The lovefest surrounding Caitlin Clark, acclaimed as the greatest women’s college basketball player ever, has followed her right into the WNBA. Her team, the Indiana Fever, is clearly positioning itself as a strong contender for the league championship during her second year as a professional, and her popularity with fans seems to know limits. The tickets for a recent exhibition game at the University of Iowa, where her team played the Brazilian National Women’s Team, sold out in only 42 minutes.

Add to this the lines of girls queuing up for her autograph everywhere, all of which she graciously signs until her hand goes numb, and one can see her immense impact as an ambassador and role model for girl’s and women’s sports in general. It also seems likely that the WNBA will see record viewership during the upcoming season. Good for them—and great for female athletes everywhere in America.

However, given the ongoing controversies about biological males declaring themselves to be transgendered females—and dominating their biologically female competitors in high school and college sports—one has to wonder how different this lovely story will turn out to be if Caitlin Clark is soon forced to drive the basket against a parade of broad shouldered “women” tucking their penises down into their shorts.

It would cause an identity crisis for the cheerfully Woke WNBA if another team in the league that is equally intent on winning a championship decides the best way to neutralize Caitlin Clark and her Fever teammates is to sign some transgendered females to shove the basketball right in their faces. Women’s professional basketball—where size, speed, and strength provide undeniable competitive advantage—is clearly becoming a marquee sport ripe for infiltration by men performing as women, and this would force a startling reckoning about the mutability of biological sex that has to this point managed to avoid intense national scrutiny.

President Trump’s recent efforts to cut some federal funding to force Maine to stop allowing transgendered girls to compete in high school athletics—and Maine Governor Janet Mill’s defiant refusal to comply—has been successfully framed as an example of Republican bigotry because the girls being victimized are faceless and largely anonymous, while the transgendered females are portrayed as heroes. This crass media strategy works well for liberals because, just as they refuse to acknowledge the crime and expense of illegal immigrants, they ignore the inconvenient consequences of girls having their athletic careers derailed by having to compete against those with an innately unfair male physical advantage.

If you’re wondering why parents and female athletes don’t more loudly protest competing against “women” wearing jockstraps and sporting five o’clock shadows on their faces, you have managed to miss the schism now tearing feminism apart: the war between women who believe gender is entirely malleable and their arch-enemies, the so-called TERF’s, also known as trans-exclusionary radical feminists.

If it is not already clear, TERF is a nasty slur used to denigrate biological women who believe biological men continue to be men, even if they are injecting hormones, undergoing surgical alteration, and power buying cosmetics at Sephora. TERF’s are considered hateful and transphobic because they don’t want biological boys or men in women’s spaces such as bathrooms or locker rooms—or competing against them or their daughters on the courts or playing fields. 

Perhaps the most famous TERF in the world today is Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, who has been subjected to both personal attack and censorship for many years—and whose books are today the focus of a worldwide boycott that has drawn in organizations such as OXFAM. 

Given the willingness of the anti-TERF wing of feminists to engage in unrelenting attacks, including expensive legal action and economic warfare to silence and bully their opponents such as Rowling who believe in the immutability of biological sex, it is understandable that many girls and women (of the biological variety) prefer to keep a low profile, particularly because until only recently the federal government was explicitly targeting those who questioned transgendered ideology and transgendered women in women’s sports.

No one knows, of course, whether the WNBA already has some transgender women surreptitiously playing in the league; until this past season, there was one player, Layshia Clarendon, who declared as non-binary, eventually opting for “top surgery” to achieve a more androgynous appearance. Although this was an entirely different circumstance, clearly her long career indicated that the WNBA is open to a degree of gender fluidity that might make it impossible to draw the line at transgender women openly competing—and perhaps dominating—throughout the league.

Now that the WNBA seems on the cusp of achieving a marketing breakthrough that will translate into national popularity that was previously undreamed of, it is a vexing question whether the League and its players would react negatively or positively to transgender females playing openly in this “women’s” sport, but we might soon find out which way the wind blows. Given the enormous and unprecedented power Caitlin Clark today exercises as the WNBA’s most prominent star, her reaction to this development, which certainly seems more likely than not to happen, will hold the key. 

So what would Caitlin Clark do? We might soon find out the answer, which will have repercussions far beyond the female professional basketball court and reverberate throughout America.