The WNBA is quickly becoming one of the most talked-about sports in America, but not all of the coverage is positive.
In recent months, the debate around whether transgender athletes should be able to compete in the competition has become very prominent, and fuel has only been added to the fire since Enes Kanter and Royce White declared for next year’s draft.
A WNBA task force of team presidents and general managers even got together to discuss the growing debate over transgender athletes. They released a statement in the aftermath of that meeting, in which they said they ‘strongly denounce the bad-faith efforts to use these topics to demean or marginalise others’.
But this issue doesn’t appear to be going away anytime soon, with one of the latest developments seeing Sophie Cunningham’s name banned from the WNBA subreddit after she spoke out about ‘biological males’ competing in the sport.
Now, amid all the discourse in the media and online, Elle Duncan has weighed in on the situation.
Elle Duncan suggests ‘everyone’ is to blame for ‘toxic’ WNBA
When speaking to WHYY’s Sports In America, as quoted by Awful Announcing, Duncan said: “Right now, the WNBA is the most toxic space to cover, and that’s incredibly frustrating and sad.
“There was so much conversation … about, early on, ‘Hey this is maybe not such a bad thing, right? No such thing as bad publicity, right? It’s all good! Now we’re like the men’s sports! We’ve got stupid narratives and discourse and we’ve got, like, false things being said. Uh-oh, we’ve made it! We’re like the men!’ And I think, very quickly, that’s turned into, ‘Oh my goodness, everything that people revered and loved about this space is essentially being hijacked.’”
Duncan then went on to claim that it is not just one person or group who is to blame for the current climate, instead suggesting it is on ‘everybody’.
She stated: “It’s on absolutely everybody.
“I know everybody that I work with is exhausted by this space right now, and I think the players included. But I do think that it’s not just the media to blame, just the league to blame, or just the players. I think, collectively, we’ve got to put our heads together and figure out how we right this ship.
“Because we have an opportunity here to celebrate this momentous moment and this movement in the WNBA, and I think we are wasting it by muddying it down with everything else that’s bothering us in this country right now.”
Read more: