Julie Tétart is averaging 21.2 points and 20.2 rebounds per game in France’s Ligue Féminine 2 — numbers that would turn heads in any league on earth. The 6-foot-3 post player for Monaco Basket Association even set a league record with 30 rebounds in a single game this season. She’s also openly transgender, and if she ever makes the jump to the WNBA, she would be the first trans woman to compete in the league. The catch: no team has called. And the league itself hasn’t decided what it would do if one did.
From Men’s Leagues to Monaco’s Record Books
Tétart came out publicly as a transgender woman in October 2021 and stepped away from competitive basketball for three years while she transitioned. Before that, she had played in France’s men’s lower divisions — including ESC Tergnier and Nationale 3 in Saint-Quentin. When she returned to the court, she joined Monaco Basket Association, becoming the first openly transgender athlete to play for any Monaco sports club.
The comeback has been impossible to ignore. In the 2025–26 Ligue Féminine 2 season, Tétart led the entire league in both scoring and rebounding, while helping Monaco reach its first-ever playoff appearance. Those 30 rebounds in a single game aren’t a footnote — they’re a league record. For context, the WNBA’s all-time single-game rebounding record is 23, set by Liz Cambage in 2018. Tétart’s number lives in a different atmosphere.
When asked about the WNBA, she has been honest: it’s been a childhood dream, and she ‘won’t say no’ if an offer came. But she’s also been clear that the political climate around transgender athletes in the United States gives her pause. Her immediate goals are the EuroLeague and a spot on the French national team — not a league where her right to play would become a daily news cycle before she ever touched the court.
What the WNBA Debate Actually Looks Like on the Ground
Here’s the reality: there are currently no transgender women playing in the WNBA. The controversy consuming the league isn’t about an active roster situation — it’s a policy debate being conducted through protest signs, press conferences and, in at least one case, a viral arena ejection.
Sophie Cunningham of the Indiana Fever sparked the most high-profile player-level controversy by publicly opposing transgender women in women’s sports. Former NBA players Enes Kanter Freedom and Royce White separately announced they identified as women and intended to enter the WNBA Draft — declarations the league and multiple media outlets immediately called bad-faith stunts. Freedom escalated further by attending WNBA games in shirts targeting trans athletes, provoking a confrontation with Chicago Sky guard Natasha Cloud that ended with Freedom being escorted out and banned from the arena.
On the other side, players like Cloud, Breanna Stewart, and Minnesota Lynx head coach Cheryl Reeve have pushed back hard, framing the debate as a human rights issue and calling WNBA arenas spaces that should remain inclusive and safe. Commissioner Cathy Engelbert has walked a careful line — acknowledging that eligibility will be addressed through collective bargaining while criticizing outside actors trying to weaponize the league as a political stage.
The WNBA’s Collective Bargaining Agreement currently states that ‘only players who are women are eligible to play.’ What it does not include: any formal guidelines on gender identity, medical transition history, or sex assigned at birth. That ambiguity is not accidental — it is an unresolved institutional question that Tétart’s potential arrival would force the league to answer out loud.
The League Has a Decision to Make Before She Does
Tétart has not applied to the WNBA. No team has scouted her. No offer exists. But her numbers are real, her profile is growing, and she has already said the door is open. What happens next depends less on her than on a league that is currently trying to hold together a coalition of players, sponsors, politicians and fans with a policy document that doesn’t actually answer the question everyone is asking.
The WNBA built its brand, in part, on being a league that leads on social issues when other sports leagues stay silent. Trans inclusion is the test of whether that reputation holds. The Kanter Freedom circus made it easy for the league to look reasonable by comparison — denouncing a stunt costs nothing. Julie Tétart averaging 20 rebounds a game is a different kind of pressure entirely.
- how the WNBA handled its biggest political controversies
