The Right Has Created Their Perfect Trans Athlete

A lot of people in and around the WNBA are talking about trans women. In the aftermath of Indiana Fever role player Sophie Cunningham’s negative comments about trans people playing sports in an ESPN profile, transphobic right-wing grifters and small groups of protesters have made a show of themselves at her games. In response, Storm co-owner Celeste Keaton got suspended by the league for telling off a couple of Cunningham boosters, while coaches like Cheryl Reeve and Natalie Nakase have given statements in support of trans women and girls participating in sports. Still others in the league, like Caitlin Clark, Fire coach Alex Sarama, and Fever coach Stephanie White have delivered more mealy-mouthed quotes about this controversy that Fox News describes as a “culture war” and ESPN describes as “the disunited United States that shadows the WNBA.”

If you came across these headlines as a non-sports fan, it would probably be fair for you to assume that there’s a trans woman playing in the WNBA, or at least one at a high level in college who might be drafted soon. Google’s autocomplete suggestions, which offer phrases like “trans wnba star” or “wnba player who looks like a man,” imply that some number of curious people are trying to put a proper name to all this chatter. But there’s no such trans basketball player. Not unlike that period in the 2000s when male athletes would get asked if they’d be comfortable with an imaginary gay teammate, these quotes, both for and against, are all about trans women and girls as a concept, as opposed to an actual woman who could potentially speak for herself.

So, why is anyone talking about this? Let’s go back to the most memorable presidential campaign ad of 2024, the one I remember seeing all over the MLB playoffs that year: “Kamala is for they/them, not you.” Following Trump’s win, a number of people upset by the result blamed trans people—as a concept—for the Democratic Party’s defeat, while Republicans went full steam ahead with the idea that they could win by publicizing that their opponents weren’t sufficiently anti-trans. It’s no secret that they see women’s sports as the key wedge issue that they can use to their advantage, selling people who might otherwise recoil at their policies on the idea that a handful of athletic trans girls and an even smaller number of athletic trans women with comparable hormone levels to cis women represent some existential threat to womanhood—and that the only way forward would be mandatory sex testing for any girl who might want to play soccer or volleyball with her friends.