Coach Nakase Defends Men's Right To Play in Women's Sports

Golden State Valkyries head coach Natalie Nakase recently declared that "sports is all about" “belonging,” “inclusivity,” and allowing everyone to be their “authentic self.” That sounds pleasant enough until you realize it is the precise opposite of what sports has always taught young people—and what it must continue to teach if it is to retain any meaning.

Sports, at its core, is a meritocracy. It rewards hard work, discipline, effort, talent, and teamwork. The scoreboard does not care about your feelings, your identity, or how inclusive the locker room feels. It records who runs faster, jumps higher, throws harder, and executes better under pressure. Those lessons—earned through sweat, sacrifice, and honest competition—are precisely why sports has long been one of the healthiest forces in American culture. They build character. They teach resilience. They separate effort from entitlement. Not only do we believe these things, we believe them so much that through great effort and cost, the women’s movement in America has secured these opportunities for young girls so they can also learn these same hard-won lessons on a level playing field of their own.

Nakase’s framing inverts that order. By elevating “belonging” and “authenticity” above performance, she treats the athletic arena as a social workshop rather than a competitive proving ground. That may play well in certain activist circles, but it is corrosive to the actual enterprise of sport. When the primary goal becomes making everyone feel included regardless of ability, the standards that make excellence possible begin to erode. Teamwork itself becomes secondary to emotional validation. Discipline yields to self-expression. The result is not a stronger culture of sports; it is a weaker one.

Nowhere is this contradiction clearer than in the ongoing push to allow biological males to compete in women’s sports. Nakase’s rhetoric of universal belonging collapses the moment a male-bodied athlete steps onto a women’s court or field. In virtually every documented case, the male athlete does not merely participate—he dominates. He starts. He stars. Female athletes who trained for years find themselves displaced, outmuscled, and told that their exclusion is actually a triumph of inclusion. The very women who were supposed to “belong” are informed that their category no longer belongs to them.

This is not abstract theory. It is measurable reality rooted in biology. Males, on average, possess greater muscle mass, bone density, lung capacity, and strength even after hormone suppression. Pretending otherwise does not change the physics of competition. It simply transfers opportunity from women to men who identify as women. The athletes who lose roster spots, scholarships, podium finishes, and the simple dignity of fair play are always female. That is the opposite of inclusion.

To insist that this arrangement somehow expands belonging requires a level of rhetorical gymnastics and gaslighting that is insulting. No serious person believes that a male athlete competing against women is merely “being authentic.” The authenticity claim is selective: it elevates one group’s self-conception while erasing the sex-based category that made women’s sports possible in the first place. Title IX was not written so that biological males could claim the benefits designed for females. It was written because sex is real and differences matter.

Nakase cannot possibly be unaware of these facts. Coaches at the professional level live by film study, performance data, and the relentless sorting of talent. They know the difference between male and female physiology. When a coach of her stature echoes the language of belonging-over-merit, it is not a sincere misunderstanding of sport. It is the adoption of an ideological script that prioritizes political fashion over competitive integrity. The cost is paid by female athletes who are told their losses are progress and by young people who are taught that effort and excellence are secondary to identity claims.

Sports has always been one of the clearest remaining arenas where results speak louder than rhetoric. The stopwatch does not care about your pronouns. The scoreboard does not grade on a curve for authenticity. When institutions abandon that clarity in the name of inclusivity, they do not expand opportunity—they shrink it for the very group women’s sports was created to serve. Conservatives who still value the formative power of athletics should say so without apology. Meritocracy is not bigotry. Fair competition is not exclusion. And women’s sports belong to women.