The word fairness has become one of the most persuasive—and least defined—words in modern political vernacular.  Nearly every policy can be called fair if one focuses only on its beneficiaries.  The harder question is whether it remains fair to those who pay the costs, lose opportunities, or are treated differently.

Before accepting any appeal to fairness, we should ask: Fair according to whose definition?

Another increasingly flexible word is discriminate.  Merriam-Webster defines discriminate in several ways, including to distinguish or differentiate, and notes that discrimination can have neutral, positive, or negative connotations.  Its original meaning—the act of distinguishing—predates its modern association with prejudice and unjust treatment.

Today, discrimination generally means unfair treatment based on characteristics such as race or sex.  But simply making distinctions is not inherently unjust.  We distinguish between qualified and unqualified applicants, adults and children, and licensed and unlicensed drivers every day.

Sometimes distinctions aren’t merely acceptable; they’re essential.  Women’s sports are a good example.  Their purpose is to provide meaningful competition among athletes with comparable physical characteristics, which requires distinguishing between biological males and females.

In the original sense, that’s discrimination.  But not all discrimination is unjust.

Sports discriminate constantly.  Little League separates by age; boxing and wrestling by weight; Paralympics by disability; and men’s and women’s sports traditionally by sex.  These distinctions don’t deny opportunity—they make meaningful competition possible.

Transgender athletes should have opportunities to compete, but the question isn’t about inclusion; it’s about placement.  Biological males develop advantages in size, strength, speed and power during puberty, some of which remains even after testosterone suppression.  The question, then, is whether those advantages are significant enough to warrant preserving sex-based athletic categories.

A frequently cited 2017 soccer scrimmage provides a striking illustration of why those categories exist.  The U.S. Women’s National Team played the FC Dallas U-15 boys academy team in two training matches.  The boys won handily.  That doesn’t disparage the women.  The U.S. team was among the world’s best and won the World Cup two years later.  But what the matches did demonstrate is that highly trained teenage boys can possess significant physical advantages over elite adult female athletes.

Now carry the logic one step further.  Suppose every boy on that Dallas team declared himself a girl.  Would that declaration erase the physical differences that allowed 14- and 15-year-old boys to defeat one of the world’s bests women’s teams?

Yet if gender identity alone determines eligibility, the distinction separating those boys from the women’s team becomes difficult to defend.  More importantly, allowing men into a category specifically created because of the physical differences between male bodies and female bodies undermines the very reason the category exists.

Which brings us to the WNBA.  Former NBA players Enes Kanter Freedom and Royce White have announced their intention to declare for the 2027 WNBA Draft.

Freedom, a 6’10” center who played 11 NBA seasons and was the third overall pick in the 2011 NBA Draft, says his advisers have examined the league’s eligibility rules.  White, a 6’8″ former first-round pick, followed, saying he intends to identify as transgender for purposes of entering the draft and suggesting he might pursue legal action if refused.

Neither is seriously trying to resurrect his basketball career in the WNBA.  They’re making a point.  Their challenge forces the league to answer a remarkably simple question:  What, exactly, makes someone eligible to play in the Women’s National Basketball Association?

The issue intensified after Indiana Fever guard Sophie Cunningham publicly argued that biological males shouldn’t compete in women’s sports.  Freedom and White have now turned that debate into something resembling a real-world thought experiment.

If WNBA eligibility is based on biological sex, their challenge ends immediately: they are biological males and therefore aren’t eligible for a women’s league.  But if gender identity determines eligibility, the WNBA faces a more difficult question.  What objective principle allows one transgender-identifying biological male to participate while excluding another?  At what point does the league draw the line, and on what basis?

That’s why this matters beyond what some will dismiss as a publicity stunt.  Freedom and White are forcing the WNBA to define its terms rather than simply adhering to woke ideology.  Women’s sports were created because biological differences matter in athletic competition.  Without sex-based categories, female athletes would face dramatically different competitive landscapes.  Women’s sports created a protected category in which female athletic excellence could flourish, be recognized and be rewarded.

The debate need not be about whether transgender athletes deserve dignity, respect, or opportunities to compete.  They do.  The real question is how competition should occur so that one athlete’s inclusion doesn’t come at the expense of another’s opportunity.

Sometimes fairness requires recognizing meaningful differences.  And sometimes discrimination—in its oldest sense of distinguishing between things that are inherently different—is precisely what makes fairness possible.  The Freedom/White WNBA draft story is one that I’ll be watching closely – whatta country!