The WNBA Has Talked the Talk. Now Comes the Awkward Part
Clay Travis just put $10 million on the table, and the WNBA won’t even look at it. The Outkick founder publicly challenged the Las Vegas Aces, the reigning WNBA champions, to play a boys’ high school state championship team for the money. If the Aces win, they keep the $10 million. If the boys win, Travis says he will give the players $10 million to split, with pay-per-view profits going to the Tunnels to Towers Foundation.
Travis picked the best team in the league on purpose, reasoning a weaker opponent would undercut the point. The Aces swept the Phoenix Mercury in the 2025 WNBA Finals for their third title in four seasons. I don’t know this I looked it up, because, obviously, I don’t watch the WNBA. But, the point is clear, if any WNBA team could hold its own against a boys’ team, it is this one.
Travis is not arguing that WNBA players can’t play basketball. They are elite, tough athletes. Any one of them could beat me easily. But, the dare tests something else: whether sex-based physical differences are large enough to justify separate leagues at all.
History offers a warning against assuming a women’s team would win. In 1998, teenage tennis stars Serena and Venus Williams took part in an informal “Battle of the Sexes” challenge at the Australian Open against German player Karsten Braasch, who was ranked No. 203 in the world at the time. The sisters had suggested they could beat male players ranked outside the top 200, but Braasch defeated Serena 6-1 and Venus 6-2 in one-set matches. Venus was a top-20 player in women’s tennis at the time.
The WNBA wants women’s sports taken seriously on their own stage. Plenty of its most prominent voices will not defend the biological distinction that justifies having a separate stage at all. Travis exposed that with one dare, and the Aces are not going to touch it.
I’ve written at PJ Media about how the WNBA is on the verge of becoming the new ground zero of the trans sports debate after WNBA player Sophie Cunningham said transgender male athletes should not compete in women’s sports, a position an an overwhelming majority of Americans share. The backlash was immediate. Fans, players and even coaches piled on. Now, a male French athlete, “Julie” Tetart, who identifies as a woman, wants to join the WNBA.
A league that truly believed there are no meaningful physiological differences between men and women would accept Travis’s challenge and let Tetart join. I am confident that the WNBA will do neither. Everyone running it knows the differences between men and women are real. They just will not say so out loud.