The Bottom Line: When absurdity becomes the norm, just call me "Corndog" and sell me at the Sonic

If identity is the sole criterion and biology is just a bigoted suggestion, then the WNBA has a new talent pipeline problem.

Why stop at biological males who identify as women? Why not biological females who identify as men (trans men) competing in the WNBA while also demanding the league treat them as men for every other purpose?

And once that door is open, why shouldn’t a 35-year-old former NBA role player who has “always felt like a woman inside” declare for the WNBA draft next year? The same people who insist sex is a spectrum shoulld have no principled basis to object. The pursuit of absurdity, pursued long enough and with enough institutional power, does not produce justice.

It produces farce.

The WNBA wholly exists because average biological differences between adult males and adult females are large, persistent, and relevant to elite athletic performance.

Testosterone-driven advantages in muscle mass, bone density, strength, speed, and skeletal leverage do not vanish because someone updates a driver’s license or posts a pronoun. That is not bigotry; it is why we have separate categories in the first place.

Erase the category and the category’s purpose disappears. The result is not inclusion. It is the quiet erasure of women’s competitive sport.

I am not sure we need the WNBA in its current form. Hell, I’m not sure we need the NBA either. The last time I watched a game live was in Charlotte on a business trip--Hornets versus Timberwolves, a matchup that felt like a participation trophy even then. I had not watched since the Bulls dynasty and have not watched since. The product has changed.

I wouldn't have gone in 1996, but I was on a business trip with two other guys, and I didn't control the rental car. So, it was Spud Webb or sitting in my hotel room for three hours. Looking back, I should have stuck it out at the Hilton.

Today, the physicality that once defined the game has been litigated and legislated into something softer and more theatrical. Watch Caitlin Clark or Sophie Cunningham absorb elbows, body checks, and flagrant contact that would send LeBron James into a week of ice baths, press conferences, and load management.

If he had endured half of what those women take routinely, his “clown show” tour would have ended years ago. That disparity is not imaginary.

This is not primarily about gender identity for me. A person can identify as a corndog. Sonic is still not putting them on the menu.

I was in a multi-stall men’s room recently when a smartly dressed, made-up gentleman who identified as a woman exited a stall while I was washing my hands. I was briefly startled, then went about my business. We both left. I was far more comfortable with that arrangement than I would have been with the same person walking into the women’s room with my granddaughter.

Preferences about sex-segregated spaces are not hatred. They are pattern recognition plus ordinary caution.

Go be an avocado if you want. Just understand that not everyone is required to like guacamole, serve it as a main course, or rewrite the culinary laws so the avocado can compete in the steak category.

Gender identity, like many other private commitments, can be respected as a personal matter without being elevated into a public veto over material reality.

Treating it as an unchallengeable override on sex-based rules--sports, prisons, shelters, bathrooms--is not compassion. It is the institutionalization of a contested belief system at the expense of the 99.9 percent who still notice that males and females are not interchangeable.

The absurdity does not stop at the NBA draft board. Once sex is optional for athletic eligibility, every subsequent claim becomes harder to police and easier to expand.

The people demanding the expansion rarely volunteer their own daughters’ scholarships, roster spots, or safety margins as the proving ground. That tells you something.

Categories exist for reasons. Pretending otherwise does not make the reasons disappear.

It just makes the outcomes look increasingly ridiculous.