“Look, I'm not trying to do a conspiracy here,” wrote right-wing commentator Sydney Watson in an X post on Monday, before proceeding to implicitly endorse one.
The Australian YouTuber, who has more than a million followers on that platform, had shared a 2024 video of Brittney Griner, center for the WNBA’s Connecticut Sun, admiring a new basketball arena at Baylor University, where she was a legendary powerhouse NCAA player between 2009 and 2013. Watson speculated in her post that “maybe the reason the WNBA refuses to define ‘woman’ and definitively say that men can't play in the league is because there is already a man ... in the league.”
The baseless and inflammatory remark (Griner is a cisgender woman) came amid an ongoing moral panic about transgender women in sports, which has been ginned up by MAGA world and Donald Trump with help from a handful of female athletes. The most outspoken of these is Riley Gaines, a former collegiate swimmer for the University of Kentucky; she tied for fifth in a 2022 NCAA championship event with Lia Thomas, a transgender competitor, and soon rocketed to fame as an anti-transgender activist thanks to the grievance-industrial complex of the far right.
In the WNBA, Sophie Cunningham, a shooting guard and small forward for the Indiana Fever, has likewise begun to embrace a role as spokeswoman for this rancorous movement.
Cunningham made waves with a July ESPN profile that quoted her opposition to allowing trans women in leagues such as the WNBA, becoming an icon of transphobic fear-mongering overnight. She explained in the interview that she wanted to “protect young girls in a locker room, or young girls in sport who shouldn't have to go against biological men.” In subsequent comments, Cunningham reaffirmed her stance: “I think it’s kind of common sense,” she told members of the press before a game. “I think it’s really important to protect children, and that’s little girls who are also involved in that category. I stand on what I said.”
But the uproar over the WNBA not expressly forbidding the inclusion of trans athletes is much ado about nothing. No transgender women have ever played in the league, which noted in a statement this month that there are also “no immediate eligibility matters” for it to address. League commissioner Cathy Engelbert has dismissed the anti-trans online vitriol and tiny protests outside stadiums as the work of “haters.”
To keep their non-controversy alive, then, culture warriors have been forced to get creative. As former NBA players Enes Kanter Freedom and Royce White, both cisgender men, fight to prove that identifying as women makes them eligible for the 2027 WNBA draft in April (it doesn’t), Watson and others in her orbit are seeding the lie that active players such as Griner are secretly transgender. It’s a development that validates years of warnings from activists that the right’s campaign to allegedly “save women’s sports” harms cisgender women as well as transgender athletes, leading to dangerous harassment across the board.
Another MAGA influencer with nearly 400,000 followers on X, for example, on Tuesday went far beyond demands that the WNBA bar trans players, calling for cheek swabs to determine the sex chromosomes of active players. That Tuesday post included a photo of Griner on the court. “Women’s sports exist because men and women are different,” the user wrote. “If the league is terrified of a cheek swab, that tells you everything you need to know.”
The sentiment that individuals assigned male at birth are already playing in the WNBA as women is now widespread across a social media platform where owner Elon Musk famously declared the words “cis” and “cisgender” to be slurs that violate community guidelines. A self-described “American Patriot” on the site who goes by “Kentucky Girl” and has more than 150,000 followers wrote this week, “I think it's possible there are already men in the WNBA and that's exactly why they are struggling to handle this situation.” The post included pictures of Griner as well as Courtney Williams (Minnesota Lynx), Natasha Cloud (Chicago Sky), Alyssa Thomas (Phoenix Mercury), and Crystal Dangerfield (formerly of the Dallas Wings, she currently plays for a Turkish basketball club).
And yet another blue check X user suggested to her sizable audience on Monday that the league was covering for any number of rostered men, stating she is “pretty sure there are already men playing in the WNBA,” adding, “the only question is how many.”
On the Facebook page Transvestigation Disclosure NOW 2.0, a long-running conspiracist group with some 50,000 members, basically no one is immune to accusations of being trans, and just about any WNBA player fits the bill. (“Transvestigation” is a term used for pseudoscientific analysis of a person’s physical features to supposedly “prove” they are transgender.) Users there have lately misidentified Angel Reese (Atlanta Dream), Sabrina Ionescu (New York Liberty), and, frequently, Cunningham’s teammate Caitlin Clark as trans; one member has claimed that the entire Las Vegas Aces team is “dudes.”
Cunningham’s politics haven’t protected her, either, with the group mostly agreeing that she is a male. Likewise, a verified X account has posted Cunningham’s swimsuit photos from Sports Illustrated and commented, “Sophie Cunningham is a man, you see it right?”
Clearly, the hysteria over trans athletes has left the door wide open to foment hate against cis women athletes, too, who may be taller, more muscular, and look less traditionally “feminine” than some wholly invented visual standard of womanhood. But the slippery slope gets steeper, as it turns out. Tuesday on Fox News, The Five host Dana Perino said that players voicing anger over the rising tide of transphobia were “proving that women shouldn’t have a league,” because they were “too dramatic.”
It sure didn’t take long to go from protecting the legitimacy of the WNBA to advocating for its dissolution. Almost as if these weren’t real fans to begin with.
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