Three thousand years before anyone in Indianapolis or Chicago picked up a basketball for a WNBA game, there was a goddess named Ishtar. Inanna, to the Sumerians before her. And she had priests who did not fit neatly into male or female. This week on the show I connected that ancient story to the transgender debate blowing up in women's sports right now, and I want to walk through it here too, because I don't think most people realize how old this argument actually is.
Who Were the Assinnu, Kurgarru, and Gala?
In the worship of Inanna, later called Ishtar in Akkadian and Babylonian religion, there were classes of temple personnel who lived outside the ordinary categories of male and female. The gala sang in a dialect of Sumerian normally reserved for women and sometimes took feminine names. The kurgarru performed ecstatic processions in robes deliberately split, masculine on one side and feminine on the other. And the assinnu, according to multiple scholarly sources, underwent ritual castration as part of their consecration to the goddess.
I'm not dramatizing that for effect. Historians who study the ancient Near East point to a surviving text describing a man whose maleness, in their words, Ishtar turned female, for the awe of the people. This wasn't a handful of people operating outside the boundaries of their society. This was organized, state-sanctioned religion, and it lasted for well over a thousand years.
There's a poem written by a woman named Enheduanna, high priestess of the moon god in the city of Ur, and the earliest author in human history whose name we actually know. She wrote about Inanna's power to turn a man into a woman and a woman into a man. That's not a headline from this year. That's four thousand years old.
"This is not humanity's newest idea. It might be one of its oldest." — Marc Little, Episode 66
This Week in the WNBA
Now let's come back to the news. Indiana Fever guard Sophie Cunningham said publicly that she wants to protect young girls who shouldn't have to compete against biological men in sport. That set off a firestorm. Days later, WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert sent a memo to every team acknowledging the questions have been coming in for weeks, and saying the topic will keep getting significant attention. She stopped short of taking a position either way, and a task force of team presidents and general managers is now set to take it up.
Then, almost like clockwork, former NBA players Royce White and Enes Kanter Freedom announced they intend to declare for the 2027 WNBA Draft, arguing that under the league's own inclusion standards, they should be eligible. Call it a stunt if you want. It's forcing the league to answer a question it has mostly dodged. On the other side, Minnesota Lynx coach Cheryl Reeve has been outspoken in support of trans inclusion, going as far as writing an op-ed, according to Fox News' reporting, arguing that everyone wins when transgender athletes are welcomed onto the court.
Where I Stand
I'll say it plainly, because I don't think this is actually a close call.
"Biological men do not belong in women's sports. Period." — Marc Little, Episode 66
Title IX exists for exactly one reason: to guarantee women a fair, protected space to compete on their own biological terms. If the current legal and regulatory framework is unclear enough that a league can dodge the question in a memo, the law is doing its job badly, and it needs to be fixed until it isn't unclear anymore. This isn't a gray area to me. It's a matter of basic fairness to every young woman who trained her whole life for a level playing field.
What Genesis Actually Says
Strip away the jersey, strip away the league logo, strip away the legal debate, and what you actually have is a society trying to decide, once again, whether maleness and femaleness are fixed things handed to us, or fluid things we get to construct and reassign. We just met the people who had this argument four thousand years ago. They had priests for it.
"So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them." — Genesis 1:27 (ESV)
Notice what that verse does not say. It doesn't say male and female are social constructs the culture invented later. It says male and female were part of the original design, spoken into existence by God, and called good. Some Old Testament scholars connect this directly to a law in Deuteronomy that was almost certainly written into a world that already had assinnu and kurgarru walking around in split-gender ritual dress, serving a goddess who supposedly had power to blur the line between man and woman.
"A woman shall not wear a man's garment, nor shall a man put on a woman's cloak, for whoever does these things is an abomination to the Lord your God." — Deuteronomy 22:5 (ESV)
Israel's law wasn't inventing a new rule out of thin air. It was drawing a hard line against a religious practice their neighbors were already doing in the name of Ishtar.
The Pattern I Want You to See
Every generation, humanity keeps rediscovering the same old rebellion against the created order, and every generation calls it something new. Ishtar's priests called it devotion to the goddess. Our generation calls it progress, or inclusion, or self-expression. Different vocabulary. Same underlying claim: that God did not get to have the final word on what a man is and what a woman is, and we do.
I want to be clear about something, because I don't want to be misunderstood. This isn't about hating anyone. I don't believe God hates the assinnu of ancient Babylon, and I don't believe He hates a single person caught up in this conversation today, whatever side of it they're standing on. Every person in this debate is made in the image of God and loved by Him. What's in question is whether our institutions are going to keep pretending this is a brand-new frontier of human wisdom, when it's actually one of the oldest lies on record.
"The goddess changed. The claim didn't." — Marc Little, Episode 66
So here's what I'd leave you with. This is not really a sports story. It's a worship story. Every culture eventually has to answer the question of who defines male and female: the God who made them, or the institutions of the moment. Know what you believe, and know why you believe it, before the next headline forces you to answer under pressure.