Sophie Cunningham is the latest sports star to take on the issue of trans athlete participation, leading to yet another politicized news cycle in the WNBA.<\/p>\n
The comments prompted supporters and counterprotesters to stage a demonstration over the issue in Seattle before a Storm-Fever game, and the Storm\u2019s co-owner was suspended for confronting Cunningham\u2019s supporters during the game.<\/p>\n
SiriusXM\u2019s Katie Nolan\u00a0perhaps had the most thorough deconstruction of Cunningham\u2019s perspective\u00a0on her Casuals podcast<\/a> this week<\/a>.<\/p>\n In a monologue addressing Cunningham directly, Nolan contrasted Cunningham\u2019s support of the UFC with her purported desire to protect women in sports, while calling out Cunningham for failing to understand the broader context of her comments despite playing alongside many LGBTQ women in the WNBA and even cohosting a podcast with a straight man who recently called the trans athlete conversation a \u201cborderline nonexistent issue<\/a>\u201d and said it was distracting from far more urgent problems facing the U.S.<\/p>\n \u201cOne side politically is incredibly invested in this issue, and that\u2019s because one side politically doesn\u2019t have a lot of other issues that they\u2019ve got pretty big approval on,\u201d Nolan said.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd now I am of the belief that the reason they have big approval on this is because people keep saying sentences like, \u2018I don\u2019t want little girls to have to go against biological men.\u2019 Because on its face that sounds like something is common sense. That\u2019s not what anybody\u2019s asking for. Nobody is saying we should get rid of, for example, the WNBA and the NBA, and everybody should just compete together. Nobody\u2019s saying that. And so the people that are packaging it as that are doing so on purpose. And when you are consuming it and going, \u2018How could anyone disagree with this statement?\u2019 You never consider that it\u2019s because the statement itself does not reflect the actual issue that we\u2019re discussing.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n A widely cited NBC News poll<\/a> last year showed that three-fourths of respondents were against trans women competing in women\u2019s sports. Nolan, however, believes that the argument has been twisted by the right wing\u2019s extreme language rather than focusing on the actual considerations at hand, such as how to sort children in youth sports or how to scientifically evaluate sex and gender at the highest levels of professional competition.<\/p>\n Previously, Nolan has argued that figures like Fox News contributor Riley Gaines are also manipulating the conversation around trans athletes<\/a> while not adequately standing up for actual issues facing women in sports, such as the abuse in the U.S. Gymnastics program. On her podcast Friday, Nolan grouped Cunningham into a similar bloc, arguing she is failing to apply basic critical thinking around the issue and its media coverage.<\/p>\n \u201cAll you\u2019re telling us, Sophie, is that you don\u2019t really have critical-thinking skills, or that you aren\u2019t interested in employing them,\u201d Nolan said. \u201cYou\u2019re taking the message that\u2019s being given to you by people who are highly invested in this dividing stuff, and you\u2019re helping them sell it by not questioning it at all. Which is extra crazy given the fact that you\u2019re surrounded by people you could talk to about this issue to better understand it.\u201d<\/p>\n In this case, the hypocrisy Nolan pointed out in Cunningham is that she would partner with Dana White as a UFC ring girl on a card featuring Conor McGregor. While White was once caught on camera striking his wife,<\/a> a civil jury found McGregor liable for the sexual assault of a woman, and he has since lost two appeals<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cYou couldn\u2019t catch me dead at that fight. F*ck Conor McGregor, respectfully,\u201d Nolan said. \u201cAnd you [follow up] by saying that it\u2019s really important for you to protect little girls. From some theoretical transgender person who might take advantage of \u2014 so many things would have to happen for the harm you\u2019re claiming to be worried about to actually be carried out \u2014 meanwhile men come into women\u2019s sports in various positions of authority \u2026 and they take advantage of women all the time. And where were you, Sophie, on any of that?\u201d<\/p>\n Nolan also pointed out that many sports governing bodies throughout the decade have essentially banned trans athletes from competing. In the U.S., the Trump administration has aggressively\u00a0pursued restrictive policies, with both the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee and the NCAA\u00a0following suit by adopting\u00a0rules requiring athletes to compete against others of the sex they were assigned at birth<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cYou\u2019ve already \u2018won,\u2019 quote-unquote, in that way. And yet you and others seem unwilling to let this go,\u201d Nolan said, again addressing Cunningham. \u201cOr to even learn a little bit more about it, consider what the other side is trying to say. You just keep saying, \u2018Well, I\u2019m against men fighting against women, and I think it\u2019s crazy that you\u2019re not.\u2019 What if you considered that that\u2019s not what other people are arguing? What if you considered you\u2019re misunderstanding the issue, and then consider that that\u2019s because that was beneficial to whoever\u2019s f*cking playing you?\u201d<\/p>\n Judging from the support Cunningham\u2019s comments received from mainstream figures like Stephen A. Smith and the way the Imane Khelif saga<\/a> in the 2024 Olympics galvanized<\/a> major sports personalities against the Algerian boxer<\/a>, the more conservative viewpoint is winning this argument among the public (as illustrated by the NBC poll) as well as the media.<\/p>\n Still, Nolan has been consistent in her argument that women athletes should put more energy behind actual breaches of women\u2019s safety in sports rather than the far less prevalent problem of trans women competing against cisgender women.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sophie Cunningham is the latest sports star to take on the issue of trans athlete participation, leading to…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":972508,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[49],"tags":[390351,390352,16091,62,19746,26397,67,132,68,232],"class_list":["post-972507","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wnba","tag-casuals","tag-katie-nolan","tag-sophie-cunningham","tag-sports","tag-transgender","tag-transgender-athletes","tag-united-states","tag-unitedstates","tag-us","tag-wnba"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/117017704408993357","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/972507","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=972507"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/972507\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/972508"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=972507"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=972507"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=972507"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}