Budding Fox News star and former NBA player Enes Kanter Freedom believes he can average 60 points and 30 rebounds a game by donning a woman’s wig, changing his name to ‘Eneshia’ and joining the WNBA.
Touching upon one of the network’s favorite topics – trans women in sports – Freedom told hosts Bill Hemmer and Dana Perino that he could prove the two sexes are on an unequal playing field.
‘I’m 7-foot, 270 pounds,’ the 6-foot-10 Freedom said. ‘And, if I decided to identify myself as a woman and decided to play in the WNBA … would that be fair to all the women who have been chasing their dreams since they were a little kid?’
Freedom then put a finer point on his argument: ‘If I am allowed in, I will average 60 points and 30 rebounds. I will break records.’
‘Men do not belong in women’s spaces… restrooms, locker rooms or sports.
Freedom believes he can average 60 points and 30 rebounds a game by joining the WNBA
‘Everybody knows we are bigger, stronger, taller, more muscular. It’s just not fair. It’s just not fair, period.’
Over his 11-year NBA career, Freedom averaged 11.2 points and 7.8 rebounds a game, and in 2019 was named the league’s worst defensive center by Bleacher Report. A year earlier, The Athletic named Freedom to its annual ‘No-Defense Team.’
Freedom is not the first NBA player to say that trans women should be banned by the WNBA.
‘I don’t like that,’ retired NBA forward and podcaster Matt Barnes told Vlad TV. ‘You wanna be whatever you wanna be…I’m pro-make-your-choice. Do you, do this, but sports is different, you know what I mean? Sports is a different beast.
Freedom wears a WNBA sweatshirt in 2020
‘If you’re born a woman, I think you should play women sports. And if you’re born a man, you should play man sports. But if you wanna be—if you wanna do whatever you wanna do with your life, I respect that. That’s not my business. But I just think the sports thing is just a little different.’
But several players within the league are open to trans women playing in the WNBA.
Phoenix Mercury forward Brianna Turner, for one, has called out critics of trans athletes as ‘trans phobes,’ who are only pretending to care for women’s sports.
‘Just irks me when people disguise their transphobia as caring for women’s athletics because in reality a lot of y’all could care less about the future of women in sport, you just don’t like the idea of trans women,’ Turner tweeted.
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‘I don’t support this fake outrage directed at the minuscule percentage of trans athletes. How about creating policy that would actually be beneficial?’
The Turkish-born center added ‘Freedom’ to his name when he became a US citizen in 2021
Freedom has become a cause célèbre for conservative Americans who disapprove of the NBA’s commercial dependence on the Chinese market.
In his native Turkey, Freedom has been considered an enemy of the state since 2017, when he criticized president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan as the ‘Hitler of our century.’ In response, the country revoked his passport, imprisoned his father on terrorism charges for two years, and, through Interpol, attempted to arrange for Freedom’s arrest.
More recently, the former first-round draft pick made headlines by attacking Michael Jordan and LeBron James for their business ties to Nike and, by extension, China — a country accused of targeting its minority Uighur population and forcing citizens into slave labor camps.
The US State Department estimates that, since 2017, as many as two million Uighurs and other ethnic minorities have been detained in internment camps in China. The country has denied human rights violations and claims the camps are intended to prevent terrorism among the Uighurs, who are predominantly Muslim.
In 2021, Enes added ‘Freedom’ to his name when he became a US citizen, but has since fallen out of the NBA, which he claims is the result of his political attacks on China.
