Enes Kanter Freedom posted another video going after the WNBA for refusing to define the word woman, and this time he pulled a sitting Supreme Court justice into it.
Are you even surprised it’s taking the @WNBA this long to define one simple word?
Woman!
The confusion reaches all the way to the highest court in the country.
We have a sitting Supreme Court justice whose job is to interpret the law, yet she declined to define what a woman… pic.twitter.com/qGihQVcKQA
— Enes Kanter FREEDOM (@EnesFreedom) September 9, 2026
The former NBA center said he was not surprised it was taking the league this long to define one word. He pointed at Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, said she went to law school and passed the bar and still declined to define what a woman is, and offered to do it for her as someone who speaks English as a second language. An adult human female. Or check your birth certificate. He then said this was not about winning a culture war but about whether American institutions still have the courage to say what ordinary people already know, and that leaders who fear simple truths stop leading. He closed by casting himself as the target, saying they are painting him as the villain and the extremist, that he is what they fear, and that they are not really after him at all. They are after your children.
On the basketball part, he is not wrong. The WNBA’s collective bargaining agreement, which is the contract between the league and the players union that sets pay, benefits, and who is allowed on the floor, was signed this past March. Article XIII contains a single line saying only players who are women are eligible to play in the WNBA. Across 409 pages, the agreement never defines the word. It does not mention gender identity. It does not mention sex at birth. The league convened a task force, met for days, and produced no rule. It said it would keep talking with stakeholders in the coming weeks and months without saying when a policy might exist.
What Enes Kanter Freedom does not mention is that the league already made a decision about him specifically. On August 24, sources around the league told the Associated Press, ESPN, CNN, and Front Office Sports that he and former NBA player Royce White are not eligible to play in the WNBA. The league has not said this publicly and has not explained its reasoning, so the only word on it comes from people who spoke on condition of anonymity. One of those sources called the two men’s declarations publicity stunts and said the league would not give oxygen to efforts designed to mock it. So the organization that supposedly cannot define a woman had no trouble at all determining that he is not one.
The road here started with Sophie Cunningham. The Indiana Fever guard said in an ESPN profile that women should not have to compete against biological men, calling it common sense, and the league has been arguing about it since. In August, Enes Kanter Freedom declared for the 2027 WNBA draft, saying his team had examined the eligibility rules and the framework around self identification, and that based on current guidelines he qualified. He submitted signed paperwork and insisted it was not a joke, framing it as a demand that the rules be applied to everyone equally. Royce White followed with a similar declaration. The WNBA’s agreement contains no self identification standard for anyone to invoke.
For the record, no transgender woman has ever played in the WNBA. Two nonbinary players have, Layshia Clarendon and AD Durr, and both were born female.
Then came Chicago. On August 23 at Wintrust Arena, Enes Kanter Freedom sat courtside in a black shirt reading WOMAN noun adult human female. During a timeout late in the third quarter, Sky guard Natasha Cloud walked over and shouted at him. He was removed from the building. He posted afterward that he had been thrown out of a WNBA game for supporting women. Cloud met with team and league security and did not speak to reporters. Whether he is barred from future games has not been announced.
The Ketanji Brown Jackson piece is real but it is not new. During her confirmation hearing in March 2022, Senator Marsha Blackburn asked her to define the word woman and Jackson said she could not do so in that context because she is not a biologist. That was four years ago, in a hearing about her fitness for the Supreme Court, and it has been a conservative talking point ever since. He presents it as a live failure rather than a moment from 2022 that has been recycled for years.
Here is the part being left out of most of the coverage. In 2025, Enes Kanter Freedom said he intends to run for Congress once he has been a United States citizen for seven years. He was born in Switzerland, raised in Turkey, and became an American citizen in November 2021, when he added Freedom to his name. Seven years puts him near the end of this decade.
