Three-time Olympic swimming gold medalist Nancy Hogshead is calling on the WNBA to explicitly restrict player eligibility to biological females.
Hogshead recently launched a Change.org petition asking the league to clarify the meaning of “woman” in its eligibility rules. The petition has collected more than 11,000 signatures since its Aug. 14 launch.
“We’re calling for the WNBA to clarify that its eligibility rules are for women only,” Hogshead told Fox News Digital. “If you wanna participate, you have to be a certain age, and you have to be a female.”
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Hogshead said she hopes the petition ultimately reaches 100,000 signatures.
“It’s an 80/20 issue across the country, so we can do it,” she said. “We have well over a million people who’ve engaged with our materials that we put out about the petition. We just gotta get them to sign on.”
The WNBA’s 2026 collective bargaining agreement states that “only players who are women are eligible to play in the WNBA.” However, the agreement does not further define “woman” or include specific language addressing gender identity or sex assigned at birth.
The debate intensified after former NBA players Enes Kanter Freedom and Royce White announced plans to enter the 2027 WNBA Draft while claiming to identify as women. League sources hav since said that neither of them is eligible and characterized their announcements as “publicity stunts.”
Hogshead said the declarations exposed what she considers a contradiction in policies based on gender self-identification.
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“I love it that they came forward because it just shows the hypocrisy of the WNBA, and it shows the hypocrisy of gender ideology,” Hogshead said. “For them to come forward and, you know, threaten to play in the WNBA and show up for the draft, it just shows just how ridiculous that gender ideology is.”
The WNBA previously said there were “no immediate eligibility matters” affecting the league and denounced “bad-faith efforts” to use the debate to “demean or marginalize others.” Commissioner Cathy Engelbert also said league officials would continue discussing the subject with the players’ union and other stakeholders.
Hogshead’s petition comes amid rallies outside WNBA games supporting Indiana Fever guard Sophie Cunningham, who publicly opposed transgender participation in girls’ and women’s sports earlier this summer.
“I really appreciate her for the stand that she has taken on behalf of women,” Hogshead said of Cunningham. “If anything, the more people see of Sophie Cunningham, the more they like her.”
Hogshead won three gold medals and one silver medal at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. She later became a civil rights attorney and founded Champion Women, an organization that advocates for women and girls in athletics.
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