{"id":597679,"date":"2026-04-21T14:10:13","date_gmt":"2026-04-21T14:10:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/597679\/"},"modified":"2026-04-21T14:10:13","modified_gmt":"2026-04-21T14:10:13","slug":"the-wnba-draft-and-the-political-imperative-of-minding-your-own-business","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/597679\/","title":{"rendered":"The WNBA Draft and the Political Imperative of Minding Your Own Business"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n April 21, 2026\n <\/p>\n

With the first pick of the WNBA draft, the Dallas Stars picked Azzi Fudd. It sparked a sexist, homophobic conversation online.<\/p>\n

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Azzi Fudd of UConn, right, poses with WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert after the Dallas Wings selected Fudd with the 1st pick of the 2026 WNBA Draft on April 13, 2026 in New York City.<\/p>\n

(Angelina Katsanis \/ Getty Images)<\/p>\n

The place of women in the sports world has come a long way since whale-bone corsets<\/a> would puncture the lungs of teenaged tennis players, but we are nowhere near where we need to be. We saw this last week when a sexist, homophobic frenzy emerged following the WNBA draft.\u00a0<\/p>\n

With the first pick, the Dallas Stars selected UConn\u2019s all-American guard Azzi Fudd, reuniting her with old UConn teammate, last year\u2019s rookie of the year Paige Bueckers. The Stars have created what could be an all-world backcourt, and yet the media is less interested in the future of the team than the news that Bueckers and Fudd may be an item. ESPN has described their relationship as overshadowing the Stars\u2019s choice of Fudd and wonder how it could impact the Stars\u2019s future prospects. (Fudd and Bueckers confirmed that they were dating last year, but have not spoken on the record about it since.)<\/p>\n

We live in a society, rooted in sexism and homophobia, that has an insatiable appetite for gossip and voyeurism, so of course people are interested in their personal lives. Previously in the WNBA, player couplings, while hardly new, were rarely discussed. But the Fudd-Bueckers relationship is dragging this reality, willingly or not, into the light.<\/p>\n

At her introductory press conference, a reporter pressed Fudd about the relationship by asking whether Bueckers and she had sought out advice from other WNBA players who had been in relationships with people on their same team. Before being given a chance to answer, a Wings\u2019s public-relations staffer interrupted, saying, \u201cUnderstand why you have to ask that question. We\u2019re going to respectfully decline from commenting on our players\u2019 personal lives.\u201d<\/p>\n

Perhaps Fudd and Bueckers asked for this kind of intervention from the Stars, and maybe their desire is to keep their private lives private, but it would have been good to see Fudd say that and not have to be saved by someone from the PR team. They should be able to speak for themselves, and then the media should respect their privacy and move on.<\/p>\n

As for the threatened incels who never gave a damn about women\u2019s hoops until learning of Bueckers and Fudd, they should stick to what they know\u2014like practicing pickup lines in the safety of their basement, while scrolling 4chan and trying to find the Straights of Hormuz on a map.<\/p>\n

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\n \"Cover
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As Maya Goldberg-Safir, who chronicles women\u2019s hoops for her publication Rough Notes, told me, \u201cI\u2019m assuming that for decades now, professional women\u2019s basketball players have already been playing with their girlfriends AND their exes. Whether or not Paige and Azzi want to focus on the status of their relationship publicly is entirely up to them, and whatever their status is, trust that a WNBA locker room can handle it.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Bueckers-Fudd online obsession is also a reminder of something outside the lines of the WNBA: Women\u2019s organized sports in the United States has never been allowed to just be about sports. It is always\u2014sometimes inspiringly, sometimes, exhaustingly\u2014\u201ca microcosm of society,\u201d as Billie Jean King has said often. Would that athletic prowess, excitement, and derring-do could just come to us a la carte. Instead, and we see this time and again over the last 150 years, it\u2019s only when sexism and homophobia are challenged off the field that you see inroads toward autonomy and respect on the field of play.\u00a0<\/p>\n

King also often speaks about her era, reminding us that some progress has been made. \u201cIn the \u201970s, we had to make it acceptable for people to accept girls and women as athletes,\u201d she said. \u201cWe had to make it OK for them to be active. Those were much scarier times for females in sports.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

This reality is not something that\u00a0 King could have imagined when she was on the front lines fighting for Title IX legislation in 1972. (She started playing tennis competitively as a working-class kid precisely because she said that she did not see a future in anything else except for golf, which was just \u201ctoo slow.\u201d)<\/p>\n

Golf, for many young girls, is either too slow, or inaccessible\u2014it\u2019s\u00a0 still a country club sport. But any conversation about the progress of\u00a0 team sports for girls and women should address how conditions were\u00a0 better for trans women, as well as intersex and non-binary people, a decade ago. The new policies of exclusion and persecution are not a product of \u201cfollowing the science,\u201d as International Olympic Committee Chief Kristi Coventry says, but entirely because of a larger right-wing backlash. Our trans teammates are being left behind. (It must be noted here that unlike, say, fellow tennis legend Martina Navratilova, Billie Jean King has stood in solidarity with trans athletes.)\u00a0<\/p>\n

Today we can marvel at Bueckers and Fudd as individual players and also rejoice in their reunion as teammates. But we also should defend their ability to have the relationships they choose to have, with it only being the public\u2019s business if they choose to make it the public\u2019s business. We also need to build\u2014and rebuild\u2014movements that fuse together the fights against racism, sexism, homophobia, and, yes, transphobia. That\u2019s how freedom will be won: on and off the court.<\/p>\n

Dave Zirin<\/a><\/p>\n

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Dave Zirin is the sports editor at\u00a0The Nation. He is the author of 11 books on the politics of sports. He is also the coproducer and writer of the new documentary Behind the Shield: The Power and Politics of the NFL<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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