The Sophie Cunningham-WNBA Trans War Is Sucking All The Oxygen Out Of The Room

The WNBA is one of those science experiments where, every time I return to it, it’s somehow grown larger and more unwieldy. I write about this league, exit to describe other topics, then come back to discover that women’s pro basketball has somehow claimed an even larger share of the modern controversy zeitgeist. Now we’ve got Donald Trump talking about how, if he coached a WNBA team, he’d recruit LeBron James to womanhood.

He’s not the first to make that joke. An old Dave Chappelle bit is circulating where the famous comedian imagines that a transitioned LeBron would average “840 points per game.” Conservative media is floating the possibility of a WNBA invite for a buff French transitioner named Julie Tétart, who’s averaging 21 points and 20 rebounds in a second-division French women’s league. There are now regular trans sports protests and counter-protests at Indiana Fever games. What the hell is happening and can anyone be reasonable about it? Well, a man can try…

This all started with red-coded Fever sharpshooter Sophie Cunningham giving one political opinion in an ESPN profile on her burgeoning fame:

I want to protect young girls in a locker room, or young girls in sport who shouldn’t have to go against biological men.

That’s a reasonable take that the vast majority of America agrees with. It shouldn’t theoretically be controversial, but “controversy” isn’t necessarily related to how popular a public figure’s statement is. There are other factors, such as how loud and disproportionately concentrated in media your detractors happen to be.

The noise might have died down but for a sparsely-attended “save women’s sports” protest at a Fever game in Seattle that led to Storm minority owner Celeste Keaton cursing at two teen girl protesters who sat courtside with pro-Sophie signs. Images of poor behavior from Keaton and other “pro-trans” fans in Seattle galvanized the non-Left on this issue, which further charged a thermostatic reaction on the Left. Cunningham stuck to her guns, posing for photos after a game in Minneapolis with conservative activist Riley Gaines and XX-XY Athletics founder Jennifer Sey. On Wednesday, in the aftermath of so much hubbub, Sophie expressed a desire for media to return to basketball commentary:

The WNBA media, all we ever do is cover everything except basketball … You can talk about other things, those are great stories, it shows fans who people outside of the court, but I think we gotta keep the main thing the main thing.

On the Left, she’s being assailed for hypocrisy after her words spawned this situation. The counter would be that she expressed one fairly normal opinion when asked about her views and it’s not necessarily Cunningham’s fault that a bunch of other people act insanely in response.

Speaking of hypocrisy allegations, a few prominent conservative activists bashed Fever superstar Caitlin Clark for ducking this topic in a press conference. That led to many on the Left proclaiming that the Right had moved from a “shut up and dribble” response on athlete activism to a position of “agree with us or we’ll attack you.” Here are statements on Clark from Matt Walsh and Megyn Kelly.

Walsh:

Caitlin Clark might be the biggest coward in the history of sports. She refuses to say anything about the anti-white racism she has been subjected to since coming into the league. She punts on the trans question, which is the easiest question you could ever be asked. No spine.

Kelly, more succinctly:

Coward.

Personally, I think suggesting that Caitlin Clark might be “the biggest coward in the history of sports” is juuuuust a little hyperbolic. I also flat out don’t like it. Even if I largely agree with “the Right” on this issue of males in women’s sports, I’m just constitutionally against the idea that athletes must pontificate on political positions when prompted, like trained dogs.

I’ve observed a division within the Right on how to prosecute its cultural preferences. In Prestige Media World, “the Right” can often be viewed as a monolith. They were all “shut up and dribble” and now they’re all, “wear the anti-trans ribbon!” When you look at your own side, you’re aware of all its fractures, but when you look at the enemy, it’s often perceived as totally united. But anyone closely observing the Right of late can tell it’s a completely insane circular YouTube firing squad of warring influencers one-upping each other for engagement. There is no unified position on Caitlin Clark and the WNBA. There is no unified position on much of anything.

Some on the broader Right believe in more of a “live and let live approach,” where conservatives appeal to a “silent majority” that’s sick of the Left’s media-backed nagging. You can see that element when Trump-voting Dave Portnoy attacks the anti-Clark conservatives. Others in the more “movement conservative” category of the Right view the Left’s tactic of applying social pressure to celebrities with ambitious envy. What if we were the bullies? What if we had celebrities cowed and kneeling in favor of our beliefs?!

I see a similar dynamic on the Left where many blue-influencers have adopted Trump’s cartoonish meanness under the assumption that it’s his value proposition. We’ve been too nice and that’s why we lose! Look at him, he gets away with everything, the lesson is that you must constantly insult and belittle!

It’s all so tiresome.

I’ll get back to the actual political issue, but one more observation about the Right and the WNBA. There is an irony of conservative commentators adopting a position that protects women’s sports as a category while simultaneously trashing the most talked about women’s sports league. It’s partially related to how, in the Right’s media ecosystem, many have absorbed a cartoonish view of what the WNBA is.

Since it goes viral every time Caitlin Clark gets whacked without a call, there’s a running assumption in certain quarters that she’s just beaten with lead pipes every night as the referees cheer it on. Some are under the impression that a white WNBA star is some detested rarity even though six such players were featured in the last All-Star game. Here’s an unhinged post from Federalist founder Sean Davis.

The WNBA is welfare for retarded black lesbians funded by the NBA. Anyone who doesn’t fit that bill — Caitlin Clark or Sophia Cunningham, for example — will be targeted and terrorized until they can no longer play. White girls are not allowed to be better at basketball than the retarded black lesbians. It does not matter how much money Clark and Cunningham make for the league. The league does not care. Because it is run by race-obsessed woke retards. Boycotting will change nothing, because the league doesn’t make money. It gets welfare from the NBA. You cannot punish something that exists to lose money by making it lose money. The NBA, not the WNBA, is responsible for the continued racial violence targeted at Clark and Cunningham, because the WNBA exists at the mercy of the NBA. So if you’re tired of anti-white racial violence from retarded black lesbians, you need to take that out on the NBA.

I don’t want to get derailed on other topics, but this post reflects a vice-signaling issue on the Right that’s gained momentum ever since Twitter was sold to Elon Musk. No, you don’t need to say “retarded” four times in one paragraph to make your crazy point about how people must boycott the NBA as some bankshot against the WNBA.

On the softer side of the Right slighting women’s basketball, Clay Travis is offering $10 million to a WNBA championship squad that beats a high school state boy’s championship team. If you know the sport, or perhaps just understand basic biology, you understand that the boy’s team would easily beat the women’s team. The male physiological advantage is especially pronounced in a game where height is the most significant selection pressure. Clay is also, for comedic effect, floating the idea of trans-inclusive WNBA team named “The Balls” in his native Nashville. Obviously he’s expressing an interest in muscled up Julie Tétart:

This b*tch can ball. I can’t believe the transphobic [WNBA] won’t sign this woman.

This has resulted in a lot of people asking me whether a male can actually be admitted to a women’s league that doesn’t overtly proclaim to ban males. And the answer is … I don’t know? When asking sources involved in WNBA ownership, everyone is under the presumption that such a thing can’t happen, but there’s no formal mechanism by which to obviously prevent it. The WNBA CBA rule is “Only players who are women are eligible to play in the WNBA,” but “women” is undefined. I’d hazard that WNBA teams would be restricted from adding a Julie Tétart type by an Adam Silver phone call as opposed to, say, a cheek swab.

What Clay Travis is getting at, whatever one thinks of him, is that many on the Left, including prominent voices like Minnesota Lynx coach Cheryl Reeve, are bluffing. They’re so dug in on “transwomen are women” that they won’t admit to obvious differences between the sexes. They’re adopting a position of rejecting a guardrail because really, there’s no issue here and it’s all made up. There’s no need to accept what’s so because the Right is being mean and transphobic and it’s a distraction and there are bigger problems etc. And there are bigger problems, certainly, but this one isn’t magically going away because you sneered loud enough at the people raising it.

One trendy Lefty idea is that there’s no need for a rule against a Julie Tétart because this lone example plays in a lesser French division, thus proving that no transwomen would ever dominate the highest tier of women’s basketball. But of course, as we saw with Lia Thomas, absent a barrier, someone will cross that threshold and instantly crush while becoming famous.

A clip of The Athletic’s Sports Gossip Show went viral on the Right in part because hosts Madeline Hill and Charlotte Wilder conveyed aforementioned forms of denial. According to them, “It’s pretty clear that Sophie Cunningham is doing a blatant Right-wing grift.” It’s only getting purchase because the Right are “genius marketers.” There’s an obnoxious form of argumentation on the Left that presumes it’s like, illegitimate to disagree with them. Cunningham can’t actually believe what she believes. It’s fake, somehow. And the topic isn’t worthy of consideration because it’s all a “grift.”

By the way, the divided Right aren’t “genius marketers.” They just happen to have a massive advantage on an issue you won’t deprive them of. So of course the Right is raising this topic. No duh JD Vance is talking about Sophie Cunningham. They’d be idiots to not take advantage of you looking like idiots. The day it stops is the day you concede reality about women’s sports. It’s really that simple.

I’ll close with a modest defense of the WNBA, a league I happen to now enjoy. Yes, the best males are far better at basketball than the best females, but sports can be contextual. Many consider Floyd Mayweather Jr. to be the greatest boxer of all time, even though, in his prime, thousands of dudes could kick his ass. Why? Floyd is roughly the size of a standard high school freshman. He just happened to dominate his weight classes. Yes, the Klitschko brothers would have murdered him, but nobody really cares. The job in sports is to win within your division and “women” constitutes a division. Many on the Right now denigrate that category. Many on the Left now refuse to maintain it.

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This is republished with permission by the author. The original can be found here.

Ethan Strauss is the creator of the Substack House of Strauss. He is a former NBA PR gopher, basketblogger, and NBA beat writer.