Lady Ballers is a 2023 sports comedy film directed by and starring Jeremy Boreing.
Coach Rob (Boreing) is a former basketball coach who has now become an estranged father, divorced from his wife, and generally feeling dissatisfied. After bumping into his old friend/student Alex (Daniel Considine), now a crossdresser, he is motivated to join a sports competition. After getting rejected as the men's events are full, Alex shows up still wearing a wig and gets mistaken for a trans woman, getting himself entered into the women's tournament and winning it with flying colors. Rob sees an opportunity to reunite his basketball team and have them be competitive despite their age and middling talent - by having them pretend to be trans women and competing in women's basketball.
It was released on December 1, 2023 on the streaming service DailyWire+.
"Winners are just tropers who win":
- Acceptable Feminine Goals and Traits: Near the end of the film, Winnie confesses to Rob that she wants to be a boy because she believes they're good at any sport and most things she's interested in, including opening pickle jars. Rob sits her down and tells her that she doesn't have to worry about being inferior to men in those interests, when she can embrace feminine personality traits instead; and cites being socially aware, empathy, community building, and keeping men in line as examples of this. Played with in that many of the women who actually display this in the story are either ignorant, blindsided by the media, or using that language to appear sympathetic but are in it for power.
- Ambiguous Gender Identity: Alex, Rob's closest friend on the Lady Ballers team, has something quite peculiar about his participation in the scheme. While initially only crossdressing as part of his job as a waiter and to excel in women's sports, he very slowly begins to feel more comfortable identifying as a woman than as a man. Whether Alex is actually a closeted trans woman, a Wholesome Crossdresser, or a man In Touch with His Feminine Side isn't made clear.
- Artistic License – Sports: Men can't just put on a wig, say they're trans, and compete in women's sports no questions asked in Real Life. That sort of thing is put under intense scrutiny and the entire team would have gone through a vetting process that would have shot their plan dead on arrival. This is especially egregious because
the film was originally going to be a documentary where they would have an actor pretend to be trans and catalog their rise to fame, but it didn't work for those very reasons. - Becoming the Mask: Alex turns out to be the only one of the Ladyballers who truly commits to the trans woman bit. They had already began crossdressing after an unsuccessful stint in Hollywood, gradually becomes used to casual feminine-coded activities, and admits to Rob after appearing on television that their tears and insecurities were genuine. After the big game, they even confess that they felt more complete and found their parents accepted them better after they started pulling their grift. Rob, on his part, thinks Alex is confused, and performs a Groin Attack to convince Alex that they're still a boy.
- Dragged into Drag: The film's protagonists are mediocre male basketball players who dress in drag and pretend to be transwomen so that they can play in women's basketball and dominate. Their final opponents, an all-black basketball team, is doing the exact same thing for the exact same reasons.
- Foreshadowing:
- In the opening prologue, a young Coach Rob says to his team "You're playing like girls out there", hinting as to what the team do later in the film.
- When the high school team goes back to the showers, all of the boys bully their towel boy and shove their towels into his face—all except Alex, who takes the towels off of him and gives him a sympathetic pat on the back. Considering Rob's speech at the end of the film about women being the kinder, more emphatic gender, this gives us an early indication that Alex is the only Ladyballer who might actually be trans.
- Jerkass Has a Point: While he still goes along with the plan, David Cone rightfully points out that the team is pretending to be trans women to use their "innate strength" to essentially beat up women because they weren't good enough to go up against other men, making them come across as a bunch of bullies. His teammates respond by silently mocking him for being a bleeding heart.
- Men Are Better Than Women: The movie posits that the titular Ballers — a bunch of men who had only just gotten back into sports, are past their prime, and had peaked in high school— can beat any pro-athlete woman in sports effortlessly and that the only ones who could beat them are a team of black men who is doing the same scam as they are. While Rob tries to reassure his daughter that girls are better at some things than boys (like being empathetic and civilized and other non-athletic things), they are all Informed Attributes.
- Mistaken for Gay: Or Mistaken for Trans in this case. As Rob gets turned down from joining the competition as the men's events are all full, Alex, wearing a wig, gets mistaken by the receptionist for a trans woman and she enters Alex into the women's tournament.
- Mistaken for Prostitute: A running gag in the movie. One guy is continuously asking the cast "How much?", thinking they're all sex workers. He is definitely not deterred when he learns that Rob and Alex are men.
- Ripped from the Headlines: The movie is inspired by the culture war in the 2020s over whether or not trans women athletes should be allowed to compete in women's events.
- Rousing Speech: The opening prologue has Rob giving an inspirational speech to his team, ending with the saying: "Winners are just losers who win".
- Satire: The entire film is an edgy spoof of the debate on transgender people competing in female sports. In this world, the mainstream media has on paper accepted transgender women, enough for them to be prioritized over both men and women in Hollywood, in sports, and in life. Coming out as trans is as easy as telling someone that they're trans and putting on a wig.
- Second Place Is for Losers: Rob is obsessed with winning, having been a coach who led his basketball team to victory three times in a row. Every inch of his being is given to feeling like a winner, and he even named his daughter, Winnie, after his favorite pastime. The one time he finally decides that it isn't worth it is when the Ladyballers get kicked six ways to Sunday by their black opponents.
- Slapstick: Much of the movie is composed of physical comedy especially during the basketball scenes, with either the main characters or the people they compete with getting hurt in humorous ways. Even outside of the sports scenes, there's plenty of this, like when Rob gets tased by a receptionist and then comedically hits his head on the desk.
- Strawman Political: Anything to the left of the Daily Wire's political views is portrayed as a mocking stereotype. Character examples include the woman seen in the trailer dressed in pro-LGBTQ paraphernalia with a taser, and Matt Walsh's hippie character. A systemic example is the "woke" school attended by Coach Rob's daughter, which teaches her extensively about gender theory while leaving out actual history; and the main journalist character, who is only using the language of political correctness for clout and is just as self serving and scheming as the main characters.
- Take That!: While the story often shows that the Ladyballers are jerks trying to chase their former glory by entering in women's basketball, the story doesn't think highly of women's sports to begin with; barely anyone showed up to women's basketball games before the Ladyballers start dominating (with one guy fast asleep in the stands), and the reporter admits that women's sports were only made to keep men out of their versions of the sports since men are objectively better in athletics.
