These days, brands are clamoring to work with WNBA players. Increasingly, players are hiring stylists to help them look their best, and athletes such as Angel Reese, Cameron Brink, Skylar Diggins-Smith, and DiJonai Carrington are full-fledged fashion icons. But so too are players who rock more masculine or androgynous looks, such as Arike Ogunbowale, Courtney Williams, and Diamond DeShields, players whose looks don’t get nearly the attention or praise they deserve.

“Sometimes when we look at female athletes we assume fashionable means ‘feminine’ and a lot of the more masculine-presenting WNBA players really do have style about them,” said Amadi Brooks of Amadi B Styling, who works with Sydney Colson and A’ja Wilson of the Las Vegas Aces. “That’s the beautiful thing about the W — it’s such a wide range.”

Styling masculine-of-center women is an art in and of itself, and picking out fashionable looks that fall outside of traditionally feminine silhouettes takes thought and intention. Players such as Connecticut Sun star Alyssa Thomas are upping their fashion game this year by using stylists to help them get there, while others have been quietly doing so for years.

“It’s not so niche anymore to have a stylist and it doesn’t have to be a secret,” Brooks said.

“Before this year, we were just here for business, you know?” Thomas told Harper’s Bazaar. “We would come do our job … But now that we’re putting on the clothes and taking the time to stop for a picture, people are so fascinated by it, and, I mean, I’m super into it.”

The WNBA has the most gender-diverse fashion sense of almost any other professional sports league in the world, and it’s part of what makes the W special. “The WNBA fan subculture respects and celebrates masculine fashion choices while not stripping away womanhood from these players,” Lauren Hindman, Ajhanai Keaton, and Nefertiti Walker wrote in Sports Business Journal. But all too often, the players whose style gets highlighted by media coverage are the ones whose clothing tends to fit conventionally feminine standards and expression.

The WNBA athletes have fought hard to be their authentic selves on and off the court. As the WNBA goes mainstream, it’s even more important to ensure that the league’s visible queerness and gender diversity are not erased. Helping players find a style that feels true to who they are is important, not just for their own comfort but also for their on-court performance.

“I want to make sure I’m staying true to the athletes,” Brooks said of how she approaches dressing her clients, who include NBA and WNBA players. “It’s even more important when you work with an athlete, because their confidence going into a big moment like a game can have an impact on them, so you don’t want them to feel out of their body or not like themselves.”

Marisa Ripepi of Marisa Styled has been dressing the Connecticut Sun star Alyssa Thomas (along with her teammate and fiancée, DeWanna Bonner) since the beginning of this season. Ripepi stressed how important comfort is for someone like Thomas, and that is where selecting items for her begins.

“When we first started working together she told me she really looks up to Devin Booker’s style,” Ripepi said. “Alyssa’s style is comfortable and stylish but laid-back. We are always trying to step it up a notch.”

For Ripepi, that has meant slowly pushing Thomas to try new things. They style by the month, and Ripepi said Thomas’ outfits began to evolve throughout the season, like the denim ensemble she sported for the Sun’s game against the Los Angeles Sparks on June 18.

“When she first came to me and said she wants to look a certain way, I’m going to give her exactly that so she knows I understand her vision,” Ripepi said. “But once we are working together for a while and we build trust, that’s when I start to throw in more things. The goal is to elevate the look but for her style.”

Some players, such as the Washington Mystics guard Brittney “Slim” Sykes, have no problem pushing the envelope when it comes to what they wear but want to have some professional guidance about which direction to go. “She likes to expand her horizons and try new things,” Sykes’ stylist, Juwan Williams of Styled by Coz, said. “I love it when somebody likes to be open to new things.”

Williams, who has been working with Sykes for a few seasons, said that pushing her toward streetwear helped her find her voice. Her confidence has grown as she’s learned to dress her body and see the positive reception to her outfits, including being featured on GQ Sports last season. “Now that she is a bit more confident, she has been consulting fits with me,” Williams said. “She picks out her own outfits, and I will approve them.”

Another key to styling women in menswear is always to be conscious of fit — and to have a good tailor on speed dial. “Although we [may be] dressing Syd in menswear, we have to be particular about how the clothes fit on her waist,” Brooks said. “What might fit through the thigh for a man may not for a woman, so we might have to go up a size and alter their waist, for example.”

Brooks said that working with Colson is fun because her style is a mix of masculine and feminine. She cited a Sheila Rashid pantsuit that Colson wore for the Aces game May 25 against the Indiana Fever as an example of that duality. Colson had been previously wearing more androgynous looks on game day and decided she wanted to switch it up just to be unpredictable. So they decided to go topless under Colson’s cropped suit jacket, giving it a feminine edge.

Who Colson is wearing is just as important as what she is wearing. “For Syd, it’s important to rep both sides of masculine and feminine but also to shine a spotlight on underrepresented brands, Black-owned brands,” Brooks said. “She is intentional about that and would prefer to highlight those brands over typical big fashion brands.”

But for many players, having a stylist goes beyond just wanting to look good. Plenty of athletes have their own inherent fashion sense and can do an incredible job of dressing themselves, but it takes mental energy and time to prepare outfits. A pro athlete’s schedule is already exhausting and jam-packed, and having a stylist can allow players to delegate their clothing to someone else.

“A lot of players want to put their best foot forward and maybe that means using a stylist to take that off their plate but they still feel good about how they look,” Brooks said. “People don’t consider the time relief that having a stylist may have on players, for some of my clients it’s one less thing for them to think about on game day.”

The talk reignited over the weekend when Chicago Sky rookie forward Angel Reese was assessed a flagrant foul 1 against Clark, a guard for the Indiana Fever, while trying to block her shot. Once again, the chatter got ugly, with many relying on deeply ingrained stereotypes around race, gender, and sexuality. Earlier this month, conservative sports pundit Clay Travis claimed the Fever star was a victim of discrimination against “white heterosexual women in a Black lesbian league” after Clark received a flagrant foul 1 from Sky guard Chennedy Carter.

With that statement, Travis said the quiet part out loud. Pitting Clark, a white, heterosexual woman who fits into conventionally approved, Eurocentric standards of womanhood, against the rest of the league, which is predominantly Black and perceived as largely queer or gender non-conforming, reinforces long-standing tropes of the queer villain.

Ahead of the most recent matchup between the Fever and the Sky, reporters asked Clark about “the chatter” on social media and how some have used her name to attack other players in the league. Clark initially (and repeatedly) redirected the conversation back to basketball without immediately condemning any of the harassment other players were receiving. The Connecticut Sun guard DiJonai Carrington spoke about Clark’s comments on X: “How one can not be bothered by their name being used to justify racism, bigotry, misogyny, xenophobia, homophobia & the intersectionalities of them all is nuts,” she wrote. “We all see the s—. We all have a platform … Silence is a luxury.” In response, The Athletic staff writer James Boyd asked Clark directly about her name being weaponized and how she feels about it. “It’s disappointing,” Clark said. “The women in our league deserve the same amount of respect, so people should not be using my name to push those agendas.”

In many ways, however, the damage has already been done. The real “Caitlin Clark effect” seems to be a bandwagon of new WNBA fans and media members reinforcing some of the most toxic societal ideas about good and bad, right and wrong, hero and villain. They’re also reinforcing long-held tropes about what kinds of women are deserving of protection. But this is also par for the course regarding the WNBA — and women’s sports in general.

Clark is the kind of athlete women’s sports have historically fought to protect. In the WNBA, this goes back to the beginning of the league, where players given the “Great White Hope” treatment, such as former Seattle Storm guard Sue Bird and New York Liberty guard Sabrina Ionescu, were tasked with “saving” the fledgling league. If these white, cis, and (in Bird’s case, perceived) straight athletes were here to save the league, it begs the question of who they were saving it from. The answer, one can deduce, is all the other athletes in the W, many of whom were Black, masculine or gender non-conforming, and queer.

In the Victorian era, the argument against women’s sports was essentially paternalistic — women, and mainly upper-class white women, needed to be “protected” from damaging their bodies through athletic endeavors because men feared it would damage their reproductive potential. There was worry that sports would make women too masculine, a fear that was rooted in anti-gay beliefs.

When sports were slowly opened to women, events such as golf or tennis were seen as acceptable — sports that could be played while wearing long skirts and were perceived as more feminine. Eventually, swimming fit into that category as well. In track and field, women were once only allowed to run short distances because it was believed that they were too weak to handle longer races. In basketball, women played half-court 6-on-6 basketball until shockingly recently because full-court was considered too strenuous for women’s bodies. While the Office of Civil Rights began to consider banning 6-on-6 high school girls’ basketball as early as 1958, it would take 37 years for the sport to be completely erased from schools. In Iowa, where Clark is from, half-court basketball wasn’t abolished until 1993, and it was the second-to-last state to do so (Oklahoma was the last, phasing it out in 1995).

Even sex-testing and trans-exclusionary policies in sports were designed to ostensibly protect white cis women from the perceived dominance of athletes who don’t conform to traditional ideas of femininity, many of whom are Black and/or transgender. Much of the legislation to prevent trans women from playing women’s sports uses rhetoric about “protecting” or “saving” girls and women, painting transgender women as a threat. Portraying Clark as the victim in her interactions with fellow players is an extension of this idea that a certain kind of woman should be safe to play and excel in women’s sports. It not only relies on the concept of white female victimhood but also of predatory lesbians.

Coverage of the incident between Clark and Carter (and the most recent dustup with Clark and Reese) primarily took two tracks: The first claimed Carter was overly aggressive and targeted Clark. The editorial board of the Chicago Tribune went so far as to call the play “assault,” trafficking in dangerous rhetoric seeking to criminalize a Black woman for a play against a white woman in a pro basketball game. Similarly, after Reese’s foul on Clark, some, like former NFL quarterback Matt Leinart, claimed Reese should be suspended because her play is “not good for the game.”

The other argument being made is that Clark’s teammates should better protect her on the court as if Clark, an adult woman playing pro basketball, needs someone to protect her from the league’s players. Both these arguments place Clark in the role of victim and the rest of the league in the role of villain. And there are real repercussions — a fan confronted Sky players, including Carter and Reese, outside their hotel in Washington.

This narrative continued following the Fever’s game against the Connecticut Sun on June 10, with coverage focusing almost exclusively on Sun forward Alyssa Thomas and Carrington — two openly gay Black players — whose on-court behavior was framed as being overly aggressive or targeting Clark rather than hard-nosed defense and heated competition. Following the blowback to Carrington mocking Clark for flopping, she took to X, formerly known as Twitter, to defend herself: “Why yall so mad at me & bein mean!?” she wrote. “I jus be hoopin & havin fun.”

Clark is not the first straight, cis, white player tasked with bringing a “mainstream” audience to the WNBA. The league has always struggled to market itself and its players, fearing that appearing too Black or too gay would alienate “mainstream” audiences and drive the potential of straight, male fans away — something women’s leagues have wrongly assumed they need to succeed. In 2002, Mary G. McDonald described the WNBA’s idealized image as that of the “good white girl,” noting that “constant emphasis on the players’ moral attributes … helps to distance the league from projections of alleged deviance imagined to be embodied by ‘fatal women’ — that is, bodies marked as black and lesbian.”

In 2002, Bird was placed in the position of bringing in viewers as the pretty white girl (she did not come out publicly until 2017, largely because she felt pressured into maintaining the public image the league wanted from her, she said recently). A 2002 article in the Hartford Courant called Bird “articulate with fresh-faced, girl-next-door appeal.” Constance Schwartz, the then-vice president of strategic marketing with The Firm, said Bird was “a beautiful person, which definitely helps.” Sports Illustrated described her as “pretty, quick-witted and not too imposing at 5’9,” noting that “she fits in anywhere” (all of this is, of course, code for “white”).

Ionescu left college in 2020 as the first pick in the WNBA draft and with a lot of hype, including an ESPN cover. Research by Risa F. Isard and Dr. E. Nicole Melton found that Ionescu, a white woman who played in just three games before a season-ending injury, received twice as much coverage as A’ja Wilson, a Black woman who was the 2020 WNBA MVP. Ionescu has a shoe with Nike, has been on the cover of NBA 2K, and was called “basketball’s golden girl” ahead of her WNBA debut.

When Bird entered the league in 2002, she was called “a marketer’s dream,” and several columns were dedicated to the number of sponsorships she would receive, a glaring disparity in a predominantly Black league that hasn’t been overcome to this day. Even before her first season began, Clark had record-breaking endorsements, including an eight-figure deal with Nike.

“In [women’s basketball] you gottah be the best player, best looking, most marketable, most IG followers, just to sit at the endorsement table,” New York Liberty forward Jonquel Jones said on X in 2022. “Not to mention me being a black lesbian woman. Lord the seats disappearing from the table as I speak,” she added.

Isard and Melton’s research found that Black athletes’ gender presentation greatly factored into how much media attention they received. White athletes who presented in more masculine ways received more than five times the number of mentions as Black players who had masculine-of-center presentations (212 to 41, respectively).

“There is a privilege that [white players] have inherently, and the privilege of appearing feminine,” Los Angeles Sparks rookie forward Cameron Brink recently told UPROXX. “Some of my teammates are more masculine. Some of my teammates go by they/them pronouns. I want to bring more acceptance to that and not just have people support us because of the way that we look.”

Some of the rhetoric has been more explicit than others. Fans on social media have said that Clark is being bullied because she is straight. Earlier this year, Travis said other players were “uncomfortable” with Clark “being a straight white girl” because “in the WNBA … there’s a lot of lesbians, and there’s a lot of minorities,” estimating that the league is at least 70% gay, playing up the number in a way that has the effect of making the league seem like an angry mob of lesbians (in reality, approximately 25% of the league is openly queer).

Diana Taurasi, a 20-year veteran known for being a league heel, were attacked in the media for allegedly hating on Clark ahead of the WNBA season as if Taurasi hasn’t “hated on” everyone she’s played against for the last couple of decades. The difference, however, is that Taurasi has embraced the role of the villain for herself, and it wasn’t placed on her by outsiders, akin to what writer Mark Harris has called “a joyous reclamation of the idea of gay monstrosity.”

“I’m not a marketing major,” Taurasi recently told Rolling Stone. “I don’t f–king know how all this s— works. I’m here to ball out and try to kill whoever’s in front of me. You know what I mean?”

Ultimately, long-time fans of the WNBA are frustrated by much of the coverage of Clark because it harms most of the athletes who play in the league. The W isn’t the W without the players who make it the most competitive pro league in the world. Lifting one athlete at the expense of all the others goes against everything the WNBA represents and only serves to reinforce ugly ideas about the women and trans people who play alongside Clark.

As a queer and trans sports fan, this image is always a little jarring to me. As Pride Nights celebrate the visibility of the queer and trans community, we are being legislated out of existence and made to disappear from the public eye by our government. We are actively under attack, but you would never know that from the way sports leagues talk about Pride Month. They want cookies for allyship without acknowledging the reality of the community they are claiming as allies.

Pride began as a riot by queer and trans folks of color who were sick of being harassed and killed by the system. Yet, by refusing to acknowledge that the same forces are still at play, Pride Nights fall flat because they don’t actually do anything to advocate for the real change that queer and trans folks need to be truly safe.

Franchise owners regularly donate money to politicians who support anti-LGBTQ+ legislation while their teams draw rainbows on their pitching mounds. Florida passed a law banning the ability for queer and trans history to be taught in school (known as “Don’t Say Gay” laws), and now some states are pushing for it to be a felony to expose children to drag queens — a very slippery slope to banning them from being exposed to trans people, generally. Trans women of color are killed at an alarming rate, and at least 14 trans people were killed violently in 2022 alone, even with the killings of trans women being deemed “a crisis” by community advocates.

The attacks on the rights of transgender people very directly impact sports. At least 10 states have passed bills banning trans children from being able to play sports, and the new Ohio bill would have required children to undergo genital exams to prove their gender until the provision was removed from the bill earlier this month.

Also this month, two international governing bodies tightened their policies of participation for transgender athletes. The Union Cycliste Internationale, the governing body for cycling, has lowered its testosterone levels for trans women to the lowest level of any existing policy outside of an outright ban. FINA, the governing body for swimming, has announced a new policy banning any trans woman who has gone through any amount of testosterone-driven puberty from being able to compete in the women’s division at the elite level. The policy also requires all athletes to submit to chromosomal verification.

Happy Pride Month, indeed.

These sex testing requirements, from genital exams to chromosomal verification, have been deemed a human rights violation by the United Nations and Human Rights Watch. And all of these bans will disproportionately affect young girls of color who do not conform to white, Western standards of femininity. But none of that is ever mentioned during the month supposedly dedicated to allyship. Instead, we get pinkwashing.

It’s true that some individual athletes have spoken out against these attacks on the queer and trans community. Most of those voices have come from women’s sports, where athletes such as U.S. women’s national team member Megan Rapinoe and the WNBA’s Brianna Turner have been outspoken advocates for the inclusion of trans women and girls in girls’ sports. Rapinoe told Time magazine this week that she is “100% supportive of trans inclusion.”

“We need to really kind of take a step back and get a grip on what we’re really talking about here, because people’s lives are at risk,” she told the magazine. “Kids’ lives are at risk with the rates of suicide, the rates of depression and negative mental health and drug abuse. We’re putting everything through God forbid a trans person be successful in sports. Get a grip on reality and take a step back.”

It’s not a coincidence that the women’s leagues, which have high numbers of openly queer players and some leagues having openly trans athletes playing, are the most outspoken about the legislative reality facing the LGBTQ+ community.

In men’s sports, you have to look a lot harder. Washington Nationals pitcher Sean Doolittle has always been outspoken in support of the LGBTQ+ community, and Cleveland Browns fullback Johnny Stanton has also positioned himself as an LGBTQ+ ally. “Being a supporter of the LGBTQ community is really important to me because LGBTQ athletes, especially youth athletes, drop out of sports at an alarming rate and they don’t feel comfortable,” Stanton said recently. “I want to make sports a more welcoming, supportive atmosphere for all people.”

To find male athletes explicitly taking on things such as the trans sports bans, you have to look for players who are impacted by the issue personally. The NBA’s Reggie Bullock has made it his mission to raise awareness and acceptance for the trans community following the 2014 slaying of his sister, Mia. The other high-profile male athlete speaking out against these bans is a retired one — Dwyane Wade, whose child, Zaya, is transgender.

But these athletes are in the minority. And the fact that several Tampa Bay Rays players, including pitcher Jason Adam, refused to wear a rainbow patch on their sleeve during their franchise’s Pride game — afterward telling the Tampa Bay Times that they “don’t want to encourage” the LGBTQ+ “lifestyle,” while also saying they want queer and trans fans “to feel safe and welcome” at the ballpark — reveals the true state of Pride at the ballpark. This is the logical outcome of a league like MLB trying to force an inclusive message when it hasn’t done the work to make it a safe place for LGBTQ+ people.

Until players and leagues are willing to speak out about the very real marginalization still facing our community, the Pride celebrations are nothing but a rainbow Band-Aid placed over a gaping wound.

We are dying, and a rainbow uniform patch will not save us.