Adding yet another layer to its ultra-woke reputation, the NBA was thrilled to announce this week that it will be debuting its first “trans and non-binary” referee this season.
Does anyone really care about who or what a referee is?
Apparently, the NBA thinks we do, and this one wants to be a role model for “queer kids” aiming to referee pro basketball games.
So, not only is “they/them” pushing her agenda in the faces of sports fans, but she is also coming for your kids.
The news was first revealed Monday by GQ, which published a lengthy interview with Che Flores, the newly minted referee.
A day later, the league proudly shared an Associated Press report about Flores on its official website, NBA.com
Both GQ and the AP acquiesced to Flores’ “pronoun” demand, of course, confusingly calling her “they”/”them” throughout their articles.
“Che Flores’s suitcase sat empty on their bed at home in Los Angeles. This shouldn’t have been a surprise, exactly: Flores has lived the bulk of their professional life out of a bag and on the road,” the GQ story’s opening paragraph said.
Flores joined the NBA last season, but she was officially identified as female.
This year, though, will be different. The NBA will be using her “preferred pronouns” from now on.
“One piece I was missing for myself was that no one knew how I identified,” Flores told GQ. “Being misgendered as she/her always just felt like a little jab in the gut.”
“I can go through the world and even my job a lot more comfortably,” she said of the new way the league will identify her.
NBA referee Che Flores on becoming the first out trans and nonbinary ref in American pro sports
🔗: https://t.co/C3tsJEgoXX pic.twitter.com/BjhntLLdSS
— GQ Sports (@GQSports) October 23, 2023
Flores has years of officiating under her belt, so she isn’t new at the referee game, for sure.
She joined the NBA as a non-staff official during the 2021-22 season. She also officiated in the WNBA’s G League for 10 seasons.
In addition, Flores was an NCAA ref for 13 years, working the women’s national championship game in 2021 and the women’s Final Four in 2019.
“When I started refereeing, you had to look a certain way,” she told GQ. “This is the first time I’m comfortable expressing myself through my own fashion and not having to worry about it. I feel one hundred percent myself now.”
“I can go through the world and even my job a lot more comfortably,” Flores said.
She also said she hopes to be a role model for “queer kids.”
“I just think of having younger queer kids look at somebody who’s on a high-profile stage and not using it,” Flores said.
[firefly_poll]
“And I’m not using the league to an advantage in any way,” she said. “This is just to let young kids know that we can exist, we can be successful in all different ways. For me, that is most important — to just be a face that somebody can be like, Oh, okay, that person exists. I think I can do that.”
It seems fitting that it is the ultra-woke NBA that is the first to make this move. The league has been forcing its far-left politics on fans for years now. And it is forever aimed at kids. One of the main targets the league has always had in its social justice spending has been to target kids.
As a society, we continue to stray far afield from the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s maxim of valuing the content of our character to build a better society and instead are promoting separatism by pushing identify, race and niche agendas.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.