The darker side of the rise of women's sports: With more visibility comes more online harassment

For Djaniele Taylor, attending WNBA games was the perfect way to rediscover a sense of community coming out of the long slog of pandemic-era lockdowns.

The 38-year-old Evanston, Illinois, resident has regularly attended Chicago Sky games for the last three seasons, after she watched the team win its first championship in 2021. As a queer Black fan, she felt the games were a supportive and safe sporting environment.

"I was hooked and I loved the atmosphere — it was very queer-friendly, very family-oriented, very diverse," she said.

As the popularity of the WNBA skyrocketed this year, Taylor watched the price of her season tickets more than double since 2022. With the growth, she noted a "darker vibe shift," too: What always felt like a positive setting started to take a more hostile turn at times.

As women's sports set new records for attendance and viewership, Taylor and other longtime fans watched with optimism — and unease. It's a cycle female athletes and fans of women's sports have come to recognize: With the increased and sought-after visibility also comes added scrutiny — as well as harassment and online abuse toward some players.

This year, fresh off the NCAA spotlight, former college basketball stars Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese made their WNBA debut for the Indiana Fever and the Chicago Sky, catapulting their personal brands as well as the popularity of the league among viewers.

Fans are tuning in for the love of the sport, as they always have, said Amira Rose Davis, assistant professor in the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas-Austin. But they're also drawn by the dynamics between players like Clark and Reese, who faced each other in the 2023 NCAA championship between the University of Iowa and Louisiana State University.

While both deny there's any bad blood between them, tension has been drummed up by fans and increased media attention. Beneath it are racial undertones that originated while the two played in college — with predominantly white Iowa pitted against predominantly Black LSU, and Clark and Reese "emerging as these kind of archetypes that people can run with," Davis said.

"That really raises the engagement and just the raw numbers of viewership. And then it also solidifies those narratives," she said.

It's also led to harassment and abuse — much of it racially motivated and directed at players of colour across the league and the wider sports landscape.

"Angel and Caitlin have given us an incredible platform to talk about how we treat Black and white athletes differently in the media," said E.R. Fightmaster, co-host of Jockular, a podcast on the intersection of women's sports and queer identity.

During the playoff matchup in September between the Connecticut Sun and Indiana Fever, the Sun's DiJonai Carrington posted an email she received with a racial slur and graphic death and sexual assault threats.

Her teammate, Alyssa Thomas, shared her own experience.

"In my 11-year career, I've never experienced racial comments [like] from the Indiana Fever fan base," Thomas said, after the Sun eliminated the Fever from the playoffs.

For her part, Clark has disavowed the toxic discourse, though some say she hasn't done enough to try to rein in the racism by some of her Indiana Fever fans.

"People should not be using my name to push those agendas. It's disappointing. It's not acceptable," Clark said back in June. "Treating every single woman in this league with the same amount of respect, I think, it's just a basic human thing that everybody should do."

At the end of the 2024 season after facing some criticism for initially failing to condemn the harassment, WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert said, "There's no place in sports for this," and vowed to attack it "multidimensionally."

The league should have done a better job preparing for the harassment, said Frankie de la Cretaz, a freelance writer whose work explores sports, culture and queer identity. "They should have seen it coming based on the discourse between fans around Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese in college."

'Extremely concerning and disappointing'

The NCAA released a study in October showing online abuse toward student-athletes peaked during March Madness, with women's basketball players receiving three times more threats than men's players. For the first time in March Madness history, the women's championship game drew more viewers this year than the men's.

"It's very exciting, of course, to see the increased visibility of that increased popularity, but it is extremely concerning and disappointing to see what has come along with that," said Lynn Holzman, vice president for NCAA women's basketball.

A similar study found racist and sexist posts aimed at female athletes made up nearly half of all monitored abusive posts during the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris.

At the summer games, Algerian boxer Imane Khelif faced hateful comments and false accusations about her gender leading up to her gold medal win.

The false narratives, perpetuated by internet trolls and public figures like President-elect Donald Trump and "Harry Potter" author J. K. Rowling, highlighted how female athletes of color have faced disproportionate scrutiny and discrimination when it comes to sex testing and false accusations that they are male or transgender.

"People want a chance to delegitimize successful women all the time. And so if you are a successful boxer and they can't find anything else to pick on, they are going to say that you are too manly to play," Fightmaster said.

Khelif urged an end to bullying athletes. "It can destroy people, it can kill people's thoughts, spirit and mind," she said.

The issue of transgender women competing in women's sports has been highly polarized this year. A former University of Kentucky swimmer was among a dozen athletes filing a federal lawsuit against the NCAA in March, accusing it of violating Title IX rights by allowing a transgender woman, Lia Thomas, to compete at the 2022 national championships.

The lawsuit also cited unconfirmed reports that a transgender woman was playing on the San Jose State women's volleyball team. This fall, colleges began dropping out of matches with San Jose State, which has not confirmed it has a trans woman on the team. The Associated Press has withheld the player's name because she has not publicly commented on her gender identity.

But that hasn't stopped politicians from shaping campaigns around keeping transgender women out of women's sports or wading into the polarizing debate on fairness.

About half of U.S. states have a ban on transgender athletes participating in school sports according to their gender identity. This year, New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu signed a law banning transgender athletes from grades 5-12. Ohio banned trans athletes as young as kindergarteners. West Virginia and Idaho are looking to the U.S. Supreme Court to support their bans.

Even as women's sports reach new heights in viewership and with it ticket sales and lucrative deals, inequalities persist, including disparities in pay, the quality of women's sports facilities and online harassment of female athletes.

"It's disingenuous to me if we are going to celebrate the rise of women's sports but not address the ways in which we're treating women athletes differently," said Cheryl Cooky, professor of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Purdue University.

"My hope is that the rise of women's sports can happen in absence of the vitriolic rhetoric that we've seen."