The WNBA’s identity crisis is bigger than basketball

With the “Women’s” NBA twisting itself into knots rather than plainly defining woman, gender ideology is back in the news.

The first problem is linguistic. Using “gender” when one means sex invites confusion. Jay Richards has explained gender ideology as the view that the sex binary does not fully describe human identity and that a person may possess an internal “gender identity” incongruent with sex.

‘The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.’

That framework helps explain a related question: Why can stating ordinary biological distinctions provoke such extraordinary hostility — even death threats — when the dispute concerns women’s sports and other sex-separated spaces?

One answer is that the argument is not only about biology. It also draws on an older revolutionary tradition that