The best case scenario is that Enes Freedom Kanter is 100% ignored by the players and fans. The second best is that the entire arena boos him aggressively to show their support for trans people.
I found this article about Mr Freedumbs (the "b" stands for "bogus") illuminating in a "know your enemy" sort of way. Apparently he was all for Western - style openness and yes, freedoms, when it worked in his favor. Not so much once he found a vulnerable target that he hoped would erase his irrelevance.
Incels will buy his merch and make Enes lots of money. Then, they'll wear it to a WNBA game and wild out like the assholes they are and eventually get the living shit kicked out of them by a player.
Then, when they try to play the victim card, we here at Wonkette will be like, "Dude, you got beat up by a girl."
Let me tell you just a little bit, a tiny bit, of what I think about this.
You have to start with Baseball. Baseball has zero out gay men. Zero. Not in the major leagues, not in the semi-pro minor leagues. It has no out gay men. I'm told there are 30 MLB teams with over 20 players on the active roster, and 40 or more on each roster if you use the 40-man roster + long term injured or whatever. 750 dudes at the low end. Over 1200 at the high end. And including the minor leaguers on teams associated with an MLB team I'm told it's ~4000. Then there are so-called unaffiliated minor league teams. I don't have a source that I trust that there are no gay men on those teams, and I *think* the sources that say no minor or major league players are out are just talking about the MLB-affiliated minors. But it's entirely possible that there's no out queer men on those teams as well. Which would take us into the 6,000-7,000 range.
How is it possible to collect 4 or 6 thousand men who love to get sweaty and lift weights in front of other men and share their masculinity in man-only spaces with men who do men things like real men and NOT get a heapin' hunk o' homo in there?
It's not random. It's bullying.
It starts young. It targets a lot of kids for a lot of reasons, but 2 of the biggest, if not the 2 biggest, are the related cootie obsessions of the gay and the womanly. Which, y'know, is kinda nitpicking about what could be just one cootie obsession.
My point here is that there's zero possibility that you have a group of men selected randomly where stats would tell you that you'll find hundreds and you actually find zero. Zero now. Zero in the Pacific Northwest. Zero in the South. Zero in the Yankees farm system. Zero that you don't know but play in Canada. Just zero.
And it's not random bad apples on a few teams here or there. Because if it was, then you'd see out gay high school stars drafted by MLB (yes, they draft high schoolers) who would immediately break the minor league ceiling. Maybe some of them would be forced back into the closet, but the precedent would be set, the glass would be broken.
How is it possible that baseball has managed to keep the number of gay men participating at zero when a few bullies here and there would inevitably miss some high schools, fail to suppress some confident queer kids?
It's because baseball trains the bullies.
You couldn't have the system be this perfect at keeping out the queers if the system itself didn't have keeping out the queers built in.
Baseball creates the bullies that it needs to bully the gays to keep baseball pure.
Got all that?
Okay, let's talk about the WNBA. You don't watch it every night. I don't watch it every night. But I have the League Pass and every week I watch at least 5 games, sometimes 10.
The W is full of women, yes, but also it's full of players who hug their opponents with enthusiasm before the game. If you watch the way I watch, you'll see Caitlin Clark hit a ridiculous three over the long-armed superstar Brianna Stewart, then the two of them share a laugh as they run together to the other end of the court. You see life-long friends like Heideman and Williams facing off when Seattle plays Minnesota literally high fiving each other for good play **against** each other during a time out. Not before the game. Not after. During a time out. I've seen two opponents fall to the hardwood, one fouling the other by grabbing them to try to stay up, and then on the ground they took each others' hands and helped each other up. I've seen a player miss a layup and fall to the ground, the other team gets the rebound to start the fast break ...but one player stays behind to help the fallen opponent up while her 4 teammates run the break.
The WNBA on the whole - and yes, with the Cunningham exceptions - **actually** anti-bullying. They're **actually** good sports.
And yes, this is related, but in more complex ways than one would first recognize. Because it's the league that actually supports inclusion and actually fights bullying that is more likely to have an out trans woman playing, and the Right hates trans women.
But there are no out trans women playing college basketball. There are no trans women in the development feed to the W right now. And with Trump bullying the NCAA, if we get any trans women in the development feed to the W, they're somewhere in Europe playing club or school basketball and not remotely on the radar yet in the USA.
They're not doing this bc they're worried about trans women playing basketball any time soon. That's not it.
And yet trans women also aren't a distraction.
They're doing this because US sports, from elementary school to the pros, trains people to be bullies.
The WNBA may have bullies, but it doesn't train people to be bullies.
What's at stake here is not only the 15 year old kid on the verge of suicide, as important as she is. It's not the business model of the W, as important as it is to have professional leagues for women athletes that pay their players million dollar salaries.
What's at stake is whether sports gets to keep training bullies for another generation.
There won't be a trans woman in the WNBA in 2027. But there might be a gay man in MLB in 2037 if they don't fight right now for a vision of sports that rewards bullying and promotes bullies. If they don't fight right now, you might see a bi dude fronting for the NFL in 2030. (Don't ask me why the NFL is ahead of MLB, that's another long post.)
The culture of sports is bullying, and the culture of bullying is sports.
Sports is where you get to belittle the people you don't like in ways that don't fly in the warehouse break room. Sports is where dominating other people is still seen as a good thing. Sports is where hatred and the desire to destroy are praised as positive motivations.
They hate trans people because they hate trans people. They want to destroy trans people because they're bigots. They hate women because they're misogynists.
But they're terrified of an inclusive WNBA, they want to ridicule and destroy the entire idea of an inclusive WNBA, because they're bullies who need a training ground for the next generation of bullies, and the WNBA don't play that game.
Well said. They also sneakily hate women's sports in general because they often do have out queer women, and that can't be tolerated. If you get the go-ahead to start policing whether or not any particular woman is "acceptable" or "real", you can start chasing out the queer cis women, as well. Slowly you get to pare "woman" down to something very narrow and very tightly controlled.
This is not the first time Kanter misrepresented himself. For several years he tried to be a ringer in high school and college basketball after having turned pro in Turkey.
Looking at his Wikipedia article, he appears to have been intensely mediocre by NBA standards. Like, he was good enough to play, but he seems to have gotten traded around quite a bit.
I say let him come and try out. Once he’s been publicly humiliated by actual WNBA-eligible players, he’ll probably be too embarrassed to try this shit again. He’s a has been.
teaming jews
The best case scenario is that Enes Freedom Kanter is 100% ignored by the players and fans. The second best is that the entire arena boos him aggressively to show their support for trans people.
"How Not to Become a Nazi Bar for Dummies" should be given to the WNBA pronto.
I found this article about Mr Freedumbs (the "b" stands for "bogus") illuminating in a "know your enemy" sort of way. Apparently he was all for Western - style openness and yes, freedoms, when it worked in his favor. Not so much once he found a vulnerable target that he hoped would erase his irrelevance.
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2026/aug/25/enes-kanter-freedom-transgender-wnba-natasha-cloud-trump
The misogyny of all this is off the charts. Why are owners and officials allowing men to harass these athletes
Incels will buy his merch and make Enes lots of money. Then, they'll wear it to a WNBA game and wild out like the assholes they are and eventually get the living shit kicked out of them by a player.
Then, when they try to play the victim card, we here at Wonkette will be like, "Dude, you got beat up by a girl."
All alone, no bro guard, just someone confused about his identity.
Caitlin Clark is the RWNJ's new taylor swift
Yeah, and I think she's rolling her eyes about it just as hard as the original did.
The reason that they have to be TBD on banning Kanter is because they have to deal with the NBPA and such. I think they will do what they need to do.
Stupid Voltron = Doltron
Let me tell you just a little bit, a tiny bit, of what I think about this.
You have to start with Baseball. Baseball has zero out gay men. Zero. Not in the major leagues, not in the semi-pro minor leagues. It has no out gay men. I'm told there are 30 MLB teams with over 20 players on the active roster, and 40 or more on each roster if you use the 40-man roster + long term injured or whatever. 750 dudes at the low end. Over 1200 at the high end. And including the minor leaguers on teams associated with an MLB team I'm told it's ~4000. Then there are so-called unaffiliated minor league teams. I don't have a source that I trust that there are no gay men on those teams, and I *think* the sources that say no minor or major league players are out are just talking about the MLB-affiliated minors. But it's entirely possible that there's no out queer men on those teams as well. Which would take us into the 6,000-7,000 range.
How is it possible to collect 4 or 6 thousand men who love to get sweaty and lift weights in front of other men and share their masculinity in man-only spaces with men who do men things like real men and NOT get a heapin' hunk o' homo in there?
It's not random. It's bullying.
It starts young. It targets a lot of kids for a lot of reasons, but 2 of the biggest, if not the 2 biggest, are the related cootie obsessions of the gay and the womanly. Which, y'know, is kinda nitpicking about what could be just one cootie obsession.
My point here is that there's zero possibility that you have a group of men selected randomly where stats would tell you that you'll find hundreds and you actually find zero. Zero now. Zero in the Pacific Northwest. Zero in the South. Zero in the Yankees farm system. Zero that you don't know but play in Canada. Just zero.
And it's not random bad apples on a few teams here or there. Because if it was, then you'd see out gay high school stars drafted by MLB (yes, they draft high schoolers) who would immediately break the minor league ceiling. Maybe some of them would be forced back into the closet, but the precedent would be set, the glass would be broken.
How is it possible that baseball has managed to keep the number of gay men participating at zero when a few bullies here and there would inevitably miss some high schools, fail to suppress some confident queer kids?
It's because baseball trains the bullies.
You couldn't have the system be this perfect at keeping out the queers if the system itself didn't have keeping out the queers built in.
Baseball creates the bullies that it needs to bully the gays to keep baseball pure.
Got all that?
Okay, let's talk about the WNBA. You don't watch it every night. I don't watch it every night. But I have the League Pass and every week I watch at least 5 games, sometimes 10.
The W is full of women, yes, but also it's full of players who hug their opponents with enthusiasm before the game. If you watch the way I watch, you'll see Caitlin Clark hit a ridiculous three over the long-armed superstar Brianna Stewart, then the two of them share a laugh as they run together to the other end of the court. You see life-long friends like Heideman and Williams facing off when Seattle plays Minnesota literally high fiving each other for good play **against** each other during a time out. Not before the game. Not after. During a time out. I've seen two opponents fall to the hardwood, one fouling the other by grabbing them to try to stay up, and then on the ground they took each others' hands and helped each other up. I've seen a player miss a layup and fall to the ground, the other team gets the rebound to start the fast break ...but one player stays behind to help the fallen opponent up while her 4 teammates run the break.
The WNBA on the whole - and yes, with the Cunningham exceptions - **actually** anti-bullying. They're **actually** good sports.
And yes, this is related, but in more complex ways than one would first recognize. Because it's the league that actually supports inclusion and actually fights bullying that is more likely to have an out trans woman playing, and the Right hates trans women.
But there are no out trans women playing college basketball. There are no trans women in the development feed to the W right now. And with Trump bullying the NCAA, if we get any trans women in the development feed to the W, they're somewhere in Europe playing club or school basketball and not remotely on the radar yet in the USA.
They're not doing this bc they're worried about trans women playing basketball any time soon. That's not it.
And yet trans women also aren't a distraction.
They're doing this because US sports, from elementary school to the pros, trains people to be bullies.
The WNBA may have bullies, but it doesn't train people to be bullies.
What's at stake here is not only the 15 year old kid on the verge of suicide, as important as she is. It's not the business model of the W, as important as it is to have professional leagues for women athletes that pay their players million dollar salaries.
What's at stake is whether sports gets to keep training bullies for another generation.
There won't be a trans woman in the WNBA in 2027. But there might be a gay man in MLB in 2037 if they don't fight right now for a vision of sports that rewards bullying and promotes bullies. If they don't fight right now, you might see a bi dude fronting for the NFL in 2030. (Don't ask me why the NFL is ahead of MLB, that's another long post.)
The culture of sports is bullying, and the culture of bullying is sports.
Sports is where you get to belittle the people you don't like in ways that don't fly in the warehouse break room. Sports is where dominating other people is still seen as a good thing. Sports is where hatred and the desire to destroy are praised as positive motivations.
They hate trans people because they hate trans people. They want to destroy trans people because they're bigots. They hate women because they're misogynists.
But they're terrified of an inclusive WNBA, they want to ridicule and destroy the entire idea of an inclusive WNBA, because they're bullies who need a training ground for the next generation of bullies, and the WNBA don't play that game.
Well said. They also sneakily hate women's sports in general because they often do have out queer women, and that can't be tolerated. If you get the go-ahead to start policing whether or not any particular woman is "acceptable" or "real", you can start chasing out the queer cis women, as well. Slowly you get to pare "woman" down to something very narrow and very tightly controlled.
Amen. We all need to fight this.
Also, good to see you, Crip Dyke.
Hey, BosGrl. Good to see you as well.
I think I might cross-post this to the endless thread. Is that overkill?
Nope, do it. It was well written and absolutely correct.
I'm a semi-decent follower of the NBA. This guy played in the NBA for 15 years?
Honestly, I have never heard of him until this article.
I guess his career was wholly unremarkable. He was traded like 7 times and was apparently just okay by NBA standards.
This is not the first time Kanter misrepresented himself. For several years he tried to be a ringer in high school and college basketball after having turned pro in Turkey.
Looking at his Wikipedia article, he appears to have been intensely mediocre by NBA standards. Like, he was good enough to play, but he seems to have gotten traded around quite a bit.
A 6 foot 10 inch 250 lb obstacle has a place in the NBA.
"Stand here and stick your arms out"
I say let him come and try out. Once he’s been publicly humiliated by actual WNBA-eligible players, he’ll probably be too embarrassed to try this shit again. He’s a has been.
The league needs to hire people to protect the players from idiots like him.
Individual teams are responsible for furnishing security in their home stadiums. Security in this case did their job.
Supporting women by insulting a bunch of them at work. Interesting tactic