I don't have all the answers, but I know the first step is to not let the bad actors frame the situation.
The WNBA simply restates whatever rule or premise is relevant when questioned about the bad faith plans, but otherwise continues business as usual. Rather than an immediate uproar in response, which teaches bad actors that this is a good way to get an uproar. If a simple statement from a bad actor is enough to make your entire organization start scrambling, you have major problems. One of which is that single bad actors have an enormous amount of power over your operations.*
If these two ex-NBA players want to try for the WNBA draft, let them. Just as people have forever maliciously included women in organizations and activities previously restricted to men, sneering that they could participate if they could keep up.
Instead, we have a screaming signal that even the people involved in professional women's basketball don't think it's as serious of a sport as men's basketball. Immediate panic at the thought of ex-NBA players trying for the draft because the assumption is they will naturally be superior to every other person there.
Sounds a bit misogynistic, yeah?
And then there's the locker rooms. Fucking hell, US culture has an obsession with building up the mythology of locker rooms. Media is sure all kinds of salacious things go down there. These two bad actors have almost definitely been infected with the idea that women's locker rooms are some hypersexual paradise where they will be lavished with eye-candy; it's likely they also fully buy into the currently popular (and heavily transphobic) fiction that women are entirely vulnerable in locker rooms, like lobsters after molting, and that penises are exceptionally powerful there.
The reality of women's locker rooms is that they are quite similar to men's. They smell different and are likely cleaner, thanks to societal expectations and differences in allowed standards, but they aren't full of gauzy curtains and shy, yet lusty, maidens. They are full of athletes who are either getting pumped up for competition or worn out and recovering from competition or practice. They are full of people who have lives they are ready to continue living. They are not communal erogenous zones.
Straight men tend to have this fantasy that they will be dominant in a room full of naked women. In reality, being unclothed around a bunch of unclothed people when you are the one who is visibly different is not generally a position of power. What they are likely not prepared for is indifference. When so much of your life revolves around your own penis, it's inconceivable that everyone else just doesn't care.
Had this situation been treated as no big deal, it's doubtful the ex-NBA players would have followed through on trying for the draft. Had they done so, it's highly doubtful they would have made it very far. Things held together by bullshit generally fall apart pretty fast when the rubber hits the road.
Instead, the situation was handled exactly as expected by the bad actors who instigated it. Which was the entire reason they did so in the first place.
So again, congrats on giving these two exactly what they wanted.
*-to be fair here, I don't think the WNBA organization itself has done an excessive amount of panicking. From what I've read, they added discussion of the "trans issue" to an already scheduled meeting. But the failure to have consistent messaging has been damaging.
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