Just this week, Enes Kanter Freedom posted a video where he looked straight into the camera and said, “I would like to offer you a peace summit,” addressing WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert directly. Freedom is the same guy who spent the last several weeks stirring up the whole trans-eligibility fight in the league in the first place. But now he’s the one asking for a sit-down.
Odd turn, but that’s where things stand. And right in the middle of it, Fox News has started going after the WNBA’s own media coverage for basically pretending the story regarding the whole saga doesn’t exist.
Fox News Has Criticized the WNBA Media
On a recent Tuesday segment, Fox News correspondent Trace Gallagher brought up the fact that several outlets that cover the WNBA closely simply haven’t run a single headline on the ongoing trans-eligibility debate, or on anything involving Enes Kanter Freedom’s campaign.
“Apple News sidelines headlines on WNBA trans controversy, Enes Kanter Freedom, League bid, zero headlines, zero headlines from July 22nd to August 24th, zero, Matt, nobody’s, I mean, you look in the media, you see nobody wants to cover this, and I don’t know why,” Gallagher said during the segment.
Gallagher turned to his co-host and asked if that made any sense. The response was pretty simple. The fact that the WNBA still hasn’t laid out what actually counts as a “woman” for eligibility purposes is newsworthy on its own, and the silence from outlets that normally cover every bounce of the ball felt strange.
“You think that news organizations want to cover the news, not just be political advocacy groups for the people that work at that company. This is clearly a newsworthy story. The Women’s National Basketball Association doesn’t know how to define the word woman.”
“Whichever side you come on that issue, the news needs to be portrayed, allowing the audience to decide. But they’ve tried to shelve this story. They’ve tried to hide this story because they know that the league they sympathize with wants to keep it pretty quiet. That’s not a news organization,” Co-host Matthew Bilinsky said during the segment.
Great joining @tracegallagher as always. https://t.co/VvdFjzolQ0
— Matt Bilinsky (@mattbilinsky) September 2, 2026
The criticism comes as the WNBA’s publicly available eligibility language has remained at the center of the dispute.
The league’s collective bargaining agreement states that only players who are women are eligible to play in the WNBA, but critics have argued that the language does not provide a detailed public explanation of how transgender eligibility is determined.
That lack of clarity has helped keep the argument alive. Freedom has continued demanding a more direct explanation from the league, while the WNBA has pushed back against what it describes as bad-faith efforts surrounding the issue.
What makes it stranger is that Commissioner Engelbert clearly isn’t confused about what a woman is. If we go back to her very first press conference as commissioner in 2019, we will find her leaning hard on the word throughout the whole thing, according to Outkick’s count, using it more than thirty times.
She talked about “women’s leadership,” “women’s advancement,” “women’s initiatives.” So when the same person now says the league can’t offer a straightforward answer on the subject, it’s fair to ask what changed. She clearly had no trouble defining it back then.
For now, nobody knows when or if the WNBA plans to put out an official statement or update its policy in any real way.
