Two former NBA players, Enes Kanter Freedom and Royce White, have recently announced in succession that they plan to seek entry into the 2027 WNBA draft as transgender women. Both men’s remarks clearly carry the flavor of political protest and a stress test of the rules, rather than an ordinary application for participation that has already been recognized by the league.
The WNBA’s current collective bargaining agreement only stipulates that only female players are eligible to participate in the league, but it does not further specify whether “female” here is determined by gender identity, sex assigned at birth, physical development, or some other standard. League Commissioner Cathy Engelbertlater said that team management and the players’ union will continue discussing the issue of transgender participation, while listing fair competition and the integrity of the game as important considerations.
The independent scholar Hu Yilin believes that this controversy should not begin from the overly broad question of whether “society recognizes transgender women.” Far more basic questions are why women’s sports exist, what purpose sports classification serves, and who has the right to determine the boundaries of a professional league.
Why the women’s category exists
“Women’s sports are certainly not a sports league for the female identity group,” Hu Yilin argues. If a sports category existed solely because of some social identity, then one could just as well ask why there are not universally established categories for people of African descent, Asians, gays, or other identity-based groups.
But women’s sports also cannot simply be explained as compensation for those at a physical disadvantage. Different ethnic groups may show statistical advantages in certain sports, yet the sports world has not therefore divided track and field into different ethnic categories. Basketball and volleyball are not grouped by height, and in many events, talent differences are allowed to determine the outcome directly.
To understand the rationale of the women’s category and of weight classes in boxing, Hu Yilin believes, one must return to two values inherent in sport itself: excellence and enjoyment.
The first value comes from the classical Olympic tradition. Sport allows people to rely on their own bodies, training, and will to pursue limits, competing for the glory of being “the fastest,” “the highest jumper,” or “the strongest.” Sport does not promise that every innate condition will have an equal chance of victory; otherwise, the meaning of the strongest would disappear.
The second value comes from play and spectatorship. People need contests between evenly matched opponents, uncertainty of outcome, and the suspense generated by different styles meeting one another. The champion of a lower boxing weight class is not necessarily the most powerful fighter in the world, but bouts between people of similar weight can create an independent technical, rhythmic, and spectator value, and are therefore recognized by the market.
Women’s sports possess both of these meanings at once. Although female athletes usually cannot compete for absolute human records regardless of sex, they can still pursue the excellence embodied in “the fastest woman” or “the strongest woman.” Competition among women also has genuine suspense and technical and viewing characteristics distinct from men’s competition.
Therefore, the legitimacy of the women’s category lies not merely in protecting the weak, nor merely in recognizing identity, but in the fact that it forms an independent competitive category capable of producing excellence, competition, and public honor.
The market can accommodate more than one kind of contest
Following this line of thought, Hu Yilin does not believe that all mixed-sex competitions should be prohibited. Exhibition fights, mixed competitions, or special events can have their own space, so long as athletes are willing to take part and audiences are willing to buy tickets.
If a professional league chooses to admit transgender athletes, the games still remain suspenseful, female athletes are willing to participate, and spectators and sponsors continue to support it, then such a league may likewise gain legitimacy in the market. Conversely, female athletes who do not wish to compete against those with male physical advantages also have the right to withdraw and organize a new league with stricter rules.
If both leagues can attract athletes and spectators, they can coexist; if one side loses participants and the market, it will naturally be eliminated. What Hu Yilin cares about is not preemptively declaring which kind of competition is the only one allowed to exist, but rather whether the rules come from the free choice of athletes, spectators, and organizers, or are imposed top-down by political doctrine.
Of course, the market cannot guarantee that every choice is noble or fair, but it at least allows different rules to coexist, enabling participants to express judgment by leaving, joining, buying tickets, or refusing to buy tickets. What is truly worth vigilance is the government’s use of law, fiscal incentives, or political evaluation to require private leagues and enterprises to accept a certain set of gender rules, and then to describe that result as a spontaneous consensus of the market or society.
“Social recognition” is not a universal pass for all institutions
Transgender debates often adopt a binary: either society recognizes someone as a woman, or it is denying their personhood.
Hu Yilin believes that this premise itself is problematic. “What does ‘social recognition’ even mean? ‘Society’ is not a single entity to begin with.”
Society is made up of institutions with completely different functions. The military, sports leagues, clothing stores, businesses, government offices, and private families may all handle gender in different ways.
A clothing store recommending clothes according to the gender image a customer wants to present is usually a kind of goodwill service; a butcher has no need to sell so-called female meat simply because the customer is a woman. Some military posts depend heavily on physical condition, so gender differences may have institutional significance; in public office, clerical work, and debate, where knowledge and judgment are chiefly evaluated, the principle is to treat each person simply as an equal person.
Accordingly, respecting a transgender person’s dignity, name, and private life choices does not necessarily mean that all institutional categories named for women must be opened on the basis of individual self-identification.
In private relationships, people may freely negotiate forms of address and ways of interacting; public institutions, by contrast, must decide which differences are relevant and which are not according to their own function. The more a field depends on physical ability, the more reason it has to attend to real bodily differences; the less it depends on the body, the less reason it has to treat people differently on the basis of gender.
Sport clearly belongs to the first category.
Advantage is not measured by before and after treatment, but relative to whom
Hu Yilin especially emphasizes that evaluating competitive advantage cannot be done merely by looking at whether testosterone, muscle, or strength declined after an athlete underwent gender transition treatment.
“So-called ‘advantage’ is relative; it is always relative to your opponent.”
Even if one physical indicator of an athlete declines because of treatment, if that person at the same time moves from the men’s category into the women’s category, whose average physical indicators are significantly lower, his advantage relative to competitors may still increase. Treatment lowering his absolute capacity does not mean that his relative advantage in the new category has disappeared.
This is the logic he was truly expressing when he previously used testosterone as a simplified explanation: the standard of measurement should not be “is this person weaker than before,” but rather “after entering the women’s category, how much significant advantage does he still retain over female athletes?”
Therefore, he proposes two parallel eligibility principles: an athlete should have bodily characteristics consistent with the women’s category, and at the same time must not obtain a significant competitive advantage relative to that category through artificial intervention.
Here, “artificial advantage” does not mean any medical intervention whatsoever. Athletes may undergo coronary bypass surgery, fracture repair, and ordinary rehabilitation, because these treatments mainly restore the body to normal function and do not thereby confer abnormal competitive advantage; but if a boxer were to replace the bones of his hand with a more striking-capable metal structure, and then demand entry on the grounds that “this is also a medical operation,” the rules obviously could not accept that.
Within Hu Yilin’s framework, the controversy is not whether gender transition treatment allows a person’s absolute strength to keep increasing, but whether that person has, by artificially changing categories, retained bodily advantages that are substantively meaningful against new opponents.
Genetic testing is only a screening tool, not the final judge
In recent years, international sports organizations have gradually adopted clearer biological sex standards. The International Olympic Committee’s new policy announced in 2026 limits the Olympic women’s category in principle to biological women identified through a one-time SRY gene screen; World Athletics has also adopted SRY testing and conducts further medical evaluation for athletes who test positive.
Hu Yilin does not oppose genetic testing, but he does not think genes alone are sufficient to replace judgment about the body.
In his view, detecting a Y chromosome can indicate that an athlete may have undergone a male developmental pathway, and may also indicate the need for additional review, but it cannot automatically explain the full bodily situation. Conditions such as complete androgen insensitivity syndrome or Swyer syndrome may cause a person with a Y chromosome to naturally present female bodily development, and they have not entered the women’s category through artificial sex transition. According to his principles, such athletes may be recognized as female competitors.
For cases of partial androgen insensitivity, 5α-reductase deficiency, and similar conditions that may lead to varying degrees of male bodily development during puberty, stricter review should be carried out according to the actual bodily traits and the sport-specific advantages involved. The core issue is not whether a person’s identity narrative is sincere enough, but whether bodily conditions are compatible with the purpose for which the women’s category was established.
Likewise, if a transgender girl receives intervention before puberty, does not go through the developmental process that forms a significant male competitive advantage, and as an adult does not gain a clear advantage in the women’s category because of artificial intervention, Hu Yilin believes she may be allowed to compete.
His standard is not “once registered male at birth, never able to enter the women’s category,” nor is it “as long as one self-identifies as female, one may enter”; rather, it is a combined judgment of bodily characteristics and relative competitive advantage.
This set of principles still requires each sport to translate “significant advantage” into workable medical and competitive standards. The bodily conditions on which basketball, weightlifting, shooting, and long-distance running depend are not the same, so it is hard to solve all sports with a single hormone indicator. But in this system, genes, hormones, and bodily tests are only evidence; they should not be treated as an identity tribunal divorced from the purpose of competition.
Anti-doping and the women’s category share a common logic
Hu Yilin understands women’s sports eligibility and anti-doping within the same framework of sports ethics.
Sports competition is not about finding the fastest-moving object, otherwise running would have been replaced long ago by automobiles. What it compares is the performance people achieve within given rules through body, training, and will. Modern sports of course make use of shoes, equipment, surgery, and scientific training, but they always need to distinguish between technologies that help people play to their normal capacity and enhancement methods that directly manufacture abnormal advantages for the body.
Precisely because sport cherishes human bodily capacity, doping is not a mere technological advance; and precisely because the women’s category protects a kind of competition grounded in a specific bodily basis, artificial processes that alter identity or category cannot, merely on the basis of subjective identification, obtain complete exemption from responsibility.
This distinction between what is “natural” and what is “artificial” does not mean that everything innate is absolutely fair. Sport has always allowed for many differences in talent, yet through limited category boundaries and prohibited means it decides which advantages count as part of the game and which advantages would destroy the abilities the game is meant to display.
In the women’s division, women’s bodily characteristics are one principle of classification; significant relative advantage gained without artificial intervention is another principle of competition. Both need to be satisfied at the same time, not substituted for one another.
“Offense” cannot become a universal reason for the state to restrict speech
As for the behavior of Kanter and White, Hu Yilin thinks it is more like a somewhat overdone piece of performance art. The two of them used a definitional blank spot in the rules to push a political claim to an exaggerated extreme, forcing the WNBA to explain how it understands “women.”
This approach may be uncomfortable, and it may be seen by real transgender people as parody, but Hu Yilin does not approve of lightly restricting expression on the grounds that it “offends a certain group.”
Any statement with a definite viewpoint may offend some people. Evolutionary theory may offend religious fundamentalists, historical judgments may offend pseudo-historians, and support for or opposition to transgender participation in sports will also make the other side feel insulted. If “someone feels offended” is enough in itself to trigger a ban, public discussion would be almost impossible to continue.
That does not mean everyone else must support the two men’s expression. The WNBA can reject applications that do not meet the qualifications, teams and sponsors can end cooperation, and players and spectators can criticize, boycott, or leave. These are likewise free choices, not infringements on freedom of speech.
The state should not punish speakers merely because their expression is offensive, and private organizations are under no obligation to provide qualifications, funding, and a stage for every kind of expression.
I advocate reducing regulation as much as possible at the level of government and law, and leaving the rest to the marketplace of ideas and the market of commerce. The comment I have published is also free speech in the public sphere; those who oppose me can speak freely as well, and in the end it is up to the various participants in the market to choose how to organize and formulate the rules.
What the WNBA really needs to answer is not the identity of two people
Kanter and White do not currently obtain WNBA eligibility automatically through self-declaration. The league’s existing rules simply do not spell out “women” any further, and the management and the players’ union have already said they will continue to discuss the matter.
Therefore, the real target of this political performance is not an existing self-identification admission system, but a league boundary whose definition has not yet been completed.
Hu Yilin’s answer is not to ask the government to uniformly prescribe how all sports leagues should classify people, but to give the decision-making power as much as possible to athletes, leagues, sponsors, and spectators. Women’s sports can insist on strict bodily boundaries, or they can have mixed or inclusive events with different rules; the key is to make the rules public, to make participation truly voluntary, and to let different systems be tested in the marketplace of ideas and commerce.
In this sense, gender equality does not mean abolishing differences across all categories, nor does it mean that a person must be classified in exactly the same way in every system.
Equality in sport first requires answering what sport is pursuing. If what the women’s division seeks to preserve is the excellence that women’s bodies can achieve, and the suspenseful and entertaining competition among women, then its boundary cannot be determined solely by declarations of identity; but this boundary should also not be prescribed once and for all by political power on behalf of every private community.
Women’s sports are not an identity alliance, nor are they a moral honor bestowed by the government. They are a system established for a specific competitive value. Whether they continue to exist, and how the line is drawn, should ultimately be decided together by the people who actually compete, organize, and watch the games.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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