Earlier this month, the Women's National Basketball Players Association put out a statement to address unanswered questions about the participation of biologically male players in the WNBA. As one might have expected, it consisted mostly of bromides about “justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion” (good); and “hate, abuse…fear, division, and harm” (bad). But one sentence jumped out at me from among these clichés, as I think it captures the rock and the hard place pincering female sports—including Australian Rules Football, which I will get to below: “Those are the values that unite this Union and allow it to protect women’s sports while creating transformational change” (my emphasis).

As the WNBA and a number of other female sports leagues are discovering, there’s a problem with perpetually presenting yourself to the world as “transformational”: Eventually, the thing you’re trying to transform gets transformed. Then what?

When I was in college, the idea that women’s pro basketball would become a multi-billion-dollar business was a sneering sports-bar joke. Now it’s a reality: The fabled transformation has arrived.

With their 11-year, US$3-billion TV deal, have WNBA players finally earned the right to focus on the sports they love—a right that professional male athletes take for granted every time they suit up? Or are these women still required to go out and find “transformational” social-justice missions—such as, oh, say, convincing fans that sexual biology is a figment of their imaginations? The sanctimonious statement from the players union quoted above suggests it’s the latter.

The reason the WNBA keeps serving up scenes of culture-war farce in 2026 is that it insists on juggling two missions—providing elite female sports entertainment while giving lip service to transgender activism—that are completely at odds with one another. On one hand, everyone knows that it would be insane to permit female-identified men to compete against women (as four former NBA players are nominally planning to do). On the other hand, the league’s administrators apparently feel that explicitly encoding this obvious principle in the league’s rules would represent an impermissibly anti-“transformational” posture.

Instead of dealing frankly with this contradiction, the league has taken the position that everyone would do well to simply shut up about it, lest they “sow divisiveness” (i.e., by calling out the league’s brain trust for its policy paralysis). One ideological enforcer, Golden State Valkyries head coach Natalie Nakase, has even smeared non-compliant fans as purveyors of “hate speech.” The WNBA is a women’s sports league—that’s the first letter, lest we forget—led by people who, with a straight face, will tell you they are incapable of defining the word “woman.”

This embarrassing state of affairs isn’t a product of the (real) sexism that trailblazing female athletes often face when creating their own sports institutions. It isn’t a product of “transphobic” hysteria. It isn’t a phenomenon that can be blamed on Donald Trump or Joe Rogan. This is something women are doing to themselves. The question is why.

For clues, let us now turn to a telling case study from a lesser-known sport.