Kristoffer Ealy is a political scientist, political analyst, and professor in Southern California. He teaches American Government and political behavior, with a focus on political psychology, voting behavior, and political socialization. Subscribe to his Substack, The Thinking Class with Professor Ealy.
Last month, Royce White—a man who played exactly three NBA games in a single season for the Sacramento Kings, was a first-round bust out of Iowa State, and was at that moment still fighting for the Republican Senate nomination in Minnesota—announced that he was transgender and would be declaring for the 2027 WNBA draft.
When the headline first scrolled past me, my initial reaction was disgust. The entire stunt was slimy: a grown man using transgender people as props, turning their lives into a cheap joke, and expecting applause because he had found a new way to be an asshole on television. That disgust immediately produced a powerful professional temptation. I could roast this chump for four thousand words before lunch and still have time to grade papers. Then I had a second thought, the kind that occasionally saves you from yourself: White has spent his entire post-basketball career standing beside the attention economy with an empty cup, shaking it at passing cameras, and the easiest thing in the world would be for me to drop a few coins inside. So I passed. I told myself I was not going to reward this slimeball by becoming the latest person to hand him the platform he was so transparently begging for.
Then I watched him go on tour.
He told Fox News he was “having a blast” in his “feminine era” and wanted the chance to play with “my queens.” He went on Fox Business to warn Stuart Varney that he would sue the league for discrimination if it refused to let him play. His official draft declaration was handled by his legal counsel, former Congressman Matt Gaetz—that noted lifelong champion of women. I would ask you to stop laughing, but I try not to make unreasonable demands of my readers. Of all the attorneys White could have chosen to help defend the supposed dignity of women’s athletics, he selected a man whose name causes every woman within a five-mile radius to instinctively cover her drink. Because of course he did.
White then told Newsmax he was looking forward to becoming the first person “sometimes identifying as a transgender Black lesbian” in both the Senate and the WNBA, managing to insult transgender people, Black lesbians, professional basketball players, and the United States Senate without pausing for air. And on Free People Radio, with a wig on and dignity missing, he called it “completely, completely bigoted” that the league might deny his “trans existence.” This was never about basketball. It was a man with a collapsing Senate campaign discovering that the fastest route back onto television was to transform himself into a punchline the entire right-wing media apparatus was contractually obligated to platform.
And here’s the punchline underneath the punchline: it didn’t even work. Three days after he first put on the wig, Minnesota Republicans went to the polls, and White got 11.2 percent of the vote in his own primary, finishing a distant third behind Michele Tafoya’s 52.1 percent. He responded to getting crushed by announcing he’s running for president next, and for good measure kept the WNBA stunt going anyway — Gaetz was still filing paperwork and threatening litigation on his behalf two weeks later. The attention-seeking outlived the campaign it was supposedly boosting.
Here is the thing about that particular trick, though: it is not new, and it is not just Royce White’s. Republicans have run this exact play cycle after cycle, like a football team that keeps calling the same play after the quarterback has been sacked, stripped, and carted off the field.
