United States President Donald Trump once joked about how LeBron James would help him become the greatest WNBA coach of all time.
The WNBA has been hit with a fresh wave of debates regarding the inclusion of trans athletes into their sport after Indiana Fever star Sophie Cunningham advocated for safer spaces for biological women.
President Trump had addressed the question of trans women in the WNBA in 2022 with a comment about using LeBron James to dominate the league.
President Donald Trump’s comments about the WNBA and LeBron James go viral
X account BrickCenter reshared a clip from Trump’s July 2022 speech where he speaks about excluding trans women from women’s sports while using an exaggerated LeBron James reference to try to make his point.
“I’d be the greatest women’s basketball coach in history because I don’t like LeBron James. I like Michael Jordan much better. But, I’d go up to LeBron James… I’d say, ‘LeBron, did you ever have any desire to be a woman? Because what I’d love you to do is star on my team that I’m building up.'”
“I will have the greatest team in history. They’ll never lose. Nobody will come within 70 points of this team. Now, we have to change that, and we have to make it okay to talk about it.”
This is a common argument made by opponents to trans women being included in the WNBA, although there hasn’t been any indication at the top level of either sport that an NBA player would consider something like this.
Photo by Jamie Squire/Getty Images
While exaggerations like these minimise the struggles of actual trans athletes, they aim to portray the worst-case scenario of allowing trans athletes to compete in women’s sports.
James would obviously walk into the WNBA with a material physical advantage that cannot be overcome, but the notion that he, or any top men’s basketball player, would want to do that is not based in reality.
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