The binary outside the body

The discomfort toward women's bodies, choices, and pursuits that Dearica Hamby's lawsuit against the WNBA and Las Vegas Aces lays bare.

What is the value of women, I asked once.

It was a cruel hypothetical, to show how numbers are used for pro athletes (and by sports media, fans, contemporary society) as armament against women at the centre of instances of intimate partner violence, and against women, generally.

In light of Dearica Hamby filing a federal lawsuit against the WNBA and her former team, the Las Vegas Aces (and by extension, certainly in the fallout since, her former coach Becky Hammon), alleging discrimination and retaliation against her while she was pregnant, I’ve been turning over another question: What is the value of a woman? Just one.

Before I get into any of it, and the simplified binary arguments of who in this situation is right or wrong, good or bad, I have to flag that roughly the first four pages in the 18 page lawsuit are intent on Hamby’s own numbers. When she was drafted (2015), how high she was chosen in the Draft (6th overall), her back-to-back Sixth Woman of the Year awards (2019, 2020), being one of 22 players out of the league’s 144 to be selected for her first All-Star Game in 2021 (then again in 2022, 2024). Even her children (2) are included in the tallying of this section. These numbers are meant to add up. To establish Hamby as an accomplished professional, a winner, and lastly, a mother. The former make her credible, the latter sympathetic.

This is the kind of math we require of women.

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The Aces were allegedly upset that Hamby signed a two-year extension with the team in spring 2022, an extension that promised private school tuition for her daughter in the form of a “donation” and for Hamby to occupy team-provided housing. Hamby had a residence in Nevada, and the secondary housing was meant for Hamby’s family, who would assist with childcare for her daiughter when Hamby was on the road. A month after signing the extension, Hamby learned she was pregnant for a second time. She told Hammon and other Aces staff that summer, and announced it publicly at the Aces championship parade in September. As Hamby’s lawsuit states this was when the team, who she won a mutual first title with and played for since 2015, began to freeze her out.

Hamby was asked to vacate the team-provided housing, and answers to when her daughter’s tuition would be paid got murky. Hamby was traded to the Sparks on January 21, 2023 and gave birth to her son in March. To further blur the lines of what’s ethical, it’s worth noting that financial incentives folded into contract negotiations, like the Aces promising Hamby tuition for her daughter, are technically tampering. Though as a franchise the Aces haven’t always shied away from that sort of thing.

Legally, Hamby had no obligation to disclose her pregnancy to her employer, the Aces, or their closest representative to her, in Hammon. She did not fail to “hold up her end of the bargain” — one of the complaints Hammon made to Hamby over the phone in January 2024, less than a week before the Aces traded her.

That call reads as a particularly rough one, with Hammon calling Hamby a “question mark” for a team that “needed bodies” and accusing a seven month pregnant Hamby of not taking her workouts seriously. Hammon also pressed Hamby on whether her pregnancy had been planned (Hamby did disclose that it hadn’t been, but again, that information has no merit nor is it legal for an employer to ask) and told her that Aces staff believed she’d get pregnant again. “You’re trading me because I’m pregnant?” Hamby asked, twice. “What do you want me to do?” Hammon replied.

Hammon called the next day and told Hamby, “Your time with the Aces is up.” That it would be best for Hamby’s career if she moved on.

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At its most basic, Hamby’s lawsuit is an employment complaint. Because Hamby is a Black woman and professional athlete, in a league that underscores often how empowered and outspoken its athletes are able/encouraged to be, was formerly coached by Hammon — a woman long touted as a trailblazer for women’s professional equity and advancement in basketball — and wades into the world of reproductive autonomy and women’s bodily autonomy, this wasn’t ever going to be a basic lawsuit. It should be. It can’t be.

Beyond the troubling details and straight up illegal examples of the Aces violating workplace conduct in Hamby’s lawsuit, sits an illuminating if messier intersection of who laws are for, and when. Labour disputes, in an American context, are rarely clean. Steeped in 248 years of a frontiersman mentality, the American ethos that in work, higher pursuits, and life itself, the individual is the most crucial element is hard to shake. Even in a country with a long history of unions and organizing, the greater whole always reduces to the individual as self-propellant force and sole achiever. The sum greater than the whole.

Where this collides with Hamby is where it does for most women, more so for Black women, and not limited to reproductive or labour rights. The American ethos of the individual — and by extension, their rights — functions as the backdrop in only the most clear-cut cases. That is, for men, and for men aligned with all the historic markings of power. We know this to be true because we witness it again and again, that with more power come greater rights (or access to greater rights, as with all the tossed-out cases, for example, against Donald Trump). We also know it to be true because we borrow from this backdrop when assigning its features to cases, like Hamby’s, where they do not apply.

We hear very often, often in defence of men who’ve been accused of committing acts of violence and harm in sports and the public sphere, that people are innocent until proven otherwise (“guilty” has so many shades at the moment, I’m abstaining from using it). With Hamby, but also with women, or people in lesser positions of traditional power, there is already a tinge of decided guilt overlaying any legal course. Observations like, If she had only done her job she wouldn’t be in this position. Questions like, Why is she being so greedy/selfish? As a worker, or “employee” to keep with the current tack, Hamby is criticized as someone who did not have the company’s interest at heart. As an athlete, she’s a bad teammate. Both of these, of course, are bullshit, but we are accustomed and most comfortable aligning with power, in this case, brands.

As an aside: It’s easy to invert this mode of thought by substituting Hamby with a company (in this case, the Aces, but any company works) in the above example of observation or question. If the Aces had only done their job, etc.

Much of the personal criticism of Hamby, you won’t be surprised to read, is gross. People siding with the Aces and Hammon because Hamby, by “becoming” or “getting” pregnant (the removal of her autonomy already casually at work in the linguistic framing), failed to uphold some sacrosanct responsibility of an athlete. That responsibility, for men, mostly comes down to money. Salaries and being “worth” them. But many male athletes have children and given their financial compensation, start their families young. We don’t talk about the burden of pregnancy, or reproductive autonomy, because they are not the ones carrying to term, negotiating with their bodies and bosses and limited career windows as they do so and then work to make up for that precious time postpartum. In women we tend to treat the responsibility of an athlete as virginal, fragile, something to be protected. You need only go far back as Caitlin Clark getting fouled in a completely normal way earlier this season for proof of this same conceit, albeit in different circumstances.

The irony of discomfort with women’s bodies visibly working — in the context of functioning at their peak physical ability on a basketball court or procreating — followed by the criticism of how and when they get to work, would be funny if it wasn’t so alarming. Hamby, like all women in a country that has been lessening for a long time and recently decided to give up the ghost of freedoms for all, owns her body and the choices she makes about it up to a point. That point is usually the line between private and public, or the binary of right and wrong. For women, what’s right for their bodies won’t be the be-all, end-all of any particular discussion. For women athletes, as we’ve witnessed all too recently, their bodies often provide the jumping-off point for discussion that quickly, voraciously, vaults into extremes that has nothing to do with them. The binary, however archaic, exists outside their bodies.

The other binary is with Hammon. Whether she is now “good” or “bad” for what’s been revealed in Hamby’s lawsuit, specifically in the January 2023 phone calls between them.

It’s too clean of a read, too unrealistic and frankly naïve, to call Hammon the villain. A claim like that lives in the trope that Hammon, who worked for so long in the NBA to ascend, who was dubbed the would-be ceiling-breaker and went through what felt like the motions of team GMs signalling progressiveness only in the act of interviewing her for head coaching jobs they knew they’d never offer, and finally left for the WNBA, has always worked with other women in mind. Being paid the highest salary of any W head coach as a first-time head coach, coaching her team to win back-to-back titles, and happening to be a woman throughout all that, certainly helps the trope, but Hammon has always had herself in mind. It’s not lost on me that the frankness of that fact will read as off-putting to some, when the fact of its frankness should be the goal.

Hammon can have achieved something great — for herself, and by extension for women — and still be an asshole actively impeding another woman’s livlihood, in this instance. There’s a self-protection that comes with all jobs, especially jobs of high scrutiny, where the environment limits how many are available. Hammon has the pressure of that protection, in some ways, three-fold.

From her franchise — as much she is empowered by the Aces, and team owner Mark Williams and GM Natalie Williams will likely stand behind her in this latest allegation as they’ve done before, there are still stakes and optics. From her team — the mechanics of it. In the climate we’ve created for pro sports, Hammon can only be the best so long as she keeps coaching, and winning with, the best (Hamby, too, proved she was the best, but we’ve also created a climate where women who choose to conceive are sidelined as less determined, less desirous of achieving and winning). Finally, Hammon has the pressure of self-protection in her own ascent. She hasn’t made it as far as she has by putting anyone other than herself first, especially in rooms where it was clear no one else was going to. I’ve interviewed Hammon a few times, am a fan and admirer, but I also understand the changeability, and volatility, of lore — where it has to be maintained, where you fumble it, where you wish you could wash your hands of it — and what it does to people, certainly women, in high-profile positions of power.

The truth for Hamby, as it is for Hammon, can’t be binary. The outcomes likely will be — a settlement for Hamby, a fine for the Aces — but that’s what employment law is for. The conversations I wish Hamby’s lawsuit encouraged is why we expect, or desire, the outcomes (professional, personal) for and personas of women to be so precise and within that exatitude, so limiting. I know why we want them to be exacting — there’s a lot of latent hatred for women out there simmering, eager for punishment first and questions never — but confusion doesn’t need to beget volatility. Forfeiting any deeper, challenging discussions that aim to get women out of the binaries we have for a long time worked to reduce them to is boring. Not to mention undermining, detrimental, and dangerous.

Autonomy (from the Greek, auto, “self, one’s own”) isn’t math, nor is it as clean as numbers. Maybe that’s why we have such a hard time interpreting it, assigning it. There’s nothing to add up when it demands only one thing.