Before this summer, the WNBA player Sophie Cunningham was probably most famous for her decision, in the waning seconds of a 2025 game, to more or less tackle an opponent who had poked the eye of her Indiana Fever teammate Caitlin Clark. In the weeks that followed, Cunningham signed a bunch of endorsement deals and picked up more than a million new TikTok followers. She earned a second wave of social media-driven attention this season, when her exaggerated, taunting finger-point at another opponent went sufficiently viral to earn the attention of, among others, the former NFL quarterback Tom Brady and President Donald Trump.
It also caught the attention of ESPN, which in a lengthy profile, described Cunningham, a reserve guard, as one of the WNBA’s “most magnetic stars.” Most of the piece, which was published in July, explores the putative contrast between Cunningham’s appearance—“white, feminine-presenting and in line with traditional beauty norms”—and her reputation as an on-court “enforcer” who revels in “stirring the pot.” Toward the end, though, it takes an abrupt turn: “I want to protect young girls in a locker room, or young girls in sport who shouldn’t have to go against biological men,” Cunningham says. She describes this stance not as “hating trans,” but as part of her commitment to “being honest.”
This quote, which recycles the sort of bog-standard transphobia you’d find on a Trump rally teleprompter, quickly prompted bigots to embrace Cunningham as the unapologetically anti-woke heroine they’ve all been waiting for. Anti-trans protesters began showing up at games holding “THANK YOU SOPHIE!” signs and wearing T-shirts produced by a clothing brand founded to “protect women’s sports and spaces.” On Fox News, Vice President JD Vance praised Cunningham for her “courage” and urged her to “keep going.” The creeps who spent last season tossing dildos on the court during WNBA games reappeared, too, vowing to continue throwing sex toys at professional athletes until the league “explicitly states that only biological women” can play.
Becoming the face of a nasty culture-war sideshow doesn’t seem to have bothered Cunningham in the slightest. “I said what I said,” she told reporters on July 22. “I think it’s kind of common sense.” During a game against the Fever on August 2, Cheryl Reeve, the Minnesota Lynx head coach, wore a “Trans Kids Belong” T-shirt. After the game, Cunningham posed for a picture with the anti-trans activist Riley Gaines, who captioned it, “Little girls belong!”
Cunningham has explored other ways of winking at the newer members of her fan base, too. Last week, for example, she posted a TikTok of herself dancing to Brooks & Dunn’s “Boot Scootin’ Boogie” as an answer to the question, “What rap songs do you listen to before games?” It is hard to imagine a more obvious try-hard stunt than a newly minted conservative celebrity performatively disclaiming rap in favor of a country song that came out five years before she was born—especially after Cunningham listed Lil Wayne, Drake, and Future among her pregame favorites in an interview just last year.
Sophie Cunningham’s political conservatism is not new or especially interesting, because there are and have always been political conservatives in every workplace. Now in her eighth season in the WNBA, Cunningham has appeared in right-coded spaces before, most notably by acting as a ring girl at a UFC event in July, just a few weeks after President Donald Trump celebrated his 80th birthday by hosting a cage fight on the White House grounds. Within the WNBA—a mostly Black league with many openly queer players—former teammates have hinted that her politics have sometimes rubbed people the wrong way.
But what’s newer, and what Cunningham is taking full advantage of, is the emergence of an insular right-wing media ecosystem that exists to turn opportunistic conservatives—especially ones who are anti-trans—into well-compensated media personalities. By making herself the favorite WNBA player of people who otherwise have no interest in WNBA players, Cunningham is the latest relatively unremarkable athlete to achieve more notoriety from a second act in reactionary politics than from actually playing sports.
The paradigmatic example is Gaines, who tied a transgender woman for fifth place in a 2022 college swim meet and simply never stopped complaining about it. Within months, Gaines was speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference, where Trump introduced her as “our beautiful, great swimmer.” Since then, she’s launched a podcast, published a children’s book and a memoir, and secured endorsement deals for (among other things) herbal supplements and ivermectin, according to Mother Jones. She has also been paid tens of thousands of dollars in speaking fees—not bad for an ex-college athlete who last raced four years ago.
More recently, the former NBA center Enes Kanter Freedom has been trying to capitalize on Cunningham’s fame by “declaring” for the 2027 WNBA draft on the grounds that he “identifies” as a woman. (“If simply declaring who you are is all that’s required, then I meet every single requirement necessary to compete in the WNBA,” he said on August 7, with a smirk that will be instantly familiar to anyone who has watched Ben Shapiro speak.) A few weeks later, Kanter Freedom sat courtside at a Chicago Sky game wearing a shirt that read, “WOMAN noun. adult human female,” and got banned from the arena after trying to pick a fight with WNBA players who understandably found his presence equal parts offensive and desperate.
The overwhelming majority of WNBA players and coaches see Kanter Freedom’s antics for exactly what they are. One of them, Cameron Brink, a forward for the Los Angeles Sparks, called trans women in sports a “nonissue” and a thinly disguised attempt at “targeting a vulnerable community.” She also described Kanter Freedom, a 34-year-old center who last appeared in an NBA game in 2022, as a “stupid piece of shit” who is “just trying to stay relevant.”
Brink is correct on all counts. The problem is that for anyone who wants to “stay relevant” these days, hawking transphobic talking points in public is a pretty good strategy. Over the past decade, politicians have mastered the art of using sports as a wedge issue to frame anti-trans discrimination as, to borrow Cunningham’s words, “common sense.” Conservative pundits have made transphobia a regular feature of their programming, and X, the social network that the noted transphobe Elon Musk acquired in 2022, is a cesspool of gleeful hate speech. As Miles Klee points out at Wired, the fact that the WNBA has never had a trans player has not stopped X users and YouTubers, inspired by Cunningham, from pushing conspiracy theories that there are secretly trans women playing WNBA games right now, and that the league is covering it up.
People like Cunningham—celebrities with name recognition, millions of followers, and/or a knack for creating viral moments—are very useful additions to the anti-trans movement, because they are well equipped to appeal to new audiences who hear a phrase like “protecting women and girls” and don’t clock it as a dog whistle. In July, after the Supreme Court upheld a state law barring trans girls from playing on women’s teams as a matter of “safety and competitive fairness,” Gaines touted sports bans as a way to make transphobia seem a little less toxic. “Each major [court] decision gives your ordinary person more cover to say something that . . . was the standard, like the default position to take, really not that long ago,” she said.
Perhaps the grimmest aspect of Cunningham’s fame is how much easier she’s made it for athletes to pivot into the culture wars. Cunningham, 30, hasn’t aged out of her sport like Gaines did. She also isn’t washed up like Kanter Freedom, whose most memorable moment in the NBA was when TV cameras captured his visibly disgusted head coach seemingly muttering “can’t play Kanter” after a characteristically bad defensive sequence.
At the same time, Cunningham is a backup who is probably past the midway point of her career, and it makes total sense for her to be thinking about what comes next. There are plenty of after-basketball paths Sophie Cunningham could explore that do not involve further emboldening vile bigots obsessed with driving trans people from public life. But none of those paths are as easy or as lucrative as this one. That’s why she’s taking it.
