Wonkette Sports Desk Brings You The Good News!
It's good news day today, right? Right?
On this day of nothing but good news, Wonkette brings you some hopeful stories from the world of women’s sports.
Trans People Are Not Killing Women’s Sports
Calling this good news is perhaps damning with faint praise, but after a year of widespread testeria about Gold Medal trans swimmers knocking volleyballs into the heads of vulnerable 6-year old boxers just trying to earn their bachelor’s degree in kinesiology, it’s very good to have some sanity and some fact. And so it’s worth noting two moments of truth telling from this past week.
In the first, the NCAA President and former Republican governor of Massachusetts Charlie Baker testified to the GOP-majority Senate Judiciary Committee that there are over 510,000 NCAA athletes competing in sports where the NCAA overseas a process of determining a national champion, and fewer than 10 of those athletes are trans persons competing in the category of their gender identity. It’s important to note that this severe underrepresentation is bad news for trans people who have obviously been bullied into non-participation. It’s the speaking truth to power bit that’s the good news. Women’s sports are healthy and competitive, and whatever ails them isn’t due to an invasion of hypermasculine male bodybuilders who decided to claim a few weeks of transness on a Tuesday afternoon to score a national championship for their resumés.
Simultaneously but unconnected with Baker’s testimony, the academic journal Sociology of Sport published research showing that bigots who didn’t like women’s sports in the first place and want women back in the kitchen and gays back in the closet were the most likely to also oppose trans people competing in sport. Or in the dry language of the authors:
Findings revealed that more strongly believing that female athletes are undeserving, suggesting that women should more fully conform to traditionally idealized physical appearances, and expressing more homophobic views were negatively associated with support for transgender athletes’ rights and rights for athletes with varied sex characteristics
Study co-author Kirsten Hextrum added to PsyPost:
“We were, and remain curious about, whether this political movement supports equitable policies and outcomes for girls and women’s sports. Based on our broader public opinion research, we see relationships between anti-trans* views and orthodox gender beliefs in sport—beliefs that may lead to policies that restrict and contain girls and women’s sports into subordinate athletic opportunities. In these ways, our research indicates these movements may not be in the best interest of girls and women’s athletic opportunities.”
Wonkette should say.
Women’s College Basketball Has A New Highest-Paid Coach
Just like sports such as the National Football League that struggle to find, hire, and pay talented Black coaches and coaches who are former players, NCAA college basketball is highly dependent on the talent and hard work of Black athletes and other athletes of color. Yet it remains extremely difficult for former players to break into the coaching ranks where the real money is. Unlike the NFL, however, where the highest paid coach is Andy Reid, a successful guy but still a white dude who never played in the NFL, NCAA women’s basketball’s new highest-paid coach is Dawn Staley, a Black woman who won the NCAA’s most prestigious individual awards as a player, then went on to to team success winning three Olympic gold medals. Since transitioning to coaching, she has won another three Olympic golds and three NCAA championships from the bench.
Until recently she was the third highest paid coach behind undeniably successful Geno Auriemma — a man who, understandably, did not play women’s college basketball — and Kim Mulkey, a white woman who did play the sport and has also had success, but who is in yr Wonkette’s opinion a terrible human being who managed to alienate her most famous player — Britney Griner — to the point that they didn’t speak when Griner was released from a Russian prison two years ago.
Staley, on the other hand, took a stand for trans inclusion in women’s college sports the day before winning her most recent championship last April:
“I’m of the opinion of, of, if you’re a woman you should play. If you consider yourself a woman and you want to play sports, or vice versa, you should be able to play. That’s my opinion.”
It’s because Staley loves her sport that she wants everyone involved. Far from being afraid that inclusion and participation will ruin women’s basketball, she seems certain that more people will only bring more love. We couldn’t imagine a better representative of her sport, for her talent, for her work, for her individual and team success, for her mentorship, and for her generous humanity. If we’re going to live in a world where sportsball coaches earn multi-million dollar salaries, we couldn’t pick a better person to get top dollar than Dawn Staley.
Speaking Of Money: Pay The Women
Finally, two more related stories in a busy week of (obviously!) great news. First, ESPN reports that the NCAA, which makes huge Ameros off of the broadcast rights to their annual basketball tournaments, will finally be paying women’s teams for their participation. It has long been the policy that men’s basketball teams that make the end-of-season tournament receive payments from the NCAA as a cut of the sales of broadcast rights to tournament games. Not so with women’s teams. But last week a unanimous vote changed that policy, and none too soon. In 2024 viewership for the women’s championship outstripped viewership for the men.
Women athletes are finding success and making money for organizations like the NCAA and its member schools. Not rewarding women’s teams was already sexist and unjustifiable, but after last year’s TV performance it also became politically untenable.
But wait, there’s more! While Joe Biden was declaring the ERA part of the US Constitution, the Department of Education noticed that, hey, if schools are paying men athletes as individuals but not individual women athletes, that maybe-kinda-oopsie-daisy violates Title IX’s requirement of non-discrimination.
"When a school provides athletic financial assistance in forms other than scholarships or grants, including compensation for the use of a student-athlete's NIL, such assistance also must be made proportionately available to male and female athletes," the [DoE] memo said.
The opinion wouldn’t apply to non-school monies, such as Phil Knight giving hefty contracts to University of Oregon athletes to promote Nike goods, but to the extent that schools are rewarding individual athletes with a share of the TV revenues the school earns from NCAA participation, that sharing must be non-discriminatory. At least until some future, non-Biden Department of Education decides otherwise.
But that is a fate we are not prepared to consider on this day of great news in women’s sports.
Your friendly, neighborhood Crip Dyke also writes Pervert Justice!
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Today, we are all apparently women due to the wording of Trump's EO.
Author, game designer and transgender woman, Crystal Frasier wrote on Blue Sky,
"In that familiar old incompetence I haven't missed, Trump's executive order defines sex as what a person is at CONCEPTION. Fetal sex doesn't begin to differentiate until about 7 weeks into gestation. Which means Donald used the highest office in the land to declare all Americans legally female."
"Just realized that this EO outlaws men. At conception, all embryos are female. Which, to be honest, might not be such a bad thing," said legal analyst Jay Reding."
Funny how so many conservative pathologies trace back to:
1. I hate Black people and brown people and think they're inferior to me, and/or
2. Women should personally be dressing and acting to appeal to me personally and welcome my sexual advances if they're lucky enough for me to find them attractive.