Enes Freedom Is Male. So Why Can’t He Play for the WNBA?

This article originally appeared on Gold Report with Dr. Simone Gold and was republished with permission.

“Only players who are women are eligible to play in the WNBA.”

Freedom has provoked the WNBA: define “woman”, or include him. There are now potentially 11 males who may announce for the WNBA draft: Freedom, Royce White, Larry Sanders, two other former NBA players, three G-League players, and three European-league players who are now considering entering the 2027 WNBA draft, typically held in April. There has been plenty of political and cultural argument over his challenge. But the question Freedom is asking is actually quite narrow.

I have spent my professional life in two fields that answer questions very differently: medicine and law. As a physician, I begin with biological reality. As an attorney, I ask what the rules are, what the words mean, and whether the rules are being applied consistently.

There are really two questions here: one biological and one legal. Medicine can answer the first. The WNBA must answer the second. Medicine describes biological reality. Law and private institutions create classifications and rules. A rule can change a person’s legal status, eligibility, rights, or obligations. It cannot change his biology.

A legislature could, for example, define “tall” to include everyone over five feet for purposes of a particular statute. That would make a five-foot-one person legally “tall” under that statute. It would not add an inch to his height. Likewise, an institution can define woman to include some males. That changes the institution’s definition. It does not change anyone’s sex.

From a medical standpoint, there is nothing to resolve about Freedom’s sex. He is male. A male who takes estrogen remains male. A male who undergoes surgery remains male. A male who sincerely believes himself to be a woman remains male, just as a male who makes the same declaration to test the WNBA’s eligibility rule remains male. Motives, beliefs, clothing, appearance, legal documents, and medical history do not determine human sex.

Human sex is established at fertilization and written into the chromosomes of the developing human from its first cell. XX directs female development; XY directs male development. Those chromosomes do not change with time, identity, belief, desire, or statute.

Their genetic signature remains in the nucleated cells of the body and can be detected long after death. Hormones can alter secondary sex characteristics, and surgery can remove or reconfigure anatomy. Neither rewrites chromosomes or reverses the developmental pathway established at fertilization. Neither transforms a male human body into a female one.

There is another biological reality hiding in plain sight: this problem runs in only one direction. If male and female were truly too difficult to distinguish for purposes of sport, we should see the same problem in both directions. We don’t. There are no women lining up to fight Mike Tyson.

WNBA players are not demanding roster spots in the NBA. Female tennis players are not clamoring to compete on the men’s tour. The controversy is at the boundary of women’s sports because crossing that boundary in one direction can confer an athletic advantage.

Male development produces advantages in strength, speed, power, size, and other physical characteristics that make the highest levels of male competition largely inaccessible to female athletes. Reverse the sexes and the same biology that puts women at a disadvantage puts men at an advantage.

Put roster spots, records, medals, championships, fame, and money on the other side of that sex line, and those advantages suddenly matter. In basketball or track, the stakes are opportunities and titles. In combat sports, where physical force is directed at another person’s body, they include physical safety.

Women’s sports are a human-created category built around a biological reality humans did not create. We can change the category. We cannot change the biology beneath it.

Changing a word does not change strength, speed, power, skeletal structure, or physiology. Biology does not yield to legal definitions.

We can name it or rename it, acknowledge it or deny it. Biology remains what it is. Words can be redefined and rules rewritten. Biology is not a party to the contracts we draft, and it is not bound by their terms.

So the medical question has an unequivocal answer. The legal question begins.

The WNBA is free to use words differently from physicians, just as legislatures routinely adopt specialized definitions for particular statutes.

But once the League elects to use the word woman as an eligibility classification that does not mean female, it must say what woman does mean.

The relevant question is not whether Freedom is actually a woman in the biological sense. He is not. The question is whether he satisfies whatever non-biological rule the WNBA has substituted for sex.

And this is the problem for the WNBA: the same framework that ordinarily treats “Are you really a woman?” as an illegitimate question suddenly depends upon accusing Freedom of not “really” being one. Yet by what standard? If woman means female, the answer is easy: Freedom is male and therefore ineligible.

But if woman does not mean female—if biological sex no longer determines eligibility—then biological sex cannot distinguish Freedom from someone else the League recognizes as a woman. There must be some other standard. What is it?

Freedom is not necessarily demanding that the WNBA adopt his definition of woman: biological sex. He is demanding that the WNBA disclose its own.

WNBA eligibility is not symbolic. A roster spot has real economic value. Under the League’s new compensation structure, salaries range from roughly $270,000 at the minimum to as much as $1.4 million at the maximum.

Every WNBA player signs a contract governing the terms of her employment, and the relationship between the League and its players is governed by an extensive collective bargaining agreement.

These are not handshake arrangements. When hundreds of thousands—or more than a million—dollars in compensation can turn on whether someone qualifies for a roster spot, the meaning of the eligibility category matters.

Defining terms is entirely ordinary in law. The WNBA does it routinely. Its agreements define Standard Player Contract, Unrestricted Free Agent, Restricted Free Agent, Reserved Player, Core Player, Qualifying Offer, and Right of First Refusal.

Those definitions determine who may negotiate with whom, who has exclusive rights to a player, what compensation may be offered, and under what conditions.

When contractual rights turn on a word, the meaning of that word matters. If woman means female, the League can say so. If woman includes some males but not others, it can say what distinguishes them. Self-identification? Legal status? Medical treatment?Duration? Hormonal criteria? Some combination? The WNBA knows how to define a term when it needs to.

The problem is not solved by dismissing Freedom’s declaration as strategic—or insincere. Of course it is strategic. But his motive explains why he invoked the rule; it does not determine whether he satisfies it.

Motive is not ordinarily an element of eligibility unless the rule makes it one. If sincerity is an eligibility requirement, the WNBA can say so. Then it has to explain what sincerity means and how it determines who is sincere.

Requiring sincerity creates another problem. The theory that removes sex from the definition of woman gives the individual the subjective authority to say who he is.

Biological sex, chromosomes, anatomy, reproductive function, and even medical transition no longer decide the question; internal identity does.

Yet when Freedom invokes that same authority, the WNBA claims the authority to say that his self-identification does not count.

The obvious question is: How does the League know?

There is no medical test for sincerity of gender identity. A physician cannot order a laboratory study, examine a chromosome, perform imaging, or conduct a physical examination that distinguishes a sincere male claimant from an insincere one.

The League can, of course, require evidence—legal documents, hormones, medical treatment, surgery, duration of identification, or something else. But then it must say what it requires and apply the same rule to everyone. A standard cannot be subjective until the answer is inconvenient and then suddenly become objective.

Perhaps duration matters. If so, how long? Perhaps consistency matters. If so, what demonstrates it? Perhaps medical treatment matters. If so, which treatment and how much?

Perhaps the League intends to decide whether the person actually believes what he says. If so, by what standard, and who decides whether another human being’s internal identity is genuine?

If self-identification establishes the category, Freedom invokes the same rule. If something more is required, the WNBA must say what that something is.

If the WNBA’s answer is that Freedom does not “really” identify as a woman, it has come full circle. It replaced biological sex with subjective self-identification, only to insert an objective gatekeeper back at the door. Now the gatekeeper’s job is to decide another person’s subjective belief is real.

That raises a larger question: Is this really an improvement over an objective standard? Biological sex does not require the WNBA to decide whether someone is sincere, whether an identity is deeply enough held, whether a declaration has lasted long enough, or whether appearance, behavior, medical choices, or life history prove that an internal belief is genuine. Once those questions matter, someone has to answer them.

Sports offer a useful comparison. No panel of judges decides whether a basketball went through the hoop or which runner crossed the finish line first. We can see what happened.

But in sports that depend on human judgment, such as gymnastics or figure skating, we expect disagreement and accusations of bias. That is why they have detailed scoring rules and multiple judges. The more discretion we give the person making the decision, the more we need rules that constrain it.

An objective standard does that. Everyone knows the rule in advance. The same rule can be applied to everyone, and a decision can be checked against something other than the opinion of the person making it.

Whatever one thinks the WNBA’s eligibility rule should be, replacing an objective standard with a subjective one does not eliminate gatekeeping. It replaces an objective gate with a human gatekeeper.

That is why Freedom’s declaration matters. He does not need to establish that he is female; he plainly is not. Nor does he need the WNBA to agree with his definition of woman. He is asking the WNBA to say what its definition is, what the rules are, and why he does not qualify.

Medicine answers the biological question: Freedom is male. The harder legal question is the one the WNBA has created for itself: if being male does not necessarily exclude a person from the WNBA’s category of “woman,” what does?