Here’s the story:

Navratilova tweeted out before Christmas, “You can’t just proclaim yourself a female and be able to compete against women. There must be some standards, and having a penis and competing as a woman would not fit that standard.” The tweet brought a firestorm and she promised to write more about it when she educated herself on transgender athletes. She tried to make amends in an op-ed in February by explaining the science she discovered…

It didn’t work. She was dropped from the board of a gay rights advocacy group, and excoriated further on social media. As part of a response to that, Martina wrote [emphasis mine]:

What I really wanted to do was try to open up the debate about equality and fairness in relation to transgender participation in women’s sport. There were too many voices that were silenced and shamed into submission and that is not right. My aim was to encourage a more scientific, rather than emotional, conversation and to search for a solution that would work better than current arrangements… Well, I certainly stumbled into a hornets’ nest. The support I normally get from ‘my people’, the LGBT community, was replaced by a barrage of quite nasty personal attacks and I was dropped (jettisoned is a better word) as an ambassador for Athlete Ally. Conversely, some publications and people that I am at odds with on most issues, such as the Washington Examiner (gasp) and James Woods (double gasp), were strongly supportive of my opinions. Those are unwelcome bedfellows. So where did I go wrong? Or did I go wrong?

Most coverage of this story is about the transgender athlete controversy aspects of it. But the portion of Navratilova’s words that I bolded is what caught my attention. What I see here are the glimmerings of at least the possibility of political change on Navratilova’s part, depending on how she answers the questions she posed.

This incident represents an opportunity for her to make a shift, a move that’s incredibly hard to make and that she may reject. You can feel her confusion and hesitation; it’s real and it’s painful. It’s somewhat like what #WalkAway founder Brandon Straka said in the video where he told his change story. At the beginning of Straka’s voicing of a single mild non-PC possibility, he wondered something like why are my friends treating me like that? I thought they were my friends. Why are my enemies treating me nicely? Does that mean I’ve gone over to the Dark Side?

Or maybe it’s not the Dark Side?

Navratilova is experiencing the struggle between emotions and logic. She didn’t think there would be such a disagreement between the two. Her friends are leading with emotion, and she wanted to lead with logic. People like James Woods are defending her out of logic, too, not because they love her. And she is discovering the viciousness of the left towards someone who violates the rules of groupthink.

I wish her well.