Women should not have to wait for a man to demonstrate the danger before anyone respects the warning.....This week, two former NBA players announc
Women should not have to wait for a man to demonstrate the danger before anyone respects the warning…..
This week, two former NBA players announced they intend to enter the WNBA draft, declaring themselves transgender in what much of the sports press itself is calling a stunt, a mockery, a test of a league policy that never bothered to define what a woman is in the first place. One of them is a name most sports fans know from years on the court and, more recently, from years in a Minnesota courtroom, where a judge found the allegations against him â a documented pattern of physical abuse, intimidation, and control directed at his ex-wife and his own teenage son â credible enough to issue a fifty-year no-contact order.
This is the man now telling the WNBA that the rules should apply to him too. That he should be let in. That his word alone should be enough.
Sit with that for a moment. Because we have been sitting with it for fifteen years. YEARS.
You cannot build women’s safety on the expectation that every person seeking access will be honorable or safe to be around. And this is what we have been saying about murderers and rapists deciding that they are women to be transferred to women’s prisons.
Now we have rape cases. And babies. And judges telling attorneys and rape victims that everyone has to call the man “she.” So, I do not care about your “outrage” over this man wanting to play in the WNBA when they said he was welcome. Even wearing t-shirts saying so. “Come one, come all.”
The female prisoners in the US have been begging us to hear their cries, and too many have not. For over a decade.
We Have Been Screaming Into a Silence
Historically, the women called “difficult” are simply the women who noticed the danger before everybody else.
Women’s rights advocates did not discover this issue this week. We have been raising it for a decade and a halfâwriting about it, testifying about it, organizing about itâwhile being called bigots, while being deplatformed, while being unfriended by people we knew in real life, and while losing jobs and opportunities and standing in our own communities for saying the plain thing: that sex-based boundaries exist for a reason and that “just say the words” is not a policy; it is an open door.
We were slurred for it. We were threatened for it. Our reach was throttled by algorithms built by men who never had to think twice about a locker room. And now, because two men with basketball resumes have decided to make a public spectacle of a rule, the wider culture is suddenly willing to entertain the question we were mocked for asking all along. Of course it takes men â professional, famous, media-friendly men â before the culture agrees to listen. Society does not listen to women. It listens to men talking about women.
We despise that this is what it took. We say so plainly. And we are not going to pretend gratitude for a hearing we should have had fifteen years ago.
The History of Violence Is Not a Coincidence â It Is the Point
What have most women’s rights advocates been saying, writing, and teaching? A woman’s ânoâ does not become cruelty because someone else desperately wants it to become ‘yes.’ Whether it was stalking, domestic violence, sexual violence, or a man/boy identity changing. You think we haven’t dealt with men changing their “identity” in some way to get what they want from the women we were trying to help to survive before?
It’s actually a pretty common con. The new “nice guy.” The new “church guy.”
I was helping one lady, and that man crashed his car into a tree the night before we were to go to court. Now HE was the victim.
Then there was the time I was sitting in court with another high-ranking professional leader in the community. Her abusive partner wheeled himself into the courtroom very very slowly. She smirked. At one point his phone rang. He leaped up out of that assistive device and bolted out of the door to answer it. I looked at her, and she looked back at me as if to say, “What did I tell you?” She was through. She could see everything clearly now.
This wasn’t new to us.
That one of these two men carries a documented history of violence against a woman and a child is not some ironic footnote. It is the entire argument, delivered by the universe with no subtlety at all. This is what we meant when we said boundaries matter. Not “some men might be dangerous, statistically speaking.” This: a specific man, with a specific court record, standing at the door of a specific space built for women’s safety and telling us the door should open for him because he says so.
No male gets to assert his way around a woman or girl’s boundary. There is no phrase, no declaration, no paperwork that grants a man entry into a space a woman built for her own safety. Notice what does not happen: men’s spaces are never treated as permeable in this way. Only ours are. Only we are expected to prove we are not bigots for wanting a door that locks.
The Head Cheerleaders
And right on schedule, here they come â the handful of high-profile figures who always show up to cheer the trespass on. It is a familiar performance by now: a coach in a shirt making a point at a teammate’s expense, a star player announcing how welcoming she would be, an owner calling teenage girls evil for agreeing with Sophie Cunningham. The crowd claps. The cameras find them. And once again, it is the women with the most protection, the most institutional cover, the most distance from the actual risk, who step forward to tell the rest of us to be quiet, to give more, to doubt our own intuition.
It is always the most shielded women instructing the least shielded women to stand down. That is not solidarity. That is outsourcing risk to whoever has the least power to refuse it. The most protected people in the room should be careful about volunteering everyone else’s safety.
What the Patriarchy Actually Means
When we say “patriarchy,” we mean a world engineered for men to move through it easily â more easily still if they are white, but easily regardless â while women and girls are required to do more, prove more, and risk more just to occupy the same room. Safety is not a side issue in that world. Safety is survival. A woman’s boundary is not a suggestion, and it does not become negotiable because a man finds it inconvenient or because he has decided, unilaterally, that he belongs on the other side of it.
Do Not Tell Us There Are Bigger Issues
We know the script. Someone will say there are bigger issues to worry about. Someone will say there is an election to win and that raising this now is unhelpful, divisive, and poorly timed.
We have heard versions of that sermon â some of them delivered by politicians with real fire and brimstone, informing us for a decade that our unwillingness to hand over our spaces makes us hateful â and we are not interested in hearing it again. Safety is not a smaller issue we can set down until it is politically convenient to pick back up. It has never once felt smaller to the women living it.
A society that respects women does not require women to surrender boundaries as proof of kindness. And everybody know that women are the kindest adults on the planet, so cut the crap.
A boundary does not become hatred simply because someone is angry that it exists.
We Are Not Asking
Women are allowed to learn from history. We are allowed to recognize patterns. We are allowed to build boundaries around what those patterns taught us. Safety rules are not written for the person who would never exploit them. They exist because somebody, somewhere absolutely will.
We are not asking for permission to have boundaries. We are naming, plainly, what fifteen years of being ignored have costâthe threats, the silencing, the firings, the connections lostâand we are naming what it means that it took two men mocking a league’s own rules for anyone to finally look up.
This is not a new argument dressed in a new event. It is the same fire we have been putting out alone for a decade and a half, now finally visible because men decided to stand in it too. The question was never whether every man is dangerous. The question is whether women are permitted to have boundaries without first proving who the man might be.
Y’all have us going in this stupid circle like a dog chasing its tail for the last 15 years, and that alone is enraging. Women should not have to produce a victim before institutions FINALLY agree that a vulnerability exists.
Women survive abuse. We are not going to be talked out of knowing what protects us from it.
Sometimes history’s most uncomfortable sentence is simply “The women warned us.”