Indiana Fever guard Sophie Cunningham makes three-point shots from half-court while barely breaking a sweat. But while her on-court swagger turned her into everyone’s favorite meme, her unapologetic stance on men in women’s sports has reignited America’s most polarizing debate.
“I am here to extend love. But I also think with that love is truth, being honest,” Cunningham told ESPN last month. “And I want to protect young girls in a locker room, or young girls in sport who shouldn’t have to go against biological men.” She’s been branded as anti-trans, but she isn’t spreading hate. Far from it.
Cunningham was later asked to clarify her position, but she didn’t take the apology tour bait. She told the Athletic, “I said what I said. I think it’s kind of common sense … I think it’s really important to protect children, and that’s little girls who are also involved in that category.”
Despite the shift in opinion around trans-identifying men in women’s sports (roughly two-thirds of Americans think athletics should correspond to biological sex), the battle many thought was over is still raging on.
As the Indiana Fever took on the Minnesota Lynx on Sunday, Cunningham was “booed throughout the game,” per ESPN, while Lynx coach Cheryl Reeve was praised for wearing a shirt proclaiming, “Trans kids belong.” A rally supporting Cunningham outside the arena triggered counterprotesters. And once the crowd moved indoors, former swimmer Riley Gaines took heat from event officials for holding a sign that read “Sophie, thank you — A girl mom,” reportedly because it mentioned Cunningham by name.
Even unsuspecting fans got wrapped up in the drama. When 16-year-old Ahnaleigh Wilson attended a Fever vs. Seattle Storm game with a homemade sign that read, “Thank you Sophie for speaking up for girls,” Storm co-owner Celeste Keaton approached Wilson and her friend, calling them “f*cking insane.”
Wilson recalled the moment, telling The Daily Wire, “She first said, ‘Jesus loves everyone.’ When I replied, ‘Yes, I know,’ she repeated more forcefully, ‘No, Jesus loves everyone!’ She then said, ‘For you to come here and pull this sh*t,’ referring to my [XX-XY] shirt and sign, and then said ‘You are f*cking insane’ while repeatedly pointing to her head. She ended by saying, ‘I hope God forgives you for your sins’ … I was humiliated.”
Photo by David Berding/Getty Images
Keaton never personally apologized, but she was banned from five subsequent Storm home games.
As a resident of Washington state, which allows men to compete in women’s sports, Wilson had originally been invited to sit courtside as part of a cohort of girls who had been advocating for women’s sports. She had already lost a regional championship race to a biological boy.
“After spending the past two and a half years speaking up for fairness in girls’ sports, I couldn’t believe I would have the opportunity to sit just feet away from a woman I deeply admired for using her platform to stand up for girls like me,” she explained. “People are saying I was there to create conflict. But that is not true … I walked through the arena surrounded by political signs, transgender shirts, and messages I don’t personally agree with, yet I didn’t demand they be removed or act offended. I respected their right to express their views.”
Cunningham’s popularity and outspoken defiance against progressive women’s sports orthodoxy has earned her enemies. The fact that she was featured in the 2026 “Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue” probably only makes the opposition tense up even tighter. Despite her confidence, she doesn’t hit the locker room unscathed.
Cunningham has consistently called out aggressive play against teammate Caitlyn Clark, the Fever point guard who single-handedly revived “visibility, television ratings, attendance, sponsorships and national interest” in the WNBA, as Basketball Network puts it. Some refer to Cunningham as Clark’s “bodyguard,” acting as a diversion to pull media attention away from Clark’s headline-making feuds with ballers such as Angel Reese.
Clark, who has yet to speak out on much more than basketball, once again dodged questions about protecting women’s sports. During a presser this weekend, she supposedly broke her silence on the matter by saying, “It’s not really a discussion we really have in our locker room. I think it’s for leagues and the governing bodies to work with their athletes to find solutions, but our focus is on basketball.”
Back in the day, Michael Jordan famously observed “Republicans buy sneakers too” — preferring to put energy into the game, not his activism. It was a time when political statements were rare and galvanizing. Boycotts during the Nazi-era Berlin Olympics and Muhammad Ali’s opposition to the draft for the Vietnam War rocked the globe. Then came the look-at-me era where mediocre athletes — ahem, Colin Kaepernick — attempted to leverage their own visibility via alleged victim status.
Cunningham, on the other hand, isn’t preoccupied with gazing at her own navel. Instead, she plants herself firmly at the center of this crucial moment in order to slay the opposition six ways to Sunday. All for the sake of the next generation. The Daily Wire reached out for comment, but she seems to be walking the line between speaking her mind and forming an alliance with any one side of the aisle. Even so, that doesn’t mean she’s holding back — or completely staying out of politics. Maybe this is what happens when a six-year-old black belt in Taekwondo grows up to be a six-foot-one killer on the court.
Photo by Christian Petersen/Getty Images
“I’ve always been kind of a natural leader,” Cunningham said in a recent Fever promo. “I bring the energy, I bring the feistiness, I’m a little bit sassy.” By this point, she recognizes this is her moment, and she won’t be relegated to the sidelines.
Cunningham was Mizzou royalty when she joined the University of Missouri Tigers women’s basketball team in 2015. Born and raised in the Show-Me State, she joined her older sister Lindsey Cunningham Hudson, who was already on the team. Her parents Jim and Paula Cunningham were former Mizzou athletes. Same story goes for her aunt, uncle, and grandfather.
The pressure to perform didn’t mess with Cunningham’s head. She scored a record-breaking 42 points in her D1 debut and was named SEC Freshman of the Year. She made quick work of revving up thousands of fans, eventually wrapping them around her pointer finger. Maybe she gets her chutzpah from a wholesome upbringing in the heartland.
“This is kind of my safe space out here,” Cunningham said of her extended family’s soybean and corn farm where she spent much of her childhood. “Nature has a weird way of kind of settling the soul and your emotions.”
Michael Hickey/Getty Images
Cunningham was only beginning her WNBA career when the eligibility debate became a cultural flashpoint after trans-identifying swimmer Lia Thomas tied Riley Gaines in competition. At the time, Cunningham was just two years into her tenure for the Phoenix Mercury after being drafted 13th overall in 2019.
While she initially focused on developing her talent on the hardwood, it seems she may have experienced something of a change of heart in the following years. Two years before joining the Fever, she posted on Instagram: “I’m tired of how I’ve been living as of late… it’s time to step it up. 2023 is the year I live out my truth and become what’s been tugging at my heart. Just here to encourage whoever might feel that same fire God has put in your soul to go for it.”
Perhaps it was Cunningham’s personal transformation, along with a simmering down of the trans movement in the media, that triggered the star athlete to speak up. While the rest of society seemed to be taking its foot off the pedal when it came to so-called “gender affirming care,” bathroom access, and Pride, the WNBA seemed determined to keep the trans visibility going — even though no openly trans-identifying men have ever played in the league.
While fair competition between biological sexes appears to be l’inspiration du jour in 2026, those at the highest level of the WNBA — an organization literally conceived to offer female athletes a fighting chance to excel at their chosen sport — appear to support biological males invading their teams. But Cunningham hopes to protect opportunity for female athletes across the board. And she won’t take ambiguity around “inclusivity” as an answer to that.
We were sold the story that trans athletes have been competing in women’s sports for decades. That our “bizarre focus on trans people,” as the San Francisco government puts it, was unwarranted. If only 1% of adults over age 13 were trans in the first place, how could men competing in women’s sports cause any problems? Anyone even noticing the concussion Peyton McNabb suffered after being hit by a volleyball shot by a transgender opponent was wrong. In reality, young girls needed to act more polite about boys stealing their wins, records, titles, opportunities, scholarships, and innocence.
Title IX was intended to provide fair treatment for girls and women in sports. It sounds like a joke that influential female athletes would pull up the ladder behind them to preserve their personal ideology, leaving thousands of young girls effectively holding the door for men.
“Female athletes are often told that if we speak up, it means we don’t care about transgender athletes or that we’re hurting them and that isn’t true,” Ahnaleigh Wilson said. “But those making that claim rarely stop to consider the impact these policies have on female athletes. Our experiences, our concerns, and our voices should matter too. Supporting one group should never require another group to stay silent and be pushed aside especially when girls are being pushed out of a category that was created for them.”
It would take years before the White House banned funding for men from competing in women’s sports. The trend would trickle downstream to the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), the International Olympic Committee, and at least 27 different states that enacted legal protection for women’s sports.
Photo by David Berding/Getty Images
This change seems hopeful. But the dust Cunningham’s innocuous statements kicked up reveals how tenuous these wins are. Luckily, other trailblazers are joining the movement to write the next chapter for women’s sports.
“The media elite are trying as hard as they can to control the narrative and suppress the real story, which is that people aren’t afraid anymore to stand up and say: Men cannot become women and women deserve their own sports and spaces,” XX-XY Founder and CEO Jennifer Sey told The Daily Wire. “We aren’t bigots for saying so. We are believers in biological reality. We’re the normal ones. We’re the moral ones.”
Describing the supposed kerfuffle during the Fever-Lynx game on Sunday, Sey notes ESPN’s cover-up of the real story. Instead of division between trans supporters and Sophie fans, the atmosphere in the stands was pure, unbridled joy.
“It’s the last gasp of a dying movement that never should have been … The reality was XX-XY shirts were everywhere. ‘We love Sophie’ signs were everywhere,” Sey explains. “Riley [Gaines] and I were stopped repeatedly. For photos and thank yous. And people even bought us snacks to say thanks.”
Cunningham, Sey, and others who still believe in common sense represent the silent majority.
“At the rally before the game, we outnumbered the unhinged protesters by at least 10:1. We were mostly women and girls, all there with love and joy. Just wanting to take pictures with the life-size Sophie sign and celebrate and thank her — as well as Ahnaleigh Wilson and all of the women who have been fighting for fairness and reality for years. We aren’t alone anymore. And we are celebrating.”
At a recent matchup, Cunningham handed one of her game-worn Crazy Energy signature Adidas sneakers to an excited young fan who was thrilled to meet her hero. Posting a video of the moment, Cunningham shared that this connection is “what it’s all about.” Proving Cunningham’s un-cancelable reign just a week earlier, her player-exclusive pink kicks sold out in minutes at $120 a pop.
the reaction on this young fan’s face when Sophie Cunningham gifted her a game-worn shoe after tonight’s win in Portland 🥹 pic.twitter.com/ZrEYqshqAd
— Indiana Fever (@IndianaFever) August 1, 2026
Surely Cunningham sees the sullen faces of her critics, angrily clawing their way into her spotlight. But she doesn’t have time for that. Her positive energy is far too brilliant to be snuffed out by negative chatter from the nosebleed section.
“When we can just go out there and have fun and be competitors, it’s just easy,” Cunningham says. She’s intentional about fostering an environment where everyone can enjoy the game.
“You want to make sure that your home court is special to you as a team,” she says. “You gotta get your fans involved. That’s our sixth man right there and they’re loud, they’re feisty, they’re sassy, and when you get them involved, then it’s game over.”
Young female athletes deserve to reach their full potential, and a level playing field is always worth fighting for. The future of women’s sports may still hang in the balance. Luckily, we have a true champion to look up to.
“Sophie is the active pro athlete we’ve been waiting for to ignite this movement in the popular culture,” Sey says. “She is doing exactly what she needs to do. She is holding her ground. She isn’t bending a knee or walking it back. And she’s doing it with grace and kindness. We couldn’t ask for a better athlete to lead the charge.”
***
This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.
