A controversial new film mocking transgender women in sports has received hundreds of reviews online.
Lady Ballers, made by Daily Wire co-creator and co-CEO Jeremy Boreing, is a comedy about a school basketball coach, played by Boreing. He creates a team made up of men who dress as women as a means to dominate women’s sport and salvage his reputation.
The film has been slammed as transphobic by LGBTQ+ people and their allies, but many people took to movie-rating website Rotten Tomatoes to give Lady Ballers five stars. Its release comes amid an ongoing cultural war about transgender rights, especially around competing in sports with cisgender women.
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Since premiering on The Daily Wire website on Friday, Lady Ballers has managed to pick up a 96 percent viewer rating from around 500 reviews.
However, the movie is yet to receive a critic’s rating. Rotten Tomatoes works as an aggregator of professional critics and viewers’ reviews of TV and film. It then combines the percentage of the ratings to give a title a combined rating.
People who left written reviews of Lady Ballers were divided about the film.
“Pathetic. Poorly written and poorer ‘acting.’ It’s nothing more than a money grab from the people who align with their hatred of everything they disagree with. This sort of movie has been done before with much better writing, acting, and way less hatred and cheap mockery,” wrote one person.
However, another had a different take: “Not every day you see something original and fresh. Haven’t laughed this much in a long time. Highly recommended.”
A third person wrote: “I think the movie is transphobic and unfunny.”
And a fourth commented: “Loved it! Funny and original; this movie does what others don’t have the balls to do!”
A number of viewers complained of trouble leaving a review on Rotten Tomatoes, citing technical difficulties with the website. Movie critic Christian Toto said it was because people were trying to leave reviews before the film had started streaming on The Daily Wire website.
“Users tried to review bomb #LadyBallers … Rotten Tomatoes, to its credit, just wiped out those reviews knowing the film isn’t available yet for streaming,” Toto wrote on X, formerly Twitter.
Toto himself reviewed the movie for his website Worth It or Woke? and described it “as laugh out loud funny” and “one of the best comedies of the year, maybe of the last 5 years.”
Boreing said on X that he and his colleagues made the film because “Hollywood won’t make a movie about how laughably absurd it is that we now allow grown men to call themselves women and then dominate women’s sports.”
Other movie experts criticized Lady Ballers as transphobic and misogynistic.
“The thing about LADY BALLERS is….. the concept is not inherently unfunny. If the butt of the joke were the misogynistic men taking advantage of a social ‘loophole’ (gender fluidity) to stop being losers….. that could be straight up Always Sunny in Philadelphia material,” wrote director and podcast host Gwendoline M.J. Stone on X.
“The problem is….. they are not the butt of the joke. Trans people are. And women in general are. It is a form of ‘comedy’ that is hateful and rotten to its very core. That’s why it’s not funny in the least,” Stone added.
The release of Lady Ballers comes at a time of great debate about transgender people, especially trans women’s participation in sport. Critics, including Olympic champion and famous transgender woman Caitlyn Jenner, slam their participation as unfair to cisgender women, but experts have declared this to be unfounded.
“Excluding women who are trans hurts all women. It invites gender policing that could subject any woman to invasive tests or accusations of being ‘too masculine’ or ‘too good’ at their sport to be a ‘real’ woman,” the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) says on its website.
Around 220 pieces of law that target transgender people, especially trans girls and women in sports to prevent them from playing on the team that aligns with their gender identity, were introduced into national and state legislatures in the U.S this year.
Human Rights Campaign (HRC) even declared a “state of emergency” due to the unprecedented number of bills introduced targeting LGBTQ+ people in 2023, more than any other year.
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.