Key Takeaways
- Royce White attended an Indiana Fever-Connecticut Sun game in a long blonde wig and posted, “The Kweeeen has arrived! They better bow for a beautiful Black Trans Lesbian!”
- The WNBA rejected White and Enes Kanter Freedom’s claimed bids for the 2027 draft, denouncing their declarations of transgender identity as “bad-faith efforts” to demean or marginalize others.
- No known transgender woman currently plays in the WNBA, while White’s campaign follows a court ruling that found he abused his ex-wife and teenage son, which he has appealed.
Royce White's supposed WNBA career has already been rejected by the league, but that hasn't stopped the former NBA player from continuing the performance.
According to The New York Post, White showed up courtside at the Indiana Fever-Connecticut Sun game wearing a long blonde wig, later posting a photo of himself on Instagram with the caption, “The Kweeeen has arrived! They better bow for a beautiful Black Trans Lesbian!” He has also taken to calling himself “Queen Roysha.”
The appearance came days after league sources told multiple outlets that White and fellow former NBA player Enes Kanter Freedom are not eligible for the 2027 WNBA Draft. Both men have invoked transgender identity while claiming they intend to enter the league, presenting their declarations as challenges to its eligibility rules.
The WNBA has been considerably less amused. Earlier this month, the league said there were “no immediate eligibility matters affecting the WNBA” and denounced “bad-faith efforts to use these topics to demean or marginalize others.”
White's performance targets an extraordinarily small population while suggesting an immediate professional-sports problem that the WNBA says it doesn't currently have. The Williams Institute at UCLA estimated in 2025 that approximately 2.8 million Americans ages 13 and older identify as transgender—which translates to about 1 percent of the total population. Among adults, the estimate is 0.8 percent, including roughly 698,500 transgender women.
Additionally, there is no known transgender woman currently playing in the WNBA, nor has White identified an actual transgender WNBA player whose eligibility prompted his campaign.
White's own NBA résumé doesn't exactly require a lengthy Basketball Reference scroll. Houston selected him 16th overall out of Iowa State in 2012, but he never appeared in a game for the Rockets. His entire NBA career ultimately consisted of three appearances for the Sacramento Kings in 2014: nine minutes, zero points, and two personal fouls.
He later entered politics and became the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate in Minnesota in 2024.
The theatrics are also unfolding against the backdrop of much more serious recent history involving White. Earlier this year, a Minnesota judge found that White abused his ex-wife and teenage son. The court found that he repeatedly physically abused his former wife and, in one incident involving his son, grabbed the teenager by the neck and threw him into a metal basketball rack.
The resulting protection order bars White from contacting his ex-wife for 50 years and his son for two years. White appealed the civil ruling.
Meanwhile, Kanter Freedom's parallel campaign has already created its own WNBA spectacle. He was removed from an Indiana Fever-Chicago Sky game following a confrontation with Natasha Cloud and was subsequently banned from Sky home games.
