The men claiming to defend women’s sports are throwing sex toys at female athletes

I regret to inform you that yet another dildo has hit a WNBA court. The Chicago Sky v Golden State Valkyries game was sullied by sex toys being chucked on to the playing surface on Friday. Aren’t we tired of all this yet? To paraphrase the Sky’s Natasha Cloud, it takes a lot of effort to bother with such a juvenile act.

This is yet another controversy for the WNBA, a league that up until a few years ago, most media observers ignored. The WNBA is full of incredibly talented players and has a rich history, but most sports fans treated all but ignored it for the majority of its 30-year existence. But when Caitlin Clark went pro, the league surged. Ratings, attendance, and interest exploded. But not all attention is good attention.

Clark has been polarizing from the start, owing to the fact that she’s a white superstar in a league that has historically been dominated by Black players. That alone makes her a prime candidate for culture warriors to weigh in. But now, the level of debate around the league has somehow become worse. Clark’s teammate, Sophie Cunningham, chose this fraught moment to declare she’s against trans women playing in girls’ and women’s sports. Never mind that the league has never had a trans player assigned male at birth and this is all just a hypothetical scenario she’s concerned about. Cunningham is better at getting attention than scoring points. Protests outside Fever games are often covered on the news more than the games inside the arena, which is hardly the kind of attention the WNBA has been looking for. A league that has long prided itself on its LGBTQ fans and players is now at the center of transphobic controversy. And then, it started raining dildos.

The Sky-Valkyries game is not the first time sex toys have been thrown on to the court at a WNBA game – the dismal incidents started last season. It’s not even the only league where this has happened. Regardless, the timing is pointed. The WNBA is not just a sports league – it’s also a furious petri dish for the opinions of people who often don’t even like women’s basketball. A group of crypto traders took responsibility for previous incidents and the most recent one in Chicago, declaring their support for Cunningham’s stance against trans women playing in the WNBA (which again, has not happened). You’d think they’d have come up with a new stunt, but apparently, good ideas are in short supply these days (they tried the same stunt last season to promote a meme coin, and there appears to be plenty of self-promotion behind these recent ones too). And if the group – and many of the anti-trans brigade who have descended on the WNBA – truly cared about women’s sports, perhaps funding scholarships and teams for young female athletes would be a more constructive way of going about it.

With outlets like Fox News forced to cover the league and hucksters like ex-NBA player Enes Kanter Freedom coming out to glom onto the controversy, the WNBA seems to be drowning in the kind of press no one wants. There’s a long history of athletes speaking up about their political and cultural opinions, but this seems especially dire when a women’s basketball player is actively speaking out against a community that has historically supported the sport. The WNBA finds itself in a culture war ignited by one of its own players, and the absurd spectacle of young men throwing sex toys at female athletes in the name of protecting women’s sports is just another front in that conflict. The “stick to sports” mantra that was so popular during the first Trump administration has become a punchline every time a dildo gets thrown on a basketball court.

The sex toy incidents are just the physical manifestation of what Cunningham has done to her league – a needless plea for attention that serves no one but the person making the fuss. This was not a subject the WNBA was dealing with until she said something. It’s now something the WNBA can’t get away from. If women’s basketball is to maintain its recent growth it needs to continue producing stars like Clark, four-time MVP A’ja Wilson and the ridiculously talented Olivia Miles. What it doesn’t need is players who court controversy for their own personal gain. Cunningham was barely on most fans’ radars until she became a meme, an honor usually reserved for such cultural luminaries as The Rizzler and the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. Good for her, I guess. No doubt her post-career podcast will be thrilling. But where does she leave the WNBA? Drowning in the aftermath of childish pranks, it seems.

No doubt there will be further moronic stunts this season, especially during the high visibility period of the WNBA playoffs and finals. The league can’t stipulate the terms of players’ speech. It can only ban those young men who disrupt games (and it is only young men who have been apprehended for the stunts so far), although there seems to be an endless supply of them. If the WNBA is going to sustain itself and bring in more genuine fans (as opposed to people solely interested in the league because they want to make a political point), it will need to address all of this in some meaningful way. The bond it has built with many of the LGBTQ fans who have helped sustain and build the league is being torched, with the help of one of its own players. And now outside agitators have joined the party.