Key Takeaways
- Enes Kanter Freedom invited WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert to a public “peace summit” about the league’s eligibility rules, with Caitlyn Jenner agreeing to moderate.
- Freedom says he plans to enter the 2027 WNBA Draft unless the league specifies that only “biological females” can play, while league sources maintain that he is ineligible.
- The WNBA condemned “bad-faith efforts” to demean others, and the Chicago Sky banned Freedom from home games after his confrontation with guard Natasha Cloud.
Enes Kanter Freedom apparently wants to take his WNBA campaign to the negotiating table—and he's bringing Caitlyn Jenner with him.
The former NBA center issued a lengthy public invitation to WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert and the league's task force on Monday, August 31, proposing what he called a “peace summit” over his ongoing challenge to the league's eligibility rules. Freedom said Jenner, the Olympic gold medalist and transgender media personality, has already agreed to moderate. “I’ve already spoken with her, and she’s in,” Freedom wrote on X. “I’m not a troublemaker. I’m more of a peacemaker.”
Freedom then went considerably less peaceful. “The whole world is laughing at you,” he told Engelbert and the WNBA. “You have turned the #WNBA into a laughingstock.”
He accused league officials of “hiding behind closed-door meetings, excuses, and delays” and demanded a public discussion without “carefully scripted statements.”
Freedom ended with a challenge: “Name the time. Name the place. Let’s talk. Are you in?”
The invitation is the latest escalation in Freedom's weeks-long effort to force the WNBA into publicly debating its eligibility language. Freedom announced that he intends to enter the 2027 WNBA Draft, arguing that because the league's collective bargaining agreement says “only players who are women are eligible to play” without publicly defining the term further, he can declare himself eligible.
Multiple league sources have reportedly said otherwise, maintaining that Freedom and fellow former NBA player Royce White cannot enter the draft. Freedom has dismissed those reports as “fake news.”
Freedom has also offered the league another way to make his campaign disappear. He said last week that if the WNBA changes its language to specify that only “biological females” are eligible, he'll quit immediately. “If they come out tomorrow and say only biological females are eligible to play, I’d drop everything,” Freedom said. “Until then, I am eligible to play.”
His campaign has already spilled from social media into WNBA arenas. Freedom was removed from an August 23 Chicago Sky-Indiana Fever game after a confrontation with Sky guard Natasha Cloud and was subsequently banned from Sky home games.
Cloud later called Freedom “irrelevant” and urged the WNBA to consider banning him league-wide. “What I will focus on is what actually affects women and children,” Cloud told reporters, citing issues including domestic violence, sexual assault and food insecurity.
The WNBA, meanwhile, has said there are “no immediate eligibility matters affecting” the league and has condemned “bad-faith efforts to use these topics to demean or marginalize others.”
