The position How Jonquel Jones decided it was time to take up some space appeared first on Clutch Points.
Jonquel Jones became known as one of Freedom of New YorkIt’s bright stars. She helped lead the team to its first-ever WNBA championship in 2024 after joining the previous year, and she has been an integral part of the league’s growth since being drafted in 2016. However, the five-time All-Star didn’t always feel like the star fans see her as today.
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Jones was one of several WNBA players named 2025 Glamor Women of the Year, and she spoke about the effects her unique childhood still has on her as an adult. The 33-year-old emigrated to the United States from the Bahamas when she was just 13, but her island upbringing impacted her in many ways.
Although she speaks on the many summits in the interview with the magazine, the valleys were what she had to strive to overcome as a black queer woman from a more conservative background.
“We were a family that went to church every Sunday and I wore frilly dresses and socks,” Jones said. “I always asked myself, ‘Why do I have to follow these (gender) rules? Why do I have to clean the house all day with my sisters, and my brother can just be outside or just throw out the trash, and then he’s free for the rest of the day?'”
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Jones was honest about how the treatment made her feel and many people raised in the same situation often felt the same way.
“I always felt a certain way about the stereotypes or the roles that Bahamian society, or society in general, placed on women. I felt like they just wanted us to be less free,” she said. “And so for me, I just felt like the clothes that I wore represented the discovery of my freedom.”
Jones expanded on these thoughts to explain how she used clothing and her remarkable fashion sense as a method of self-expression that helped her process these feelings.
“When you come from a place where being yourself can be seen as a bad thing, it feels good to be validated by the world at large to really say, ‘No, it’s okay to live your truth. It’s okay to be who you are.’
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Jones continued, “Not just in the WNBA, but even in New York. I see it everywhere. I see people being themselves and truly happy and not feeling like they have to run away from who they are. All of these things remind me that all of my hard work, all of my efforts, all of these things are not overlooked just because I choose to love another woman, or I choose to wear a button-down shirt instead of a dress,” she said.
These feelings extend to the W and how far the league has come in terms of visibility. Jones described the change she witnessed and its impact on today’s professional women’s basketball players.
“Gone are the days when people treated their WNBA teams like the stepchild or stepchildren,” Jones said. “The league is growing and moving in the right direction, and we need owners and people aligned with that vision to continue to grow the sport and give professional athletes what they deserve.” »
It’s a far cry from how Jones felt in 2022, when she tweeted from her X account, formerly Twitter, about seats “disappearing from the table” due to her identity as a queer masculine Black woman, echoing challenges she faced earlier in her personal life. As of 2024, she told Complex that she felt more or less the same way, saying she wasn’t sure “opportunities were necessarily there for me as a player” without her attachment to the Liberty, but that she was “still fighting for those deals.”
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However, Jones is now reaping the rewards of his efforts with opportunities such as his collaboration with Nike on the KD 17 Bahamas and his invitation to the Met Gala. She embodies the confidence to have informal discussions with former Vogue editor-in-chief and event organizer Anna Wintour, and she pledges to move “through this space as if I belong, because I do,” drawing on the strengths of her Bahamian roots.
“I’m an extroverted introvert, and when I go into spaces like that, I think the Bahamian in me — the Caribbean girl in me — comes out a little bit, and I can move through those spaces as myself. I let my culture, I let all the parts of me shine through.”
Related: A’ja Wilson reveals the WNBA’s toughest player to guard
