WNBA player Sophie Cunningham already had three strikes against her: she’s white, she’s straight, and she regularly came to the defense of her teammate Caitlin Clark, who is disfavored by the league for similar reasons.
Then Cunningham stated an obvious truth that everyone in the world believed until the day before yesterday: that men who identify as women are not, in fact, women.
Cunningham became public enemy No. 1 among sports media and in other progressive circles, leading to a thousand attacks on everything from her looks to her skills. One of the attacks is weirdly revealing of a certain, perhaps surprising, strain of left-wing ideology.
“Until she spoke out of the trans issue in sports, nobody cared who she was,” wrote left-wing sportswriter Jason Page. “She’s a role player. That is disposable.”
This is a bizarre thing for a sportswriter to claim. Some role players in basketball history include Dennis Rodman, John Havlicek, and A.C. Green. They were hardly disposable. Nobody claims Cunningham operates on that level or ever did, but Page was making an absolute claim: role players are disposable.
When and why did “role player” become a term of derision?
There’s a deep, dark ideological — even anthropological — foundation to this belief. Christopher Lasch diagnosed the problem: the culture of narcissism. Michael Sandel more recently wrote of the “unencumbered self.” These pathologies have led us to believe that it is a sin to be a role player.
Modern man has come to understand himself as fundamentally an atom — an individual whose identity is determined only by his own will and self-understanding. We reject the older idea that we find our identity in relation to others.
The older idea that we are the roles we play within various institutions clashes with this newer self-image. Cutting off friends and family is emancipatory. Marriage and parenthood are to be avoided, if you listen to the likes of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY). Describing someone as a “wife” and a “mother” is somehow diminishing the person.
This manifests itself in a way that might surprise the casual observer of American leftism: a hyper-meritocratic careerism.
TIMOTHY P. CARNEY: BASEBALL SHOULD BE PLAYED OUTDOORS
Recently on Bluesky, the liberal bubble’s own little social media platform, lefties swarmed over an X post of mine because I lamented that our culture was devaluing relationships too much. “‘Relational’ means ‘good old boy network,’” objected one feminist tech worker.
When individual autonomy is your god, then relationships are oppression. If we reject the relational, then we cannot accept the idea that we ought to play a role within an institution. Then nothing becomes more demeaning than being a role player.