The WNBA said Monday that league security was wrong to force a mother and her teenage daughter to cover their shirts during Sunday’s Indiana Fever-Atlanta Dream game in Atlanta.
The fans, Kasey Thomason and her 17-year-old daughter Annie, were wearing XX-XY Athletics shirts when league security confronted them in overtime and told them to cover up or leave. The pair ultimately put on Dream shirts and watched Indiana’s 95-91 victory finish.
What the WNBA said
On Monday, the league acknowledged the incident and said the response should not have happened. A WNBA spokesperson said the league was aware of the interactions at the game and that fans were asked by league security to cover their shirts.
“This should not have happened,” the spokesperson said.
The public acknowledgment matters because the incident involved paying fans at a regular season game, not a team-controlled event or a player dispute. Once the interaction became public, the league was forced to explain why its security staff stepped in at all.
The Atlanta Dream tried to distance the team
The Atlanta Dream also issued a statement Monday making clear that Dream personnel were not involved in the decision. The team said it believes in “creating a safe and inclusive environment for everyone,” but added that WNBA security “took actions that fell short of that standard.”
That detail is important because the game was played in Atlanta, but the Dream said the call did not come from its own staff. In other words, the team was trying to separate itself from the enforcement decision while still addressing the broader issue.
Why the shirts drew attention
The shirts were tied to support for women’s sports and came weeks after Sophie Cunningham voiced support for keeping biological males out of women’s sports, which sparked a national debate. Thomason later pushed back on the reaction with a pointed question: “Biology and science is offensive?”
What happened next was simple enough from a game standpoint: the fans covered up, stayed in the building and watched the rest of the Dream-Fever game. But the league’s acknowledgment shows the situation had already become more than a courtside dispute. It became a public example of how sensitive fan interactions can be when politics, women’s sports and arena security overlap.
