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Cis white members of the media have not gotten any more normal about Caitlin Clark in the year-and-a-half that she’s been in the WNBA. In fact, the narrative currently being spun about Clark’s injury, and who should take responsibility, has become deeply ugly. On its face, the discussion is about officiating and physical play. But in regards to Clark, it has assumed the racist and sexist beliefs that have long kept women out of sports, and reflect the conservative shift our culture has taken.
Let’s connect some dots.
While Caitlin Clark stan Christine Brennan has been on tour for her (terribly written) book, making stops at renowned media institutions like Outkick and Newsmax, she has continued to push the ideas that Clark is a hero who saved women’s basketball and the WNBA, and that Clark's colleagues are ungrateful, jealous haters who are targeting and villainizing her instead of worshipping the ground she walks on.
Clark has been out for most of the season with groin and quad strains and has struggled mightily when she is on the court. Instead of acknowledging that maybe Clark’s game needs to evolve and mature for her to have long-term success (a very normal thing!), certain members of the media have attempted to explain her struggles by blaming others—namely, Clark's opponents for targeting her, and the refs for failing to protect her.
In a column for The Washington Post, longtime columnist Sally Jenkins (who will reportedly join The Atlantic in the near future) blamed the number of injuries that WNBA players have suffered this season—including Clark—on poor officiating. The column was accompanied by a video on the Post’s social media pages in which Jenkins is hit with pool noodles to demonstrate what Clark is up against when she plays.
“Contact in the WNBA is not just a problem, it’s becoming a threat to the good of the league,” Jenkins tells the camera. “Every time Caitlin Clark tries to do something on the basketball court, she gets contact… Basketball is not supposed to be played this way.” At the Wall Street Journal, a man named Sean McLean has taken it even further, arguing that Clark’s civil rights are being violated whenever she is fouled because it creates “a hostile work environment” for her.
The column ran alongside a photo of Tiffany Hayes standing over Clark and trying to get the ball from Clark, who is on the ground. The implication is that Hayes fouled Clark, but Clark slipped and fell while trying to bring the ball up the court. We saw a similar take last season, when the editorial board of the Chicago Tribune called a foul on Clark from Chennedy Carter “assault,” trafficking in dangerous rhetoric that sought to incriminate a Black woman for a play against a white woman in a pro basketball game.
Nevermind that contact is a routine part of basketball. Nevermind that Clark’s injuries thus far in her pro career have been non-contact injuries. In fact, the WNBA’s injury crisis is overwhelmingly due to non-contact, soft tissue ailments, likely caused, at least in part, by overuse due to the grueling schedule this year. For most of the league's history, teams played 34 games until the schedule was expanded to 36 games in 2022, 40 games in 2023, and now 44 games in 2025. The average number of days between games has gone from four to two this year, Mercury player Sami Whitcomb told the media earlier this week.
“As a sport psychologist who works with the best endurance athletes, coaches, and physios, I’m alarmed by the WNBA schedule,” Dr. Kristin Keim, a clinical sport psychologist, said on Bluesky. “There’s no time for recovery physically, mentally, and socially. Chronic injuries will sadly become more common, but shouldn’t be normalized.”
While I agree that the quality of WNBA officiating needs fixing, non-calls are not what’s causing all of these injuries. In fact, Tina Charles, a league veteran who is currently in her 13th season, said on Sue Bird’s podcast recently that play in the W has become less physical.
If Clark is struggling with the physicality of the league, she needs to figure out how to meet the WNBA at its level, rather than make the league come down to hers. If she truly is the best to ever play the game, as she’s been advertised, the pros shouldn’t have to make the game easier for her to be able to live up to her hype. But those kinds of adjustments can take time.
Diana Taurasi got a lot of shit when she said that “reality was coming” for Clark in her transition to the W, adding, “You look superhuman playing against 18-year-olds, but you’re going to [be playing against] some grown women that have been playing professional basketball for a long time.” But Taurasi wasn’t wrong; college basketball is full of teenagers, while the WNBA is full of grown-ass women.
Skylar Diggins said the same thing after her rookie season back in 2013; she underperformed and got her ass kicked because she wasn’t strong enough. She spent the next offseason in the weight room bulking up, saying, “It's a grown woman's league, so I had to get a grown woman's body.” The result was a huge turnaround in her second season, in which she won the Most Improved Player award.
The racial elements in any conversation about Clark and physicality cannot be ignored. In a league that is overwhelmingly Black, implying that the players are too strong and too rough for a young white woman plays into racist tropes that dehumanize Black women and police their womanhood. It echoes the narratives around the Williams sisters when they joined the WTA Tour in the 1990s. Rather than saying, “Caitlin should get stronger so she can compete up to the athletic standards of the league,” the conversation is, “Why are these Black and/or queer women athletic in a way that makes it hard for Caitlin?”
The fact that Clark is a known flopper—someone who exaggerates contact to get calls—only stokes the flames. And look, no shade, flopping is a part of the game! It’s especially a part of Clark’s. Even people like Stephen A. Smith and the men at Outkick and Barstool Sports—bandwagon WBB fans who hate women but came to the league because they bought into the Clark hype—have started to call out her theatrics. But for anyone predisposed to believing in a league-wide vendetta against Clark, every time she lands on the floor is only more evidence of one, her reputation be damned. If they stopped watching her highlights and started watching her day in and out, they might see areas for improvement and her struggles under pressure that exist alongside her incredible court vision and long-range threes.
Many of the people arguing for less physicality in the W—Brennan, Jenkins, tennis legend Chris Evert—have spent their careers covering or taking part in women's sports (or both). And yet, they’re buying into the oldest sexist trope in the book, a narrative that existed over a century ago as a way to keep women out of sports altogether: That women are too weak to handle physicality in sports. I wrote for Andscape last year about the Victorian era, when the argument against women’s sports was paternalistic—that women, and mainly upper-class white women, needed to be protected from damaging their bodies through athletic endeavors because men feared it would damage their reproductive potential. In 2025, the justifications for reigning in the WNBA are only slightly less absurd.
The emphasis on Clark’s need for protection and the focus on the perception that she is being injured by her colleagues also fall into long-held racist tropes. Studies have found that Black women and girls are believed to need “less protection and nurturing” than their white counterparts, and institutional bias in the medical field leads to claims that Black people are “not as sensitive to pain” as white people.
It’s no surprise that Evert, who often made racially coded comments about the Williams sisters, is now simping for Clark and lambasting the WNBA for not protecting her from her Black colleagues. And it’s also no surprise that someone whose views are dripping in misogynoir also wants to exclude trans women from women’s sports. Evert supports the transphobic Women’s Sports Policy Working Group, which has lobbied against trans women’s inclusion in sports under the guise of “protecting” cis women.
The racism and sexism espoused by people like Evert are related. The policing of womanhood leads to the prioritization of a white, Western idea of femininity, which means that any woman who doesn’t conform to that standard is a target. Black women athletes are regularly required to alter their bodies, even when it makes them sick, simply to be allowed to step onto the playing field, as they are often deemed to have unfair advantages over their white counterparts and are therefore threatening to the skills, ability, and safety of white athletes.
As these ideas have been legitimized in popular discourse, they have led to violations like the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee (USOPC) banning trans women from elite sports, and Democratic politicians like Pete Buttigieg parroting right-wing talking points about “fairness.” Then comes the re-institution of sex testing policies, like World Athletics just announced last week. Black and brown women are overwhelmingly impacted by sex testing and exclusionary policies, which were essentially designed to protect white cis women from the perceived dominance of athletes who don’t conform to traditional ideas of femininity, many of whom are Black and/or transgender.
Before anyone yells at me, I’m not blaming Caitlin Clark for any of this. I am talking about the way a cis white woman like Clark has been used by right-wing commentators as an avatar for white supremacy, and how the mainstream media has perpetuated that narrative. Media shapes culture, and those conversations contribute directly to transphobic policies based in eugenic race science. Thanks to the conservative shift in mainstream culture, conversations are moving backwards and now we have self-proclaimed women’s sports advocates arguing that professional athletes are too fragile to handle contact on the basketball court, and using a second-year WNBA player to bolster their regressive views.
Clark is just a relatively green WNBA player struggling to stay healthy and find her groove in the league. Unfortunately, a lot of bad faith actors won't let her be.
This newsletter was edited by Louis Bien.