The Daily Wire Unveils Men Dressed as Women, the Movie
“Lady Ballers” was filmed this summer, back when transgender people were still the all-consuming obsession of the right.
The far-right Daily Wire website yesterday unveiled a trailer for a movie starring some of the site’s conservative personalities as a basketball team of men who pretend to be women to dominate women’s sports. The site is hosting a screening in Nashville will be made available to paid members of their website starting December 1.
screenshot from the Daily Wire
The primary gag of the movie is clear from the promotional image of the “Lady Ballers” team: These conservative commentators are wearing wigs and dressing in pink sports shorts and athletic jerseys! It’s men dressed as women, the movie, with the Daily Wire presenting this as a brave comedic premise that Hollywood has avoided, despite it being one of the oldest and most thoroughly explored veins of comedy around.
However, the transmisogynist trope of a hairy bearded man in a wig and a pink costume may be the least offensive thing the trailer contains. In its 3 minute runtime the trailer depicts cis-women athletes being slammed around and physically hurt 5 times. A clip in the first few seconds depicts a woman wrestler being picked up and choke-slammed to the ground, and a later montage features slow motion shots of women being hit in the face with basketballs, shoved out of the way, and knocked over.
The trailer doesn’t end with sexism and transmisogyny though, there’s racism here as well. It includes a joke where a Black man has his pants pulled down to set up a one-liner about large penises, and features an adult dressed in a stereotypical Native headdress making an ahistorical Native American war-whoop sound, as performed by children on playgrounds in the 1980s.
The racist jokes in the trailer are as gratuitous as they are offensive, but it’s the joke about how no one watches women’s basketball that truly exposes the heart of this effort: The Daily Wire isn’t seeking to protect women or women’s sports but to mock women as being small, uncoordinated, weak, vulnerable, and easily dominated by men. This is similar in tone to the way former President Donald Trump talks about the issue of trans women in sports, lingering over descriptions of women athlete’s purported weakness and seems to savor how easily they can be beaten by men. It’s a strange choice for someone who cares about women’s athletic opportunities, but in the context of extreme sexism and disdain for women’s sports as a whole it makes perfect sense.
As with other conservative jokes about trans women in sports, trans women and the movement for trans acceptance are one target, but cis women are in the sights of these conservative personalities just as much. In real life, no trans woman has ever dominated a single sport (despite being eligible to compete in them for decades). In real life, women get sports injuries like men do, and protecting them from such injuries would mean the elimination of women’s sports, not of trans women in sports.
When trans women compete against cis women, they don’t dominate the field. Whether they have any statistical advantage at all is hotly contested, but if an advantage is retained after hormone treatments it’s so small as to be all but lost in the noise of competing scientific reports.
What conservatives find so hilarious isn’t trans women tie-ing for fifth place with Riley Gaines, but watching women being hurt by much larger men wearing pink costumes and wigs. The vulnerability of the women and the violence against them lies at the heart of the gag, and conservative men love it not just because it lets them laugh at trans people, but because it reinforces the fantasy of superiority and dominance over women that underpins their entire worldview.
