This story originally appeared on Them.
Getting into the WNBA’s business and being transphobic? In tennis, that’s called a double fault.
On Sunday, tennis icon Martina Navratilova — whose descent into the anti-trans movement has rapidly escalated since she first publicly opposed trans women in sports in 2019 — helped spread the rumor that the WNBA is purposefully harboring and hiding a transgender player. That conspiracy theory appears to have been introduced into the increasingly toxic discourse around the WNBA by Yankees minority owner Patrick Bet-David.
Navratilova quoted a social media post on X on Sunday night from New York-based comedian MJ Murphy, who wrote, “We cannot and do not know if the WNBA has any biological males playing.” In response to the original post, Navratilova wrote, “Exactly. And that’s on purpose, most likely…”
In subsequent posts, Navratilova responded to someone who said that there is “one per rumor” — meaning, a trans woman playing in the WNBA. “Point is nobody knows,” Navratilova responded to the baseless theory.
Rumors that the WNBA is hiding the identity of a transgender player have started circulating in earnest after two former NBA players — Royce White and Enes Kanter Freedom — falsely claimed to be women for the purposes of declaring for the WNBA draft. Both players announced their intent to apply for the WNBA draft on Friday, August 7 and the league declared them ineligible on August 13. Both players had hoped to exploit a loophole in the WNBA eligibility guidelines that simply says that “only players who are women” are eligible to play in the women’s league — a statute they felt was vague in its definition.
Navratilova has long espoused transphobic beliefs in regards to trans people in professional athletics. In 2019, she wrote an op-ed in the Times of London that said allowing trans women to compete with cisgender women was “insane” and “cheating.” In 2021, she was one of six female athletes who formed the Women’s Sports Policy Working Group, which declared its mission to be “to protect girls’ and women’s competitive sport for biological females while accommodating trans girls and trans women through evidence-based, respectful criteria.” She has continued to post online with some frequency about the issue, primarily on X.
White and Freedom’s declarations have fueled a firestorm of attention on the WNBA regarding eligibility for transgender players — a topic that had already been gaining steam after Indiana Fever player Sophie Cunningham made anti-trans comments to ESPN while being profiled in July. Cunningham’s comments brought not only backlash from fans and players in the WNBA, but a groundswell of support from right-wingers, who began rallying against trans inclusion in sports outside Fever games and wearing anti-trans T-shirts in the stands.
Despite the persistence of these baseless rumors, there are no trans women hiding in the WNBA, mostly due to the fact that right-wingers have made sure that trans women are not even allowed to compete at the collegiate level. Most drafted WNBA players come from within the college-based NCAA system, which banned trans women from women’s sports in February 2025, buckling under the pressure of an anti-trans executive order from Donald Trump.
State bans also impact the number of trans athletes who could end up in the recruitment pool; 27 states currently ban trans athletes from participating in teams that align with their gender identity, per the Movement Advancement Project.
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