They Were Never Protecting Women’s Sports

The pastor said the quiet part.

The pastor said the quiet part. Heritage wrote the policy.

Two teenage girls sat courtside at Climate Pledge Arena on July 28 with a sign that read “Thank you Sophie for speaking up for girls.” Before the game ended, a Seattle Storm co-owner had sworn at them, and by Thursday the WNBA had suspended her from the team’s next five home games and fined her an undisclosed amount. The next day, a pastor in Ogden, Utah watched the coverage of those girls and diagnosed the real disease. “Women’s sports are a key propaganda & discipleship tool of the Longhouse™,” Eric Conn posted on X on July 29. “WNBA is a hot bed of androgyny and homosexuality that inevitably leads to transgenderism.”

Read that second sentence again. Conn didn’t say trans athletes are ruining women’s basketball. He said women’s basketball manufactures trans people. In his telling, the sport itself is the contagion, and every girl in a jersey is a patient waiting to show symptoms.

I’ve spent years watching this coalition wave the banner of protecting women’s sports. Conn just showed us what the banner was covering.

What happened in Seattle

The week before the game, Indiana Fever guard Sophie Cunningham told ESPN she wants “to protect young girls in a locker room, or young girls in sport who shouldn’t have to go against biological men,” and when the backlash arrived she told reporters, “I said what I said.” On July 28, the Associated Press reported, a few dozen people rallied outside Climate Pledge Arena before the Storm hosted the Fever, some promoting a statewide ballot initiative to bar transgender students from girls’ school athletics in Washington, some wearing shirts from XX-XY Athletics, the apparel brand former Levi’s brand president Jennifer Sey launched in 2024 to oppose trans inclusion in women’s sports. Inside, two teenagers held their sign at courtside. Storm minority co-owner Celeste Keaton approached and, per ESPN’s reporting, directed expletives at them. Majority owner Ginny Gilder apologized the next morning. The league handed down the suspension and fine a day after that.

Keaton was wrong to curse at two kids, and the league said so with a suspension. Watch what happened next, and where the anti-trans commentariat took it. Conn didn’t treat the episode as a dispute about athletic policy. He treated the arena itself as a seminary for the wrong religion.

The inversion

Start with the arithmetic. The WNBA has had exactly one openly transgender and nonbinary player in its history: Layshia Clarendon, who was assigned female at birth and retired in September 2024. Across all of college sports, NCAA president Charlie Baker testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee in December 2024 that he knew of fewer than 10 transgender athletes among 510,000 competitors. A hotbed produces heat. This one has produced one retired point guard and a rounding error.

So the arithmetic can’t be what Conn is doing. His own vocabulary gives the game away. The “Longhouse” is a term he has preached for years. His 2025 Right Response Conference talk, “The Longhouse & The War Against Normal,” is posted in full on YouTube, and his own King’s Hall podcast ran a follow-up episode that May titled “Destroying the Longhouse.” Covering the talk, the Institute on Religion & Democracy’s Juicy Ecumenism blog reported his definition: “a female-ruled and a female-normed society,” with HR departments and schoolteachers as its enforcement army. Daniel Villarreal, reporting the tweet for LGBTQ Nation, writes that Conn’s feed pairs the sports posts with antisemitic and Islamophobic material and with declarations that women should never serve as judges or soldiers. The offense in his WNBA tweet isn’t a trans woman on the court; no trans woman has ever played in the league. The offense is “androgyny”: a woman with a jump shot, a hard box out, visible deltoids, and no appetite for deference. He listed androgyny, then homosexuality, then transgenderism, arranged as stages of one disease. The pathogen, in his sentence, is the sport.

The paper trail

A pastor with a podcast would be a curiosity. The problem is that his calendar matches the institutions’. On June 30, 2026, the Supreme Court ruled 6 to 3 in West Virginia v. B.P.J. and its companion case Little v. Hecox that states may bar transgender girls from girls’ school sports without violating Title IX or the Equal Protection Clause, per the case record at SCOTUSblog. The coalition won everything it said it wanted. Eight days later, on July 8, the Heritage Foundation published a report by Scott Yenor, “Title IX’s Failed Experiment,” arguing that the next thing to unwind is women’s competitive sports themselves.

I read the report. Yenor writes that Title IX became “a powerful engine of feminist social engineering,” that expanding girls’ athletics served “a broader project to remake female character itself,” producing women “less oriented toward motherhood and traditional feminine graces.” His proposed repair: end the proportionality standard, exempt football and men’s basketball from the count, and let schools satisfy the law with “group fitness classes, dance, yoga, recreational intramurals, hiking clubs” in place of women’s varsity teams. He opens the report by claiming that in 2024 “a Tunisian man defeated a Chinese woman” for Olympic boxing gold. The boxer he means is Imane Khelif, who is Algerian and was assigned female at birth. The report’s first factual claim about a woman gets everything wrong except the medal.

Yenor’s other grievance, that Title IX bleeds men’s non-revenue sports to feed women’s teams, has been tested against the ledgers. Marx, Cormier, and Ciapalo (2023), publishing in the Journal of Intercollegiate Sport, examined federal Equity in Athletics data from 85 Division I schools, four years before and four years after a men’s team was cut, and found the freed money was “reallocated primarily to the budgets of men’s basketball and football rather than to the women’s athletics budget”; the blame-Title-IX account, they write, “was not supported by the data.” The wrestling and men’s gymnastics programs this coalition mourns were eaten by football facilities. Women got the invoice.

Line the dates up. June 30: the Supreme Court blesses excluding trans girls from school sports. July 8: Heritage proposes converting women’s varsity rosters into yoga classes. July 29: a Christian nationalist pastor calls the WNBA a discipleship pipeline into transgenderism. One month. The argument moved from “trans women threaten female athletes” to “female athletes were the mistake” without pausing to change banners.

The girls holding the sign

I coach boys’ gymnastics in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. I built the program in 2016 because my son needed to be a gymnast and this state had no men’s program to put him in; ten years later I’m still on the floor with boys ages six to twelve, chalking grips and spotting kips. So when this coalition weeps for the men’s teams Title IX supposedly killed, it is weeping for my sport, and I can report what the tears have bought it. NCAA men’s gymnastics fielded more than 210 teams in 1969; by 2020, fifteen Division I programs remained. My son competed in college anyway, at Arizona State, on a club team, because club is mostly what’s left; the Sun Devils’ varsity program was cut in 1993 after years of sagging football ticket sales, and the administration told the coaches it was strictly budgetary. I sit on the board of the association that keeps those clubs alive. The ledgers in the Marx study say where cut-team money went across Division I. Not to women’s rosters. To the two budgets Yenor now proposes to exempt from the count entirely, which would hand football and men’s basketball a legal instrument for finishing the meal. A movement that cared about boys like mine would have written an indictment of athletic-department spending. It wrote an indictment of girls.

Gymnastics sits inside the women’s half of this story too. In Cohen v. Brown, the litigation that built modern Title IX enforcement, one of the women’s teams Brown University tried to demote to club status was gymnastics; the gymnasts sued and won, a history Yenor’s own report recounts with open resentment. And Jennifer Sey, whose XX-XY shirts those Seattle teenagers wore, is the 1986 U.S. national champion on the women’s side of my sport. Every varsity leotard she wore was cut from the statute her allies now want rewritten.

Those two girls in Seattle believed they were cheering for the people defending girls like them. Read their champions’ own paperwork. Conn believes their ticket to a WNBA game is discipleship into transgenderism. Yenor believes roster spots like the ones they might someday earn should be traded for a hiking club. A co-owner cursing from a courtside seat will hurt them a fraction as much as the people printing their signs.

I’m a transgender woman. By this coalition’s own count, I am one of fewer than ten in half a million, and the case against me still required a Supreme Court term, a think-tank report against Title IX, and a theology in which a girl’s jump shot is heresy. Protecting women’s sports was never the project. Women’s sports were always the defendant.

My shift at the gym starts at 6:15 PM. I’ll be there, spotting kips.

I Watch Women’s Sports

The women won me over one athlete at a time, and a boy did the rest

Grace Ann Hansen is an independent researcher and writer, and an MBA & PhD graduate student in health informatics and artificial intelligence. She is also a published author, a professional musician, a gymnastics coach, and a queer transgender woman living in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. All interpretation, argument, and prose are her own. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Grace Ann Hansen at grace@graceannhansen.com.