The debate over transgender women in the WNBA has reached a strange new milestone: demanding that women who already play in the league submit DNA samples to prove they are women.
Former NFL sideline reporter and current Republican U.S. Senate candidate Michele Tafoya suggested during a Fox News appearance that WNBA players should undergo genetic testing before being permitted to compete.
“If you want to play and make money and have opportunities as a person in the WNBA as a woman, it should not bother you to take a cheek swab test to just prove that you’ve got the chromosomes to play in that league,” Tafoya said.
There is one rather significant problem with the emergency Tafoya is proposing to solve.
There has never been a transgender woman on a WNBA roster. The league recently reiterated that there are “no immediate eligibility matters affecting the WNBA” while denouncing what it called “bad-faith efforts” to use the transgender-athlete debate to demean or marginalize people.
From Protecting Women to Testing Them
Tafoya argued that a cheek swab would be minimally invasive, comparing it to COVID testing she underwent while covering the NFL.
“It’s not invasive at all,” she said. “It’s no worse than what we all did during COVID.”
But the proposal illustrates how quickly the political campaign supposedly designed to “protect women’s sports” can turn into increased scrutiny of women themselves.
The debate is no longer simply about whether transgender women should compete. Increasingly, cisgender women are being asked to demonstrate that they are sufficiently female.
That concern isn’t theoretical. WNBA players, including Brittney Griner, Courtney Williams, Natasha Cloud, and others, have already been targeted online by people baselessly claiming they are secretly transgender. Even Sophie Cunningham, whose opposition to transgender participation helped fuel the current controversy, has been subjected to similar accusations.
A Controversy Searching for an Athlete
The broader sports world is nevertheless moving toward genetic eligibility testing. The International Olympic Committee and WTA have adopted one-time SRY gene testing for female-category eligibility, policies supporters describe as protecting competitive fairness and critics argue can harm transgender athletes and women with differences of sex development.
The WNBA has announced no comparable requirement.
Instead, the league finds itself debating rules for a hypothetical situation while actual players increasingly become targets of speculation about their bodies.
Tafoya’s proposal takes that logic another step: every woman becomes potentially suspect until biology proves otherwise.
For a movement that has spent years saying it wants to protect women, requiring women to surrender DNA to establish that they really belong in women’s sports is quite the plot twist.
