The place of women in the sports world has come a long way since whale-bone corsets would puncture the lungs of teenaged tennis players, but we are nowhere near where we need to be. We saw this last week when a sexist, homophobic frenzy emerged following the WNBA draft. 

With the first pick, the Dallas Stars selected UConn’s all-American guard Azzi Fudd, reuniting her with old UConn teammate, last year’s rookie of the year Paige Bueckers. The Stars have created what could be an all-world backcourt, and yet the media is less interested in the future of the team than the news that Bueckers and Fudd may be an item. ESPN has described their relationship as overshadowing the Stars’s choice of Fudd and wonder how it could impact the Stars’s future prospects. (Fudd and Bueckers confirmed that they were dating last year, but have not spoken on the record about it since.)

We live in a society, rooted in sexism and homophobia, that has an insatiable appetite for gossip and voyeurism, so of course people are interested in their personal lives. Previously in the WNBA, player couplings, while hardly new, were rarely discussed. But the Fudd-Bueckers relationship is dragging this reality, willingly or not, into the light.

At her introductory press conference, a reporter pressed Fudd about the relationship by asking whether Bueckers and she had sought out advice from other WNBA players who had been in relationships with people on their same team. Before being given a chance to answer, a Wings’s public-relations staffer interrupted, saying, “Understand why you have to ask that question. We’re going to respectfully decline from commenting on our players’ personal lives.”

Perhaps Fudd and Bueckers asked for this kind of intervention from the Stars, and maybe their desire is to keep their private lives private, but it would have been good to see Fudd say that and not have to be saved by someone from the PR team. They should be able to speak for themselves, and then the media should respect their privacy and move on.

As for the threatened incels who never gave a damn about women’s hoops until learning of Bueckers and Fudd, they should stick to what they know—like practicing pickup lines in the safety of their basement, while scrolling 4chan and trying to find the Straights of Hormuz on a map.

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As Maya Goldberg-Safir, who chronicles women’s hoops for her publication Rough Notes, told me, “I’m assuming that for decades now, professional women’s basketball players have already been playing with their girlfriends AND their exes. Whether or not Paige and Azzi want to focus on the status of their relationship publicly is entirely up to them, and whatever their status is, trust that a WNBA locker room can handle it.”

The Bueckers-Fudd online obsession is also a reminder of something outside the lines of the WNBA: Women’s organized sports in the United States has never been allowed to just be about sports. It is always—sometimes inspiringly, sometimes, exhaustingly—“a microcosm of society,” as Billie Jean King has said often. Would that athletic prowess, excitement, and derring-do could just come to us a la carte. Instead, and we see this time and again over the last 150 years, it’s only when sexism and homophobia are challenged off the field that you see inroads toward autonomy and respect on the field of play. 

King also often speaks about her era, reminding us that some progress has been made. “In the ’70s, we had to make it acceptable for people to accept girls and women as athletes,” she said. “We had to make it OK for them to be active. Those were much scarier times for females in sports.” 

This reality is not something that  King could have imagined when she was on the front lines fighting for Title IX legislation in 1972. (She started playing tennis competitively as a working-class kid precisely because she said that she did not see a future in anything else except for golf, which was just “too slow.”)

Golf, for many young girls, is either too slow, or inaccessible—it’s  still a country club sport. But any conversation about the progress of  team sports for girls and women should address how conditions were  better for trans women, as well as intersex and non-binary people, a decade ago. The new policies of exclusion and persecution are not a product of “following the science,” as International Olympic Committee Chief Kristi Coventry says, but entirely because of a larger right-wing backlash. Our trans teammates are being left behind. (It must be noted here that unlike, say, fellow tennis legend Martina Navratilova, Billie Jean King has stood in solidarity with trans athletes.) 

Today we can marvel at Bueckers and Fudd as individual players and also rejoice in their reunion as teammates. But we also should defend their ability to have the relationships they choose to have, with it only being the public’s business if they choose to make it the public’s business. We also need to build—and rebuild—movements that fuse together the fights against racism, sexism, homophobia, and, yes, transphobia. That’s how freedom will be won: on and off the court.