“Look, I'm not trying to do a conspiracy here,” wrote right-wing commentator Sydney Watson in an X post on Monday, before proceeding to implicitly endorse one.
\n\nThe Australian YouTuber, who has more than a million followers on that platform, had shared a 2024 video of Brittney Griner, center for the WNBA’s Connecticut Sun, admiring a new basketball arena at Baylor University, where she was a legendary powerhouse NCAA player between 2009 and 2013. Watson speculated in her post that “maybe the reason the WNBA refuses to define ‘woman’ and definitively say that men can't play in the league is because there is already a man … in the league.”
\n\nThe baseless and inflammatory remark (Griner is a cisgender woman) came amid an ongoing moral panic about transgender women in sports, which has been ginned up by MAGA world and Donald Trump with help from a handful of female athletes. The most outspoken of these is Riley Gaines, a former collegiate swimmer for the University of Kentucky; she tied for fifth in a 2022 NCAA championship event with Lia Thomas, a transgender competitor, and soon rocketed to fame as an anti-transgender activist thanks to the grievance-industrial complex of the far right.
Original source: https://www.wired.com/