Nine years ago, I watched Enes Kanter ask America to take him in. It was May 2017, inside the National Basketball Players Association’s offices in midtown Manhattan. Kanter had just returned from a frightening detention at Bucharest airport, where Romanian border police told him Turkey had canceled his passport. He’d just turned 25, an NBA center with a green card and no country he could safely call home.
“I’m open for adoption,” he joked from the head of a table in a nondescript conference room, addressing a dozen reporters hastily summoned by his manager. Then he turned serious: “My next move is to just become an American citizen.”
The previous 48 hours had unfolded like a John le Carré thriller. Kanter said his manager woke him at 2.30am in Jakarta where he’d been hosting a basketball clinic because Indonesian security forces were looking for him. He hurried to Singapore, then Frankfurt, only to be stopped in Romania. He feared being sent to Turkey, where he had grown up and whose national team he had represented. There, he said, no one might hear from him again. Department of Homeland Security officials and lawyers for the Oklahoma City Thunder and the players’ union helped get him back to the United States.
Sitting in that room that Monday morning, I saw someone who had already paid a steep cost for the right to speak truth to power. Kanter called Recep Tayyip Erdoğan the “Hitler of our century”. He recounted daily death threats, a family placed in jeopardy by his opposition to Erdoğan and support for the president’s exiled rival, Fethullah Gülen, and parents he had stopped calling because he feared the government was tapping their phones. He said his father, Mehmet, a university professor, had been spat on at a supermarket. “I try to be the voice of those innocent people,” he told us.
The reprisals only widened. Turkey issued warrants for Kanter and later sought an Interpol Red Notice and his extradition. He skipped NBA trips abroad, including a Knicks game in London, because he feared detention or assassination. His father was dismissed, detained and charged with membership in a terrorist organization before his eventual acquittal in 2020.
In 2021, Kanter finally became an American citizen and legally added Freedom to his name. You didn’t have to squint hard to make out the symbolism. The dissident Turkey tried to render voiceless and stateless had found both an adopted home and a protected platform.
On Sunday night, I found myself thinking about the young man from that news conference – and wondering what became of him. Back then, he used attention to protect vulnerable people. Now he uses vulnerable people to attract attention.
Kanter was sitting courtside at the Chicago Sky’s game against the Indiana Fever in a shirt reading: “WOMAN noun. adult human female.” He had joined a rally outside the arena in support of Sophie Cunningham, the Fever guard who opposes transgender participation in women’s sports. In recent weeks, Kanter had also declared himself eligible for the 2027 WNBA draft, claiming to identify as a woman and posting workout videos about beginning his “transition”. (League sources have since said he is not eligible to play and dismissed his declaration as a publicity stunt the WNBA would not “give oxygen” to.)
The crudity of the attempted reductio ad absurdum was matched only by the breathlessness of the response across the Maga right, where Kanter’s stunt was greeted as an intellectual masterstroke: BRILLIANT, GOT ‘EM, CHECKMATE. Fox News has not merely covered Kanter’s bit uncritically; it has plainly participated in the mockery. Take the premise of transgender inclusion, distort it into the spectacle of a former NBA player treating womanhood as a debating prop, and wait for the audience to laugh. Yet Kanter exposed no contradiction. The punchline was simply the existence of transgender people.
No player assigned male at birth has ever competed in the WNBA. Whatever legitimate questions exist about eligibility rules, competitive balance and the place of biology in elite sport can be discussed without reducing them to a spectacle designed to humiliate those at the center of the debate. Kanter’s stunt depends on the idea that gender identity is inherently fraudulent and that trans women are simply opportunistic men waiting to invade women’s spaces. It has done nothing to clarify policy. It has merely turned a vulnerable minority into content – including many trans fans who have long regarded the 30-year-old league as one of the few places in professional sport where they belong. At a moment when ESPN’s WNBA coverage is averaging 1.4 million viewers, up 16% from the same point last season, Kanter’s stunt has hijacked a feelgood story about the league’s growth and made a phantom threat the focus instead.
The invasion rhetoric carries a bitter irony. The WNBA is not being overrun by trans women but by straight men who cannot let women have a flourishing league of their own without mocking it, manufacturing controversy and making themselves the story. Some of loudest voices posing as defenders of female athletes openly ridicule and try to humiliate them for laughs, in some cases through sexualized stunts. There is something almost pitiable about men squandering their energy and influence on belittling women whose discipline, sacrifice and extraordinary achievement have carried them to the highest level of their profession. Misogyny has simply put on the costume of concern.
In Kanter’s case, this was not simply a lone provocateur wandering into an arena. According to Talking Points Memo, the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute (AFPI) promoted Kanter’s arrival, circulated footage of his ejection and began selling a $45 “Let Freedom Play” sweatshirt featuring him in a mock-up of the WNBA logo. An AFPI executive was seated a few rows behind him, although the organization did not answer questions about whether it bought his courtside seat. Kanter, who attended the 2024 State of the Union as House speaker Mike Johnson’s guest and has said he plans to run for Congress in 2028, has political ambitions of his own.
Whether or not there is a formal arrangement, the transaction is visible enough: Kanter lends the campaign the credibility of an 11-year NBA veteran and supplies a spectacle in which transgender people are the bait, while an organization embedded in Trump’s political network converts those assets into attention, merchandise and political capital. If it keeps voters staring at a nonexistent threat to the WNBA instead of the corruption engulfing the administration in the run-up to the November midterms, the stunt has done its real work.
Late in the third quarter of Sunday’s contest, Natasha Cloud, one of the most uncompromising athlete-activists of her generation, finally took the rage bait. The Sky guard approached Kanter, yelling and pointing in his direction. Kanter stood, spread his arms and stepped on to the court before security intervened. As he was escorted away, he stopped near the basket to argue his case, then stretched out his shirt and tried to draw a response from the crowd. He had arrived ready to provoke and left performing martyrdom.
Kanter did not suddenly discover the uses of spectacle on Sunday. In 2020, after marching with Black Lives Matter protesters in Boston, he told the Guardian that athletes should use their platforms “to spread good, and to spread the truth”. He had long understood publicity as a political tool, and with good reason: he believed international pressure helped secure his father’s acquittal. The difference is what the performance now serves.
None of this diminishes the courage Kanter showed in opposing Erdoğan. The offer of US citizenship is not a contract for ideological obedience. Human rights are not a prize withdrawn when their beneficiary later behaves immorally, nor does surviving persecution bind anyone to a prescribed worldview.
But suffering does not automatically make a person generous, either. And Kanter, more than most, should understand the mechanics of dehumanization: how a powerful movement marks a minority as dangerous, treats its identity as illegitimate and converts real human beings into totems of social decay. The scale of Erdoğan’s repression and an American culture-war stunt are not equivalent. The moral reflex behind them – identifying people with less power and making public sport of their vulnerability – should have been instantly recognizable to him. The least cynical reading, perhaps charitable to a fault, is that Kanter can recognize this kind of othering only when he is its target.
US citizenship gave Kanter what he asked for in that Manhattan conference room: safety, a home and the freedom to speak without Erdoğan deciding the consequences. That freedom includes the right to make a cruel spectacle of himself, but it does not exempt the spectacle from judgment.
“I try to be the voice of those innocent people,” Kanter said in 2017. I believed him then. On Sunday, he used that voice to make other innocent people feel smaller. What a waste.
