Does defining a woman as an "Adult Human Female" signify a threat to a person's life or safety?
Apparently, when you are in the WNBA, it is equivalent to pointing a gun at somebody.
I'm not kidding. That is what the owner of the Chicago Sky said when asked why Enes Kanter Freedom was expelled from the game between the Sky and the Indiana Fever. (See Ed's post on this here.)
They just compared wearing a shirt that said and defined "woman" to shooting someone with a gun.
— Riley Gaines (@Riley_Gaines_) August 27, 2026
Peak insanity. Do these people actually think this?!?! https://t.co/jLQwU0Ez0a
And if you follow the logic of Critical Theory, or its subset "Queer Theory," this actually makes sense, as I have explained several times before. If you hold that reality exists solely as a construct of the mind and that every conflict of visions is life or death, then a person denying that your version of reality is correct is equivalent to trying to "erase" or kill you.
Yes, I know this sounds insane, but only because you believe there is an objective reality we all refer to when we communicate. But if communication is simply a power struggle between irreconcilable visions, one's victory means the elimination of the other. And Critical Theory holds that everything is a power struggle over what reality is.
This is why you will often hear people deeply entrenched in the Critical Theory (or Queer Theory) mindset accuse people of trying to "erase" the existence of others, or even trying to commit "genocide" when they use the wrong pronoun.
To you and me, saying something like that makes one certifiably crazy; to a critical theorist, it is, in their mind, a statement of fact.
Of course, the corollary is that they are trying to erase YOU when they assert their version of reality. To the extent that you don't buy into their vision of what is, you must be erased yourself. Optimally, this is done by bullying you into compliance — in this case, tossing Freedom out of the stadium and banning him from attending games — but as we have seen in more than one case, it entails actually eliminating a person from the face of the Earth.
See Charlie Kirk.
Critical Theory is by its nature a totalitarian ideology, and necessarily so. Reality is "socially constructed," which is another way of saying it is built through people's shared agreement. Critical Theorists have a set vision of what that reality must look like, such as "This person is a woman," and there is no room for discussion. There is no "meeting of the minds," and most certainly no question about what constitutes a "fact."
A fact is what they believe it to be, and there can be no discussion, because questioning that fact is, in their mind, an attempt to erase their reality and hence them.
This is why confrontations with people who inhabit the world of Critical Theory so readily transition to violence; mere disagreement with them is, in their mind, a form of violence already. They see your assertion that they are wrong as an assault, and hence assaulting you back is a form of self-defense.
Yes, I know this sounds insane, and by that I am not using the term hyperbolically. While most people who analyze the world "critically" use the theory as a rhetorical tool to bully people and, when pushed, have some connection to the "real" world, some people are so deeply drawn into the theory that they are totally disconnected from the "real world."
Does Michael Alter truly believe that Freedom literally presented a threat to his basketball players or the fans? I certainly hope he is not that insane, but the intellectual framework he is relying on to make this assertion would be clear to anybody who has, unfortunately, spent a lot of time around academics in the Social Sciences or Humanities, where Critical Theory dominates discourse.
There is no compromise with these people, because the very notion of compromise requires a concept of meeting somewhere in between the two sides. When a person says that expressing an opinion is like waving a gun, we have entered a realm where reason has no sway.
When somebody sees disagreement as a life-or-death struggle, there's no middle ground. The best you can hope for is that they are not truly psychotic.
Most of them aren't. They are poseurs trying to bully you into compliance, or emotionally and intellectually incontinent. Those people too are totalitarians, but at least they are unlikely to shoot you if you call them by the correct pronoun.
But there are people who really have gone through the looking glass, and they can be truly dangerous, and the most dangerous thing about the intrusion of Critical Theory into our educational system is that young people are not fully grounded in reality when they begin their formal education. Their connection to reality is already weak, and they have not developed common sense to ground them.
It doesn't help to have people like Alter feed into that by comparing wearing a shirt to waving a gun.
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