Some transphobic dickheads were again wearing XX-XY shirts at Sunday's game between the Indiana Fever and Atlanta Dream. Everyone knows what the XX-XY shirt—a truly ugly piece of merchandise made by a brand that raises money for organizations that seek to strip trans people of their rights—means when worn in public. It tells everyone that the person wearing it sees trans people not as human beings, but as targets whose very existence must be protested. It is one of the oldest and most basic forms of bigotry, the equivalent of a big sign reading, "trans people not welcome."

A league security staffer who was working the Dream game on Sunday asked the unfashionable bigots to cover their shirts, for the same reason they might ask a fan sporting the Confederate Stars and Bars to vacate the damn premises: The shirts are meant to target a specific group and make them feel unwelcome in the arena. The WNBA, however, could not abide one of its employees making this reasonable and necessary demand, and on Monday released a statement saying that the security staffer should not have asked for the shirts to be covered:

The WNBA is aware of interactions at last night's game in Atlanta in which fans were asked by league security to cover their shirts. This should not have happened.

Not satisfied with the league going out of its way to coddle attention-seeking assholes, the Dream then released a statement of their own decrying the fact that a league staffer tried to ensure the comfort and dignity of any trans fans that might have been in the building on Sunday:

The Atlanta believes in creating a safe and inclusive environment for everyone. Unfortunately, at last night's game, WNBA security took actions that fell short of that standard. At no point was Dream personnel involved in the decisions made by WNBA security.

"A safe and inclusive environment" need not extend to people actively trying to create a less safe, less inclusive environment for others.

You can almost always judge the moral bankruptcy of an institution's actions by how awkward it becomes for the mainstream press to launder them as palatable. We've seen the English language tortured in order to produce phrases like "officer-involved shooting," and we see the same process play out here in an ESPN headline above an Associated Press story about the WNBA's and Dream's statements: "WNBA: Security wrong to ask fans to cover shirts' transgender messaging." Oh, you know, transgender messaging. That old thing.

This transphobic campaign has been roiling within WNBA arenas for long enough that there's no reason to believe the league, its teams, and its media partners are reacting this way because they still don't understand the meaning of an XX-XY shirt, or the motivations of those who wear them. At this point it's safer to assume that they simply agree with the people in the shirts.