“Lady Ballers,” a movie written, directed and headlined by Daily Wire CEO Jeremy Boreing, and featuring an appearance by former Daily Wire editor Ben Shapiro, is the latest awful propaganda the conservative media has fashioned into a weapon against trans people. The absurdity of the movie about cis men dressing up as women to play basketball is revealed already in its trailer, where Boreing’s character asks, “So a guy can become a girl with no physical changes at all?”
At the heart of “Lady Ballers,” like all the transphobic messages from the far right, is a sweeping lie.
“So I can be a woman on the court and a man in the bedroom, I can’t believe it!” says another character. Not surprisingly, the film is soaking up praise from right-wing critics while being widely panned by the rest of society. I refuse to watch such trash of a film, but the trailer and reviews of it make its toxicity plain.
But at the heart of “Lady Ballers,” available at Daily Wire+, like all the transphobic messages from the far right, is a sweeping lie. This movie pretends that adult men can simply declare themselves women, without taking any steps to medically transition, and then go out and conquer women’s sports.
The movie parrots the real-life lies about trans people who play sports, and even trans people who do not. A ProPublica investigation released last week explains how the Medical University of South Carolina was bullied by conservative lawmakers and media into suddenly cutting off treatment to older trans teens, in part because of a quickly-spreading myth that the medical center had been prescribing hormones to 4-four year-olds (a myth that spread further when Elon Musk posted about it on X).
The propaganda campaign against MUSC and the pathetic male power fantasy that is “Lady Ballers” are deeply intertwined.
The movie follows a group of five men played by the banal media personalities at The Daily Wire (apparently, real actors willing to take the roles couldn’t be found), who declare that they’re women and then go on to dominate a women’s basketball league. It’s a male power fantasy in that it depicts out-of-shape, unathletic men constantly dunking on women.
When Daniel Considine is shown in the trailer dunking a basketball, the camera is directly over the basket, an angle a director would choose to hide, say, a two-inch vertical jump.
The movie’s premise is rather simple. By virtue of simply being born with balls, men can dominate any woman on the court, when it’s more likely the case that any cis woman who’s put in time down at the recreation center would dribble circles around these men.
The movie takes two separate ideas — how individuals define their gender and how we structure trans participation in organized sports — and dishonestly conflates them.
The movie’s scenario wouldn’t be permitted by any sport governing bodies above the high school age. Though many organizations, such as World Aquatics and World Athletics, have caved to political pressure recently in banning trans women from women’s sports, those that remain trans-inclusive have strict medical requirements for trans women hoping to compete against other women.
But the conflation and the lie are central to selling political laypeople on these bans on trans women in women’s sports. Conservatives need you to believe it’s possible for a situation like the one depicted in “Lady Ballers” to be possible. That way they can make sweeping generalizations, like “men are generally superior athletes to women,” to justify misgendering trans women in sports as men.
In the same way that the right pushes a lie about trans athletes, it also pushes a lie about the providers of gender-affirming care for trans minors.
Lying lets them ignore what a gender transition does to a trans woman’s body. Even experts opposed to trans women participating in women’s sports agree that athletic performance is severely degraded once trans women start estrogen treatment. Their concern is whether athletic performance is degraded enough to erase all alleged biological advantages.
Even that’s a more nuanced argument than the nonsense argument made in “Lady Ballers.” In the same way that the right pushes a lie about trans athletes, it also pushes a lie about the providers of gender-affirming care for trans minors. Conservatives love to pretend that thousands of kids are getting whisked off to gender clinics to get immediate, even prepubescent, castrations. That’s another lie, of course. There are small numbers of transmasculine teens who are able to get top surgery — breast removal or reduction — in the U.S. But otherwise, gender-affirming care for minors does not include surgery. Instead, it’s a careful, slow, carefully monitored process involving first puberty blockers to temporarily prevent some of the permanent effects of natal puberty while trans adolescents have a chance to wait and make a more mature and permanent decision about their bodies. But no one is truly motivated by this very nuanced argument. Instead, the right has to lie. Conservatives need you to believe that doctors are constantly circling, always looking for half a chance to chop off a kid’s genitals. This is what motivates protests and death threats against doctors. And just as they are in the argument about trans participation in sports, the extremists are getting results. Conservatives need you to believe that doctors are constantly circling, always looking for half a chance to chop off a kid’s genitals. According to the ProPublica report, the Medical University of South Carolina stopped treating older trans teens even though South Carolina hadn’t even banned gender transition for minors. It had, instead, banned the use of state funds for use in youth gender transitions. Hospital leaders at MUSC initially said no state funds were to be used for gender transition care, but then later bowed to the public misinformation campaign run by conservative activists and stopped providing the care it had been providing to older teens. Conservatives often claim to be “defenders of reality” in the transgender debate. But if that were truly the case, then why do they have to constantly lie about trans issues? It’s they who are manipulating what people perceive as reality in order to drive hate against a minority they want erased.
Katelyn Burns is a freelance journalist based in New England. 
