For Djaniele Taylor, attending WNBA video games was the right approach to rediscover a way of group popping out of the lengthy slog of pandemic-era lockdowns.

The 38-year-old Evanston, Illinois, resident has recurrently attended Chicago Sky video games for the final three seasons, after she watched the workforce win its first championship in 2021. As a queer Black fan, she felt the video games had been a supportive and protected sporting atmosphere.

“I used to be hooked and I liked the ambiance — it was very queer-friendly, very family-oriented, very numerous,” she stated.

As the recognition of the WNBA skyrocketed this 12 months, Taylor watched the value of her season tickets greater than double since 2022. With the expansion, she famous a “darker vibe shift,” too: What all the time felt like a optimistic setting began to take a extra hostile flip at occasions.

As girls’s sports activities set new data for attendance and viewership, Taylor and different longtime followers watched with optimism — and unease. It’s a cycle feminine athletes and followers of ladies’s sports activities have come to acknowledge: With the elevated and sought-after visibility additionally comes added scrutiny — in addition to harassment and on-line abuse towards some gamers.

This 12 months, recent off the NCAA highlight, former faculty basketball stars Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese made their WNBA debut for the Indiana Fever and the Chicago Sky, catapulting their private manufacturers in addition to the recognition of the league amongst viewers.

Followers are tuning in for the love of the game, as they all the time have, stated Amira Rose Davis, assistant professor within the Division of African and African Diaspora Research on the College of Texas-Austin. However they’re additionally drawn by the dynamics between gamers like Clark and Reese, who confronted one another within the 2023 NCAA championship between the College of Iowa and Louisiana State College.

Whereas each deny there’s any unhealthy blood between them, stress has been drummed up by followers and elevated media consideration. Beneath it are racial undertones that originated whereas the 2 performed in faculty — with predominantly white Iowa pitted towards predominantly Black LSU, and Clark and Reese “rising as these sort of archetypes that folks can run with,” Davis stated.

“That actually raises the engagement and simply the uncooked numbers of viewership. After which it additionally solidifies these narratives,” she stated.

It is also led to harassment and abuse — a lot of it racially motivated and directed at gamers of shade throughout the league and the broader sports activities panorama.

“Angel and Caitlin have given us an unimaginable platform to speak about how we deal with Black and white athletes in another way within the media,” stated E.R. Fightmaster, co-host of Jockular, a podcast on the intersection of ladies’s sports activities and queer id.

Through the playoff matchup in September between the Connecticut Solar and Indiana Fever, the Solar’s DiJonai Carrington posted an e mail she acquired with a racial slur and graphic dying and sexual assault threats.

Her teammate, Alyssa Thomas, shared her personal expertise.

“In my 11-year profession, I’ve by no means skilled racial feedback (like) from the Indiana Fever fan base,” Thomas stated, after the Solar eradicated the Fever from the playoffs.

For her half, Clark has disavowed the poisonous discourse, although some say she hasn’t achieved sufficient to attempt to rein within the racism by a few of her Indiana Fever followers.

“Individuals shouldn’t be utilizing my title to push these agendas. It’s disappointing. It’s not acceptable,” Clark stated again in June. ”Treating each single lady on this league with the identical quantity of respect, I feel, it’s only a primary human factor that everyone ought to do.”

On the finish of the 2024 season after dealing with some criticism for initially failing to sentence the harassment, WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert stated, “There’s no place in sports activities for this,” and vowed to assault it “multidimensionally.”

The league ought to have achieved a greater job getting ready for the harassment, stated Frankie de la Cretaz, a contract author whose work explores sports activities, tradition and queer id. “They need to have seen it coming primarily based on the discourse between followers round Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese in faculty.”

The NCAA launched a examine in October displaying on-line abuse towards student-athletes peaked throughout March Insanity, with girls’s basketball gamers receiving 3 times extra threats than males’s gamers. For the primary time in March Insanity historical past, the ladies’s championship recreation drew extra viewers this 12 months than the lads’s.

“It’s very thrilling, after all, to see the elevated visibility of that elevated reputation, however this can be very regarding and disappointing to see what has come together with that,” stated Lynn Holzman, vp for NCAA girls’s basketball.

The same examine discovered racist and sexist posts aimed toward feminine athletes made up almost half of all monitored abusive posts through the 2024 Olympic Video games in Paris.

On the summer time video games, Algerian boxer Imane Khelif confronted hateful feedback and false accusations about her gender main as much as her gold medal win.

The false narratives, perpetuated by web trolls and public figures like President-elect Donald Trump and “Harry Potter” creator J. Okay. Rowling, highlighted how feminine athletes of shade have confronted disproportionate scrutiny and discrimination in relation to intercourse testing and false accusations that they’re male or transgender.

“Individuals need an opportunity to delegitimize profitable girls on a regular basis. And so in case you are a profitable boxer and so they can’t discover anything to select on, they’re going to say that you’re too manly to play,” Fightmaster stated.

Khelif urged an finish to bullying athletes. “It could possibly destroy folks, it may possibly kill folks’s ideas, spirit and thoughts,” she stated.

The difficulty of transgender girls competing in girls’s sports activities has been extremely polarized this 12 months. A former College of Kentucky swimmer was amongst a dozen athletes submitting a federal lawsuit towards the NCAA in March, accusing it of violating Title IX rights by permitting a transgender lady, Lia Thomas, to compete on the 2022 nationwide championships.

The lawsuit additionally cited unconfirmed stories {that a} transgender lady was enjoying on the San Jose State girls’s volleyball workforce. This fall, schools started dropping out of matches with San Jose State, which has not confirmed it has a trans lady on the workforce. The Related Press has withheld the participant’s title as a result of she has not publicly commented on her gender id.

However that hasn’t stopped politicians from shaping campaigns round holding transgender girls out of ladies’s sports activities or wading into the polarizing debate on equity.

About half of U.S. states have a ban on transgender athletes collaborating in class sports activities in keeping with their gender id. This 12 months, New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu signed a regulation banning transgender athletes from grades 5-12. Ohio banned trans athletes as younger as kindergarteners. West Virginia and Idaho wish to the U.S. Supreme Courtroom to help their bans.

At the same time as girls’s sports activities attain new heights in viewership and with it ticket gross sales and profitable offers, inequalities persist, together with disparities in pay, the standard of ladies’s sports activities services and on-line harassment of feminine athletes.

“It is disingenuous to me if we’re going to rejoice the rise of ladies’s sports activities however not handle the methods by which we’re treating girls athletes in another way,” stated Cheryl Cooky, professor of Ladies’s, Gender and Sexuality Research at Purdue College.

“My hope is that the rise of ladies’s sports activities can occur in absence of the vitriolic rhetoric that we have seen.”

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AP Sports activities writers Alanis Thames and Doug Feinberg contributed.