“The Nashville Balls”: Conservative Personality Sparks Uproar by Suggesting All-Trans WNBA Team

Clay Travis answered a WNBA coach’s call for transgender inclusion with a provocative proposal: an all-transgender franchise named “The Nashville Balls.” The radio host said the roster would be made up entirely of transgender players and challenged the WNBA to give him a team. He also said the proposed club would dominate its opponents while insisting the league would be discriminating if it refused.

The proposal followed comments from Golden State Valkyries head coach Natalie Nakase about transgender participation in women’s basketball. Nakase discussed the subject while explaining how she wants players and fans around the Valkyries to feel that they belong. She attempted to link her position to criticism she has received over her height and Japanese background.

Nakase said sports should be a place where people can be authentic and included. She recalled being in situations where others said that she didn’t belong, and said she did not want Golden State to create that same feeling for anyone else. The coach extended that position directly to trans players seeking to participate in women’s basketball.

Nakase is not the only WNBA coach to take the position on trans athletes in the WNBA. Indiana Fever coach Stephanie White, Portland Fire head coach Alex Sarama, and Minnesota Lynx head coach Cheryl Reeve have all joined the push to include trans players in the women’s game. This push has come amid controversy around players such as Sophie Cunningham pushing back on the idea of playing against biological men.

As Breitbart reported, Nakase said women and young girls deserve opportunities to play and included “transgender women” within that group. Her comments placed her among WNBA figures who have publicly supported allowing trans athletes into women’s sports. Travis seized on the statement and presented the league with a franchise built entirely around this would-be inclusive policy.

In an X post, Travis asked the WNBA where his franchise was and said the roster would be 100 percent transgender. He called the proposed Nashville club the “most inclusive women’s/men’s team in WNBA history.” He ended with a demand aimed at the league: “Stop discriminating against us.”

Travis presented himself as the proposed owner and named the franchise “The Nashville Balls,” a reference both to his Tennessee base and a tongue-in-cheek joke about male athletes competing in women’s sports. Rather than asking whether the WNBA would accept one transgender player, he demanded that the league accept an entire team. The proposal took the league’s language about belonging and inclusion and used it against them to propose a roster made up exclusively of trans players.

The joke also touches on the competitive consequences that often follow when biological males are allowed into women’s athletics. Travis didn’t portray his fictional Nashville team as just an underdog seeking the opportunity to participate. He described them as an unbeatable club that would overwhelm every conventional women’s roster placed in front of it.

Travis continued the proposal in a follow-up post. He said the Nashville Balls only wanted to belong and portrayed the league’s failure to approve the team as cruel and exclusionary. He also said he had enough money to finance the franchise and predicted that the team would sell out every game.

He claimed that the entirely transgender roster would never lose and suggested that opposing teams might even struggle to score at all. “Some games we may not even be scored against,” he wrote, before again accusing the WNBA of hostility toward transgender people for not approving his plan. The follow-up used the language of discrimination to challenge the league to follow its stated position to what Travis presented as its logical conclusion.