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In July, the Guardian reported that the NWSL had quietly allowed its policy on the participation of transgender players, established in 2021, to expire. The scrapped policy used the testosterone levels of transgender players to determine their eligibility to play in the league. In the same article, the Guardian revealed that this lack of an official policy was being eyed by conservative lobbying groups seeking to exclude transgender women from the league entirely. What that story didn’t anticipate, however, was that a player from inside the league would take up the cause. In an Oct. 26 social media post that was republished the next day as an editorial by the New York Post, Angel City benchwarmer Elizabeth Eddy criticized the NWSL’s lack of gender eligibility policy. She suggested the league should adopt standards like requiring players to have ovaries, or to undergo genetic testing. She wrote that players who those policies would exclude should be forced to play in separate divisions and leagues. Eddy, who began her NWSL career in 2015, played a grand total of zero minutes in 2025 and 87 minutes total in the two years prior—the fact that the Post called her an “Angel City FC star” is a level of truth-bending that should cast serious doubt on the integrity of the editorial.

Welcome back to The Not-So-Great Defector Bake Off, where Kelsey and Chris attempt to complete the technical challenges from the newest season of The Great British Bake Off in their own home kitchens, with the same time parameters as the professional-grade bakers competing on the show.

I wasn't ready for how much it loved trans people.

A New York City mayoral election is, definitionally, not anyone outside of the city's business. That this year's campaign, which ended in Zohran Mamdani's victory on Tuesday night, became everybody's business, and a big stupid national story, speaks to the effectiveness of Mamdani's campaign and the power of his socialist message, but also to the wild bigotry that was arrayed against him. Pundits and politicians will spend the next few weeks attempting to sort out the lessons presented by Mamdani's victory, but here's one that has always been true: There are no consequences for engaging in gutter racism in this country, so long as it is aimed at a brown-skinned Muslim. One story about this election can be told through the increasing intensity of the racism and Islamophobia that was aimed at Mamdani by those who were emboldened by that lack of consequences. This story began with Mamdani being peppered with ludicrous questions about Hamas and the precise meaning of "intifada," and it ended with several United States lawmakers talking and posting like Klansmen.

Tom Brady's post-playing career transition to "Weird Rich Guy" appears nearly complete. He announced on Tuesday that he had his old dead dog cloned. Lua, a pit bull mix, died in 2023. Brady's new dog Junie, he revealed, is an exact genetic clone of Lua, whose DNA was preserved before her death. Like all normal pet owners, Brady announced his new dog via press release to People magazine:

SAN FRANCISCO — "I don't think this will be an only good story," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said after being asked a question about whether his company, valued around $1 trillion, might bring some bad into the world. In other words: yes. His defense was that people should think in millennia, not decades. "Maybe the socioeconomic contract has to change very dramatically," he said. "But that's all been happening for a long time. There was no such job as basketball coach 500 years ago, there was no such job as AI company CEO 50 years ago." The basketball coach Altman referred to was Steve Kerr. The two were on stage together Monday night at the Sydney Goldstein Theater in Hayes Valley for a conversation about "leadership, innovation, and San Francisco." After learning about the event earlier that day, I bought a ticket out of morbid curiosity. What myths is Altman interested in telling about himself and about his company, one actively making American life more expensive, degrading, and stupid? What possible connections could Kerr and Altman have? Most intriguingly, how would the most prominent member of the triumphalist AI set talk about a city he and his cohort have all but conquered?

Recently I have been watching a lot of tennis, and thus trying to learn about tennis. This, as it turns out, is very difficult, because tennis is not a sport that wants to teach you about itself. If you do not have knowledgeable colleagues whom you can pester with technical questions, the best way to learn about a new sport should be through a well-executed broadcast that enables a correlation between time spent watching and things learned. This broadcast would ideally have an enthusiastic primary commentator who seems to like the sport and can explain both narrative context and what is happening; an analyst who can explain why things are happening with more knowledge than the average viewer; and, for the calculator casuals, some statistics that help the viewer contextualize all of the above.

Ja Morant and the Grizzlies were up 14 points on the Lakers at halftime of Friday's NBA Cup game. After halftime, Morant effectively stopped trying, and the Grizzlies went on to lose, 117-112. Morant ended with eight points and seven assists on 3-of-14 shooting. After the game, a grumpy Morant spoke as if he'd been wronged by Grizzlies coaches, according to The Daily Memphian's Chris Herrington:

Thousands entered Boise State’s arena on Monday night for the first day of the college basketball season. They arrived, I must assume, with high hopes. The Broncos are generally pretty good. They’ve won at least 19 games a year since the 2019-20 season, and went 26-11 last year. Three starters are gone from last season’s team, but transfer point guard Dylan Andrews is a good bounce-back candidate after a disappointing junior year at UCLA; even last year, he was a solid passer. The Broncos were picked third in the Mountain West and slotted in the 50s in preseason computer ratings. These things change, but there was no reason to suspect that Monday’s contest against Division II Hawaii Pacific was anything but a classic early-schedule gimme game. Andrews had 15 points and nine assists in 33 minutes, all team highs. That is the full extent of the good news. Hawaii Pacific led for most of the game and held on at the end, 79-78; the 10,795 ticketed fans in attendance did not leave happy. It was an upset that the Idaho Statesman called “one of the worst losses in program history.” It “can only be described as the worst loss in program history,” 24/7 Sports intoned. “One of the largest upsets in College Basketball History,” a college hoops sicko tweeted, adding “this is not an understatement.” Yeah, obviously.

Time for your weekly edition of the Defector Funbag. Got something on your mind? Email the Funbag. You can also read Drew over at SFGATE, and buy Drew’s books while you’re at it. Today, we're talking about Led Zeppelin, baseball grief, breaking into journalism, moving into college, and more. Oh wow, it’s Election Day! Hooray for democracy, vote early and often, all of that shit. Election Day before sunset is always the slowest news day of the year, so let’s burn some clock off with your letters: