Mom and teen daughter asked to cover XX-XY T-shirts at WNBA game; league admits error
WNBA security threatened to eject a Georgia mother and her teenage daughter unless they covered T-shirts supporting the view that only women should compete in female sports.
After a Georgia mother and her teenage daughter were ordered by security to cover XX-XY Athletics T-shirts they wore during a Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) game or face ejection, the league acknowledged the incident “should not have happened.”
Kasey Thomason and her 17-year-old daughter, Annie, attended the Indiana Fever’s 95-91 overtime win over the Atlanta Dream on Aug. 16 at State Farm Arena in Atlanta. According to OutKick, they wore XX-XY Athletics shirts — one featuring stars-and-stripes lettering and the other reading “For the Girls” on the back — to support Fever guard Sophie Cunningham and the position that men should not compete in women’s sports.
Cunningham has drawn national attention in recent weeks after she publicly spoke out against men competing in women’s sports in July, as Zeale News previously reported.
During overtime, a WNBA security guard approached the Thomasons near their seats and told the pair their shirts were “offensive” after receiving a complaint from another fan, OutKick reported.
“Biology and science is offensive?” Kasey Thomason responded, according to OutKick.
The guard gave them Atlanta Dream “Wellness & Health Night” T-shirts to wear over their own shirts and told them they would have to leave the arena if they didn’t put them on. The Thomasons complied to watch the final minutes of the game.
“We were made to cover up our XX-XY shirts at this game,” Kasey Thomason said outside the arena afterward, according to the New York Post. “They gave us T-shirts during overtime and told us we had to leave or cover our shirts up. This just happened. We did nothing. We were just sitting there.”
The shirts come from XX-XY Athletics, a brand that advocates for protecting women from being forced to compete against men in female sports or from having to share female-only spaces with men.
On Aug. 17, a WNBA spokesperson told OutKick in a statement that the league is “aware of interactions at last night’s game in Atlanta” and that the incident “should not have happened.”
The Dream also responded in an Aug. 17 X post, stressing that its employees had not participated in the decision.
“The Atlanta Dream believes in creating a safe and inclusive environment for everyone. Unfortunately, at last night's game, WNBA security took actions that fell short of that standard. At no point was Dream personnel involved in the decisions made by WNBA security,” the team said.
The WNBA has been at the center of a debate in recent weeks over whether male athletes should be allowed to compete in the league. Two former National Basketball Association (NBA) players declared themselves eligible for the 2027 WNBA draft earlier this month, arguing that the league’s policies would allow male athletes to compete if they began identifying as women.
As Zeale News previously reported, WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert said Aug. 7 that a task force of team presidents and general managers would review the league’s eligibility policies regarding “transgender athlete participation in women’s basketball.” The task force met Aug. 12 but did not arrive at any eligibility rules, according to a league statement provided to ESPN. The league said the discussions would continue in the “coming weeks and months.”
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