NEW YORK (AP) — For Djaniele Taylor, attending WNBA games was the perfect way to rediscover a sense of community born out of the long pandemic-era lockdown.
The 38-year-old Evanston, Illinois resident has regularly attended Chicago Sky games for the past three seasons, having watched the team win its title. first championship in 2021. As a Black queer fan, she felt the games provided a supportive and safe sports environment.
“I was hooked and I loved the atmosphere – it was very friendly, very family-friendly and very diverse,” she said.
As the WNBA’s popularity skyrocketed this year, Taylor saw the price of her season tickets more than double since 2022. With that growth, she also noted a “change in darker mood”: what always seemed being a positive executive started to take a turn. sometimes more hostile turn.
As women’s sports set new attendance records and the audience, Taylor and other longtime fans watched with optimism — and unease. It’s a cycle that female athletes and fans of female sports have come to recognize: with this increased and sought-after visibility also comes increased surveillance, as well as online harassment and abuse at home. against certain players.
This year, fresh from the NCAA spotlight, former college basketball stars Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese made their WNBA debuts for the Indiana Fever and Chicago Sky, catapulting their personal brands as well as the popularity of the league among viewers.
Fans are tuning in for the love of sports, as they always have, said Amira Rose Davis, an assistant professor in the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas-Austin. But they’re also drawn to the dynamic between players like Clark and Reese, who faced off in the 2023 NCAA championship between the University of Iowa and Louisiana State University.
Although both deny there is tension between them, the tension has been stoked by fans and increased media attention. Underneath are racial undertones that arose while the two played in college — with a predominantly white Iowa pitted against a predominantly black LSU, and Clark and Reese “appearing as those kinds of archetypes that people can run,” Davis said.
“It really increases engagement and just raw viewership.” And then it also solidifies those narratives,” she said.
It has also led to harassment and abuse – much of it racially motivated and directed at players of color in the league and the broader sports landscape.
“Angel and Caitlin have given us an incredible platform to talk about how we treat black and white athletes differently in the media,” said ER Fightmaster, co-host of Jockular, a podcast about the intersection of women’s sports and of queer identity.
During the playoff match at September between the Connecticut Sun and the Indiana Fever, The Sun’s DiJonai Carrington published an email she received with a racial slur and explicit death and sexual assault threats.
Her teammate, Alyssa Thomas, shared her own experience.
“In my 11-year career, I have never heard a racist comment from Indiana Fever fans,” Thomas said after the Sun knocked out the Fever. playoffs.
For his part, Clark disavowed the toxic discourse, although some say she hasn’t done enough to try to curb the racism of some of her Indiana Fever fans.
“People should not use my name to promote these programs. It’s disappointing. This is not acceptable,” Clark said in June. “Treating every woman in this league with the same respect, I think, is just a basic human thing that everyone should do.”
At the end of the 2024 season, after facing criticism for initially failing to condemn harassment, WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert said, “There is no place for this in sports” and promised to attack it “in a multidimensional way”.
The league should have done a better job of preparing for harassment, said Frankie de la Cretaz, a freelance writer whose work explores queer sports, culture and identity. “They should have seen it coming based on the fan talk around Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese at college.”
The NCAA released a study in October Online abuse toward student-athletes peaked during March Madness, with female basketball players receiving three times as many threats as male players. For the first time in March Madness history, the women’s championship game attracted more viewers this year than the men’s.
“It’s very exciting, of course, to see the increased visibility of this growing popularity, but it’s extremely concerning and disappointing to see what comes next,” said Lynn Holzman, NCAA vice president of women’s basketball. .
A similar study found that racist and sexist messages targeting female athletes made up almost half of all abusive messages monitored during the 2024 Olympics in Paris.
At the summer games, Algerian boxer Imane Khelif faced hateful comments and false accusations about her gender before winning the gold medal.
The false narratives, perpetrated by internet trolls and public figures like President-elect Donald Trump and “Harry Potter” author JK Rowling, have highlighted how female athletes of color have faced disproportionate scrutiny and discrimination in sex testing and false accusations that they are male or transgender.
“People want the opportunity to delegitimize successful women at all times. And so if you’re a successful boxer and they can’t find anything else to fall back on, they’ll say you’re too manly to play,” Fightmaster said.
Khelif called for an end to bullying of athletes. “It can destroy people, it can kill people’s thoughts, minds and spirit,” she said.
The issue of transgender women participating in women’s sports has been very polarized this year. A former University of Kentucky swimmer was among a dozen athletes who applied. a federal lawsuit against the NCAA in March, accusing him of violating Title IX rights by allowing a transgender woman, Lia Thomas, to compete in the 2022 national championships.
The lawsuit also cited unconfirmed reports that a a transgender woman was playing on the San Jose State women’s volleyball team. This fall, colleges started dropping out of matches with San Jose State, which has not confirmed having a trans woman on the team. The Associated Press withheld the player’s name because she has not publicly commented on her gender identity.
But that hasn’t stopped politicians from running campaigns to exclude transgender women from or enter women’s sports. the polarizing debate over fairness.
About half of U.S. states ban transgender athletes from participating in school sports based on their gender identity. This year, New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu signed a law ban transgender athletes from grades 5-12. Ohio trans athletes banned from kindergarten. West Virginia and Idaho are looking to Supreme Court of the United States to support their bans.
Even as women’s sports reach new heights in viewership and with them ticket sales and lucrative deals, inequalities persist, including disparities in pay, quality of women’s sports facilities and online harassment of women. female athletes.
“It seems disingenuous to me to celebrate the rise of women’s sports without addressing how we treat female athletes differently,” said Cheryl Cooky, professor of women’s, gender and sexuality studies at Purdue University.
“I hope the growth of women’s sports can happen without the vitriolic rhetoric we’ve seen.”
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AP Sports writers Alanis Thames and Doug Feinberg contributed.