“Lady Ballers,” a movie written, directed and headlined by Daily Wire CEO Jeremy Boreing, and featuring an appearance by former Daily Wire editor Ben Shapiro, is the latest awful propaganda the conservative media has fashioned into a weapon against trans people. The absurdity of the movie about cis men dressing up as women to play basketball is revealed already in its trailer, where Boreing’s character asks, “So a guy can become a girl with no physical changes at all?”
At the heart of “Lady Ballers,” like all the transphobic messages from the far right, is a sweeping lie.
“So I can be a woman on the court and a man in the bedroom, I can’t believe it!” says another character. Not surprisingly, the film is soaking up praise from right-wing critics while being widely panned by the rest of society. I refuse to watch such trash of a film, but the trailer and reviews of it make its toxicity plain.
But at the heart of “Lady Ballers,” available at Daily Wire+, like all the transphobic messages from the far right, is a sweeping lie. This movie pretends that adult men can simply declare themselves women, without taking any steps to medically transition, and then go out and conquer women’s sports.
The movie parrots the real-life lies about trans people who play sports, and even trans people who do not. A ProPublica investigation released last week explains how the Medical University of South Carolina was bullied by conservative lawmakers and media into suddenly cutting off treatment to older trans teens, in part because of a quickly-spreading myth that the medical center had been prescribing hormones to 4-four year-olds (a myth that spread further when Elon Musk posted about it on X).
The propaganda campaign against MUSC and the pathetic male power fantasy that is “Lady Ballers” are deeply intertwined.
The movie follows a group of five men played by the banal media personalities at The Daily Wire (apparently, real actors willing to take the roles…
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