Another weekend, another round of hand-wringing over who gets to call themselves a woman in the WNBA. That’s the backdrop for a new column by Silvio Canto, Jr. at American Thinker, and it’s a question that’s increasingly hard to avoid.
Canto opens with a wry reference to Sandy Posey’s 1966 hit “Born a Woman,” suggesting that the song might be deemed a hate anthem in today’s climate — simply for stating the obvious. The lyric, “Yes, I was born a woman, I’m glad it happened that way,” is, in Canto’s view, a clarity that seems lost on the league’s executives.
His column centers on the WNBA’s recent emergency meeting, held in response to former NBA players Enes Kanter and Royce White publicly announcing their intention to enter the league’s draft as women. According to The New York Post, the meeting was designed to craft a policy that would clearly exclude them — but the league reportedly couldn’t come up with one.
Instead, the WNBA issued a statement saying there were “no immediate eligibility matters affecting the WNBA” and decrying “bad-faith efforts to use these topics to demean or marginalize others.” Canto, quoting the Post’s framing, argues that Kanter and White aren’t acting in bad faith at all — they’re exposing what he calls “the hypocrisy of a women’s sports league bowing to a perverse ideology.”
Canto dismisses the notion that either man is serious about actually playing. He writes that “everyone knows” neither Kanter nor White is sincere — their point is to force a simple answer to a simple question about male and female. If the league can’t answer that, he argues, it has no business excluding anyone.
The column takes a sharp turn into speculation about the league’s internal culture, suggesting that many players privately recognize “how insane this whole thing is” but are afraid to speak out for fear of backlash from reporters or from other players. He accuses league leadership of being “lost in space” and of reaching for accusations of hate rather than engaging with the question.
Canto’s argument is as much about language as it is about sports. He leans on the song’s title to underscore a biological reality — that being born a woman is not a matter of identity but of birth. And he laments that something so basic seems beyond the league’s capacity to affirm in 2026.
The timing of the column is notable. The WNBA has been embroiled in eligibility debates for years, but the involvement of high-profile male players openly gaming the system adds a new layer. Canto suggests the league’s inability to articulate a clear rule renders its own existence incoherent — if the “W” stands for women, who exactly does it include?
He also touches on broader cultural currents, arguing that the league’s avoidance of the question stems from a fear of clashing with progressive orthodoxy around “gender identity.” The Post’s report, which Canto quotes extensively, accuses the WNBA of prioritizing ideological comfort over the integrity of its own category.
It’s a provocative comparison — Posey’s mid-century pop song versus modern institutional paralysis. But Canto’s point isn’t really about music. It’s about whether institutions can still state obvious truths without being accused of hate. And he suggests that the WNBA’s failure to do so invites exactly the kind of bad-faith stunts that Kanter and White are pulling.
For Canto, the Kanter-White gambit is less a genuine threat than a mirror held up to the league’s own contradictions. If the league refuses to say what a woman is, he argues, then it has no basis to deny entry to anyone who claims the label — and it’s only fair to let them play.
He closes with a reminder that the ability to speak one’s mind openly is vital to the republic, tying the column to American Thinker‘s broader mission. It’s a call for honest conversation, wrapped in a nostalgic reference to a simpler time when the answer to “what is a woman?” wasn’t so complicated.
Whether the WNBA will eventually resolve its eligibility rules remains to be seen. But Canto’s column suggests that the league’s current posture — neither fully inclusive nor clearly exclusive — may be the one thing that satisfies no one.
Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/08/could-sandy-posey-sing-born-a-woman-today/