Kasey Thomason and her daughter Annie spent thousands of dollars on tickets and travel to watch the Indiana Fever play the Atlanta Dream at State Farm Arena on Sunday. With two minutes left in overtime, WNBA security walked up and told them their shirts were the problem.
The shirts featured XX-XY Athletics logos. Annie's was from the Riley Gaines collection. It read "For the Girls."
League security approached the Thomasons and asked them to cover up their shirts — or swap them out for Atlanta Dream "Wellness & Health Night" promotional tees. The request wasn't prompted by obscene language, violent imagery, or any of the usual reasons arena security gets involved. The shirts referenced chromosomes. Specifically, the ones that determine biological sex.
Here's a picture of the mother daughter duo at the game before security ordered them to cover up or else...
Kasey Thomason's response was the kind of line that writes itself. "Biology and science is offensive?" she asked.
Meanwhile, another fan in the arena was wearing a shirt that read "Trans Kids Belong In Sports." That fan was not approached. That shirt was apparently fine. Just the chromosomes were the issue.
After details of the story went viral, the Atlanta Dream released a statement, saying the organization "believes in creating a safe and inclusive environment for everyone" and that "WNBA security took actions that fell short of that standard." The WNBA followed with its own statement, acknowledging that "fans were asked by league security to cover their shirts" and conceding flatly that "this should not have happened."
So the league admits it shouldn't have happened. The team admits it fell short of its own standard. And yet nobody has explained how it happened in the first place — how trained security personnel at a professional sporting event decided that the letters X and Y on a cotton t-shirt constituted a threat to fan safety, while an explicitly political message on someone else's shirt didn't register at all.
This wasn't a rogue usher. This was league security — WNBA personnel, not arena staff — making a judgment call about which political statements were acceptable inside a basketball game. One message about biological sex: unacceptable. One message endorsing a contested policy position about children's athletics: fine.
The Indiana Fever won the game 95-91. Sophie Cunningham, the Fever shooting guard whose fanbase has become a flashpoint in the WNBA's ongoing culture wars, put in work on the court. Her fans, apparently, were doing something more dangerous in the stands — wearing shirts with science on them.
The WNBA has spent years trying to grow its audience. Attendance is up. Television deals are bigger. The league finally has mainstream momentum. And in the middle of that momentum, league security is telling a mother and her daughter to take off their shirts or leave — at a game they paid thousands to attend — because the chromosomal designation for "female" might upset someone.
The apology statements from the Dream and the WNBA both used the word "inclusive." One organization said security fell short of an inclusive standard. The other said the confrontation shouldn't have happened. Neither addressed the selective enforcement — that one shirt was targeted and another wasn't — which tells you everything about what "inclusive" means in practice.