Brooklyn Nets forward Michael Porter Jr. said transgender women should tell men their gender history before a romantic or sexual encounter becomes intimate, speaking for the first time about a 2023 Taiwan meetup that later went viral and was widely identified as involving a transgender model.
The comments came on a recent episode of his “Curious Mike” podcast with Jason Lee. Porter, 28, said he was in Taiwan for appearances when a woman, Xiao A La, who publicly documented gender-affirming surgery in Thailand in 2020, messaged him on Instagram. He said she “looks kind of good to me, more like my type physically,” that they met and communicated through Google Translate, and that they “kicked it for like an hour” before someone took a photo.
“I had no idea who that woman was and no idea she was transgender,” Porter said, according to clips circulating online and multiple recaps of the episode. “Over there, the surgeries are so good you can’t tell.”
He said the picture first spread in Taiwan years later, then reached the United States. Friends messaged him asking if he had been “caught” with a transgender woman. Porter said the story “caught me completely off guard,” that the conversation never went far enough for him to know her history, and that he still does not “technically know.” He also said he “still [doesn’t] care” about the online reaction.
Michael Porter Jr. addresses the BACKLASH over being seen with a transgender woman in Taiwan, telling Jason Lee he had NO IDEA she was trans and arguing that transgender women should disclose it to men upfront 😲👀
“She looked good to me physically… We kicked it for like an… pic.twitter.com/UgQQndQUke
— Killa 🌺 (@KillaKreww) September 7, 2026
After recounting the Taiwan story, Porter turned the conversation into a broader question: if a transgender person approaches a man, they meet, “they do whatever they do,” and the man later learns the person is transgender, should the person “get in trouble for not disclosing that?”
Lee said everyone “has a right to know what they’re getting into,” while also warning that some men become violent after learning a partner is transgender. He suggested disclosure after interest is clear and in a setting that is safer than a first face-to-face meeting. Porter said he agreed.
That is the core of the remark now being framed online as a demand that transgender people “ID themselves.” Porter did not propose a government ID rule. He argued for personal disclosure before intimacy, citing both his claimed surprise in Taiwan and a separate case in which, he said, a football player learned a partner was transgender and became violent. Those comments sit in a long-running debate over informed consent, privacy, safety and whether gender history is something a partner is entitled to know.
Advocates for disclosure argue that sexual orientation and consent depend on accurate information, that some heterosexual men do not want to have sex with someone born male, and that concealment can produce rage, humiliation or violence after the fact. Critics argue that forcing early disclosure can itself be dangerous, that many transgender women live as women and are not obligated to announce medical history to strangers, and that “you should have been able to tell” is not a reliable standard once surgery and hormones are involved. Porter himself used that last point, saying procedures in some countries are advanced enough that “you really can’t tell if someone’s a woman or a man.”
The safety argument is not theoretical. Transgender women face elevated rates of assault, and some high-profile cases of violence have followed disclosure or discovery. Lee raised that risk on the podcast. Porter’s question — whether non-disclosure should carry consequences — leaves the enforcement mechanism unstated. Social shaming, criminal charges and civil claims have all been floated in similar debates in other countries; U.S. law generally does not treat failure to disclose transgender status as a standalone crime, though fraud or assault cases can arise from related facts.
