Three-time Olympic gold medalist Nancy Hogshead-Makar has created a petition demanding that the WNBA spell out that its players must be biological women. Currently, the petition has topped 11,000 signatures and is aiming for 100,000, as Marcos Menocal Pareja reports for Inside the Games.
Hogshead-Makar, who won three golds and a silver at the 1984 Los Angeles Games before becoming a civil rights lawyer and founding Champion Women, launched the Change.org petition on August 14. She wants the league to clarify what “woman” means in its eligibility rules. “We are asking the WNBA to clarify that its eligibility rules are exclusively for women. If you want to participate, you have to be a certain age and you have to be a woman,” she told Fox News Digital. She says the idea draws 80-20 support nationally, and that more than a million people have engaged with petition materials so far.
The push points to a gap in the WNBA’s 2026 collective bargaining agreement, which states that “only players who are women may play in the WNBA” without defining the term in relation to gender identity or sex assigned at birth. That ambiguity came into focus after former NBA players Enes Kanter Freedom and Royce White said they would enter the 2027 WNBA Draft while identifying as women — a move league sources dismissed as a “publicity stunt,” and one the WNBA has since ruled ineligible. “I’m glad they stepped forward because it exposes the hypocrisy of both the WNBA and gender ideology,” Hogshead-Makar said.
The petition also has the backing of Indiana Fever guard Sophie Cunningham, who drew rallies of support outside WNBA arenas after speaking out against transgender participation in women’s sports earlier this summer. “I really admire her for the stance she has taken in defence of women,” Hogshead-Makar said of Cunningham. WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert has yet to weigh in publicly or clarify the league’s eligibility rules.
