As one of the most talented WNBA players is held in Russia awaiting trial, the near-total public silence surrounding her detention has drawn confusion and scrutiny.
Griner, a Black queer woman, isn’t the first American to be detained in Russia. But her predicament stands out for how it’s directed fresh attention not only to the fact that US society undervalues professional women’s basketball but also to the ways that LGBTQ people in the US and Russia are differently marginalized.
It’s a sentiment that many might feel privately, but they probably don’t know what to do with it publicly. The basketball legend Lisa Leslie recently explained on the “I Am Athlete” podcast that she’s been instructed not to make a “big fuss” over Griner’s arrest.
Even with the geopolitical complexities, it’s important not to look away from the predicament, which intersects with issues of both gender and sexual identity in meaningful ways. As Aileen Gallagher, a journalism professor at Syracuse University, put it to CNN, from sports to politics to affinity and identity, “this story has everything we’re talking about in the US at this moment.”
Here’s a look at these issues in turn:
The salary gap
Like a number of WNBA athletes, Griner doesn’t play for just one team. She’s a center for the Phoenix Mercury, but since 2014, she’s spent the WNBA’s off-season playing for a Russian team, UMMC Ekaterinburg. The reason: Overseas, she makes more money — much more.
Still, these figures are dwarfed by the more than $1 million that players of Griner’s talent can earn in Russia, and by the multi-millions that even rookie NBA players can make.
This disparity exemplifies a wider problem: Since the WNBA’s creation in 1996 — half a century after the NBA was founded — US society has treated professional women’s basketball as an inferior sport.
“In this country, we’ve sort of decided that sports are for men,” said Kim Crowder, a consultant whose work focuses on diversity and equality. “You see that in the creation of the WNBA — look at how long it came after the NBA was created — and in pay disparities. Both of these things tell us a lot about who ‘deserves’ to be seen and treated in the world of professional basketball as a professional, as best in class.”
Crowder went on, saying that the issue isn’t just the lack of money; it’s also the lack of respect.
“If you’ve been to a WNBA game and observed how these women hustle, then you go, ‘These are athletes. These are people who’ve trained their whole lives for this sport. Why aren’t they being recognized in the same way? Why aren’t they being championed in the same way?'” Crowder said.
Jemele Hill, a contributing writer at The Atlantic who’s joining CNN+ in May to co-host a weekly show with Cari Champion, echoed some of these sentiments in a recent story.
She then added, trenchantly, “It is damning that teams in oppressive countries such as Russia and China — another opportune marketplace for women’s basketball players — place a higher value on players such as Griner than the teams in her own country do.”
Damning, very definitely. But also, given history, unsurprising.
Anti-LGBTQ discrimination in the US
Republican lawmakers in Arizona aren’t the only ones consciously deciding to pick fights with transgender children. So far this year, GOP governors in Oklahoma, Iowa and South Dakota have signed into law bills establishing similar sports bans. And in 2021, Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Mississippi, Montana, Tennessee, Texas and West Virginia enacted comparable bans.
For that story, the UC Berkeley philosopher and gender theorist Judith Butler laid out the effects of the above political machinations.
“We’re talking about kids who already feel themselves to be very different, who are trying to come to terms with their embodiment and their lived sense of who they are and what their gender might be,” Butler said. “This is an enormously vulnerable time for kids. They need support. They need room to be able to explore their feelings and to be able to speak freely about their gender and their sense of their own reality. They need to be able to communicate all that to others without fear of reproach, stigmatization, exclusion, discrimination or violence.”
The ongoing attacks on LGBTQ Americans only pull into focus the value of Griner’s advocacy.
Homophobia in Russia
Griner’s country of detention matters, too. Russia has long been hostile to LGBTQ people like the beloved WNBA player, and things seem to be on the brink of getting worse.
And maybe most infamously, in 2013, Russia passed a “gay propaganda” law that prohibits distributing “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations” to minors. Russia’s discriminatory law weaponizes the language of care and protection against an already-marginalized group.
“The gay propaganda law came out of (Russian President Vladimir) Putin’s really hard conservative turn after 2011 and 2012, when the democratic opposition mobilized street demonstrations against him and he started to pick off various parts of the democratic opposition, starting with feminists and then moving onto LGBTQ communities,” the Oxford University Russian history professor Dan Healey told CNN.
“Putin said something like, ‘We have internal enemies — people who aren’t supporting us in this war — and these people have to be purged,'” said Healey. “That was the language Putin used. It was right back to the vocabulary of Stalinists. A lot of LGBTQ people noticed that. If they hadn’t already been packing their bags, they started to do so then.”
It’s too early to tell how Griner’s sexual identity might affect her journey through the Russian legal system. Even so, the country’s past and present treatment of LGBTQ people makes her troubles feel all the more acute.
Griner’s detention comes at a time when crises everywhere are escalating. But the WNBA star’s story is just as deserving of focus.
