Something about this WNBA argument has been bothering me.
And I don’t think it’s actually about basketball.
Former NBA players Enes Kanter Freedom and Royce White have both said they identify as women and announced intentions to enter the 2027 WNBA Draft. League sources have since said neither is eligible, although the WNBA has not publicly laid out a detailed explanation of the eligibility decision. The league’s collective bargaining agreement says only women are eligible to play, without spelling out a more detailed public definition involving gender identity or sex assigned at birth.
Now, obviously, both men are making a point.
This is a provocation.
Nobody needs me to pretend otherwise.
But sometimes a provocation is useful because it stress-tests a rule.
It forces us to answer a question we could avoid when everybody involved was cooperating with the premise.
And the question here seems pretty basic.
What exactly is the category?
Not who do you like.
Not whose intentions are good.
Not who is mocking whom.
Not whose politics you prefer.
What is the category?
Because I keep hearing a word that apparently solves all of these problems.
Spectrum.
Everything is a spectrum.
Gender is a spectrum.
Identity is a spectrum.
Sexuality is a spectrum.
And sometimes that makes complete sense.
There are things in life that obviously exist on continua.
Height is a continuum.
There is no moment when you go from “short” to “tall” and the universe sounds a buzzer.
Skin pigmentation varies continuously.
Temperature is continuous.
Age moves continuously.
There is no biological explosion at 11:59 p.m. the night before your eighteenth birthday.
You are seventeen years, 364 days, 23 hours and 59 minutes old.
A minute later, legally, you’re an adult.
Did your body transform?
Of course not.
But we still use the category.
Why?
Because categories do something.
They allow human beings to communicate.
They allow us to make rules.
They allow us to distinguish one thing from another thing without explaining the entire universe every time we open our mouths.
And this is where I think we’ve made a strange intellectual jump.
We discover that the boundary between two categories can sometimes be difficult to locate.
Then we conclude that the categories themselves must not exist.
Why?
Twilight exists.
That doesn’t mean noon and midnight are the same thing.
A seventeen-year-old gradually becomes an eighteen-year-old.
That doesn’t mean a four-year-old and a forty-year-old belong in the same legal category.
There are people who are difficult to classify as tall or short.
That doesn’t mean height stopped existing.
There can be uncertainty at a boundary without uncertainty everywhere.
That seems obvious.
Or at least it used to seem obvious to me.
A gray area does not mean black and white disappeared.
It means there is a gray area.
And I think we increasingly use the existence of the gray area as an argument against the existence of the category itself.
That is where I start having trouble.
Because if that principle works, I’m not sure where it stops.
Almost every useful category has difficult cases at its edges.
Child and adult.
Rich and poor.
Hot and cold.
Day and night.
Alive and dead, in some medical circumstances.
Even something as ordinary as borrowing and stealing can produce complicated cases.
If you loan me something for a week and I keep it for eight days, did I steal it?
Probably not.
What about a month?
What if I intended to return it but never did?
What if I forgot?
What if you told me to keep it until you needed it and then we disagreed about whether you asked for it back?
Interesting questions.
But the existence of difficult cases does not suddenly mean:
“Well, stealing and borrowing are really just one big spectrum.”
Try that with the police.
“I didn’t steal his truck. I’m simply much farther along the borrowing continuum.”
I’m guessing somebody will still ask whether the owner gave you permission.
Because the category is not determined merely by locating yourself somewhere between two words.
There are criteria.
And once criteria matter, we have to identify them.
That brings me back to the WNBA.
Forget for a moment whether you think what Kanter Freedom and White are doing is clever, offensive, childish, important, cruel, funny or stupid.
Those are all separate opinions.
Just look at the question their stunt creates.
If saying “I am a woman” is not enough to establish eligibility, okay.
Then what else is required?
Sincerity?
How do we measure sincerity?
Duration?
Medical treatment?
Legal documentation?
Gender dysphoria?
Social transition?
Biological sex?
Something else?
Maybe there is a perfectly coherent answer.
Fine.
Then say it.
But once the answer becomes:
“You qualify if your reason for identifying that way is legitimate,”
we have introduced another person into the definition.
Somebody now has to decide whether your identity counts.
And that creates a very different rule from:
“People determine their own identities.”
I’m not even saying which rule is correct yet.
I’m saying they are different rules.
And we should be able to notice that.
Because this is what I think happens when we start using “spectrum” as though it eliminates the need for categories.
Eventually we still need categories.
Sports leagues need eligibility rules.
Governments need legal definitions.
Doctors need diagnostic terminology.
Schools need age ranges.
Insurance companies need classifications.
Courts need definitions.
Words eventually have to do some work.
And when the word suddenly becomes too broad to do the work, somebody has to create another rule underneath it.
Then another exception.
Then another qualification.
Until eventually nobody knows what the original word means without asking seventeen follow-up questions.
Maybe that’s progress.
But I’m not convinced.
Because language is supposed to save us from having to do that.
A word is basically an agreement.
When I say it, you are supposed to have a reasonably good idea what I mean.
Not perfectly.
Context matters.
Words can have multiple meanings.
Language is messy.
But there has to be enough shared understanding for communication to happen.
Otherwise we’re not disagreeing.
We’re translating.
And I think that’s where this week’s argument is going.
Because this isn’t really about whether everything exists somewhere on some enormous philosophical continuum.
If you zoom out far enough, almost anything can.
The question is whether identifying a continuum tells us anything useful about the categories inside it.
Sometimes it does.
Sometimes it doesn’t.
And sometimes I think we invoke the word “spectrum” because it lets us avoid the harder question:
Where is the distinction, and why does it matter?
The WNBA suddenly has to answer some version of that question.
So do the rest of us.
Because if the existence of a difficult boundary means the categories themselves are meaningless, we are going to lose a lot more categories than man and woman.
And if the categories still matter, then eventually somebody has to define the words.
Which creates tomorrow’s question.
Who gets to do that?
