WNBPA’s top priority is advancing a radically liberal agenda, even at the expense of its own members.
Every WNBA roster has a finite number of jobs, and every roster spot awarded to one player is unavailable to another. Every minute of playing time, every contract, and every opportunity affects somebody else’s career.
That makes eligibility a labor issue. And labor issues are supposed to be the union’s business.
Why shouldn’t this be one of them?
WNBA players deserve to know whether their union believes biological sex matters when determining eligibility for women’s professional basketball.
They deserve to know whether their union would object if a male athlete sought a WNBA roster spot.
They deserve to know what protections — if any — the union has sought to ensure that opportunities created specifically for female athletes remain available to female athletes.
Silence isn’t a policy. Ambiguity isn’t protection.
The WNBPA needs to answer some straightforward questions:
How does the union define eligibility for participation in women’s professional basketball?
Does the union support reserving WNBA roster positions for female athletes?
Has the union requested or negotiated protections concerning sex-based eligibility?
What would the union do if a player believed she had lost a roster spot, contract, playing time, or another employment opportunity because the league’s eligibility rules permitted a male athlete to compete in the women’s category?
What specific protections has the union established to defend the integrity of the female competitive category?
These shouldn’t be trick questions. They are fundamental to the union’s presumed reason for being.
The women of the WNBA worked extraordinarily hard to reach this level of play.
The union exists to represent its members, not a political movement that effectively undercuts their careers, their contracts, their roster spots, their opportunities, and their future.
Whatever position the union ultimately takes, its members deserve something better than evasion. They deserve a clear policy and an organization willing to defend it.
Tell your members where you stand. Explain exactly how you intend to protect the jobs and opportunities that women’s professional basketball was created to provide.
If the Women’s National Basketball Players Association cannot explain what makes women’s basketball women’s — and cannot promise to defend the women whose livelihoods depend upon that distinction — then its members are entitled to ask a much bigger question:
What, exactly, is their union for?
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Aaron Withe is CEO of the Freedom Foundation.
