Royce White wants you to know he is 6-foot-8, 270 pounds, and can palm a men’s basketball “probably as easily as any player in history.” He wants you to know that current WNBA players would “have nightmares” trying to guard him. He wants you to know he plans to “exploit” the biological differences between men and women “for his economic and athletic benefit.”
And he wants you to know he is transgender.
Except he is not. And he will tell you he is not, if you listen for more than ten seconds.
“I identify as sometimes identifying as a woman for purpose of basketball, professional basketball,” White told Fox News Digital, in a sentence that collapses on itself before it reaches the period. This is not a coming-out. It is a campaign ad. White, 35, is on the ballot in Minnesota’s August 11 Republican primary for the U.S. Senate, having already lost to Amy Klobuchar in 2024. He announced his “transition” in an X post on August 4, days before former NBA center Enes Kanter Freedom made a similar declaration, and then raced to Fox News to insist he was first. “Great minds think alike,” he said, grinning at his own performance.
United States Senate (Public domain) via Wikimedia CommonsLet us name what this is. Two men who never suited up for a WNBA game are using transgender identity as a prop to humiliate women athletes and score cheap political points. White said the quiet part at full volume: he wants to “exploit” his body to dominate women on a basketball court, then dare anyone to call it discrimination. He threatened a lawsuit if he goes undrafted. He said he would use the women’s locker room. He mocked Minnesota Lynx head coach Cheryl Reeve, who wore a “trans kids belong” T-shirt this season, by saying “I hear the coach loves a good transgender, so we’ll all be in perfect harmony.”
That line is not comedy. It is cruelty dressed as a joke, aimed at a coach who stood up for vulnerable kids and at every trans person whose identity White is wearing like a costume for a news cycle.
The WNBA’s collective bargaining agreement states plainly that “only players who are women are eligible to play in the WNBA.” The 409-page document does not define “women” further, and the league has not publicly explained what criteria it would apply to a transgender applicant. That gap is real and it deserves a serious policy conversation, led by the people most affected: women athletes, trans athletes, medical experts, and the players’ union. What it does not deserve is a Republican Senate candidate who measured his hands at the NBA combine and now brandishes those numbers like a weapon, telling Fox News that the smaller women’s basketball will be “even easier to palm.”
The Women’s National Basketball Players Association addressed the controversy Friday and drew a line that should be repeated until it lands: “We will not be used as political pawns.” That statement is the correct response. White and Freedom are not trying to play basketball. They are trying to turn a women’s professional league into a culture-war spectacle, with transgender people as the punchline and women athletes as the backdrop.
Frenchieinportland (CC BY-SA 4.0) via Wikimedia CommonsWhite’s own words convict him. He asked whether the WNBA’s criteria require “a wig” or “the snip-snip.” He referred to himself as “a young Black, hopefully United States Senator that would like a fair chance to participate as a sometimes-identifying-as-a-transgender-woman athlete.” That is not someone seeking inclusion. That is someone who found a loophole he can mock on cable news while his name sits on a primary ballot.
The WNBA needs to close this door with clear, enforceable eligibility rules developed alongside the WNBPA, trans athletes, and medical professionals, not in response to two men performing a bit. And voters in Minnesota need to see this stunt for what it is: a candidate who cannot win on policy, so he manufactures a circus and calls it courage.