Sophie Cunningham is a mid-tier guard on the WNBA’s Indiana Fever who went viral for aggressively pointing her finger at an opposing player and hasn’t been part of the starting lineup since May. The 29-year-old hoopster can’t steal the spotlight with her game, so she’s pivoting and making her name by being MAGA trash instead.
Just before the WNBA’s July 25 All-Star Game—which, it must be noted, did not include one Sophie Cunningham, who has never made the All-Star team—she got a weird soft-touch puff piece in ESPN thanks to her becoming a “cultural flashpoint.”
Yeah, that’s just code for “anti-trans conservative blonde chick who says bigoted things and gets seal claps from bigots.”
Even when the author of the ESPN article tries to puff her up, it’s a fail.
Indiana Fever’s Caitlin Clark, left, and Sophie Cunningham argue with officials during a WNBA basketball game against the Phoenix Mercury on July 9 in Phoenix.AP
“One of the league’s sharpest shooters — she has ranked in the top 10 in 3-point percentage in three of the past five years, and is on pace to do so again this year while shooting a career-best 43.7%.”
In the top 10. In one thing. In three of the past five years. Got it. We’ve got a real superstar here.
You don’t need to bother with the gazillion words in the article about whether Cunningham is a hero or an enforcer or learn about her childhood or whatever, because all of it is there to soften the core of her anti-trans bigotry, one entirely out of step with the league she plays in.
“I got a lot of negative feedback about me hating trans. And I’m like, I never once said that. I think that I am here to extend love. But I also think with that love is truth, being honest,” she blathered. “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.”
This garbage could have come out of the mouth of President Donald Trump. Or his bigoted henchman Stephen Miller. It’s rancid anti-trans intolerance, and Cunningham knows it, and she knows that there is an audience for it.
While Cunningham played coy with ESPN about how she doesn’t express her political beliefs, and is “very much in the middle,” and agrees “with things on both sides,” and whined that “people love to assume” she’s MAGA Barbie, her TikTok account makes pretty clear what her beliefs are.
To her 3.2 million followers, Cunningham has reposted a video slamming immigrants and mocking family separation along with one claiming rap is demonic. She follows Candace Owens and Riley Gaines. She posted some “USA core” that included Trump humping the flag at CPAC in 2020. Your beliefs aren’t a mystery, girl.
The Trump administration is eager to claim Cunningham, and she seems just fine with it. Over on its official account on X, the Department of Education posted a picture of Cunningham in a crown with a caption reading “Common sense prevails,” after Cunningham doubled down on her anti-trans remarks, saying “I said what I said. I think it’s kind of common sense.”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt also made sure to praise Cunningham and share that Trump is clinging to her every word, lauding Cunningham for “standing up for women and girls.” Were Cunningham at all concerned about becoming a vector for the administration to launder anti-trans talking points, she would shut this sort of thing down. Instead, she’s rolling with it.
Related | Ivy League university caves to Trump’s anti-trans agenda
Cunningham’s accelerating MAGA behavior and fandom looks a lot like an exit strategy for someone wholly out of step with her league and her sport, where the winningest coach of all time, Cheryl Reeve of the Minnesota Lynx, is passionately, openly defending trans athletes.
“Exclusion is never the answer, separate isn’t equal, and trans lives matter,” Reeve said. “So to take away something that’s so valuable that sports brings to young people, in particular, and what it does, as I have a youngster, encourages you to be part of a team and what it gives you in terms of teamwork, leadership, competitiveness, all the things, they have every right to that as well.”
Cunningham seems to be banking on the fact that there’s room in the MAGAsphere for another Riley Gaines, and sigh, she’s probably right. Gaines has made a career out of the indignity, the horror, the civilization-destroying event of … tying a trans swimmer, Lia Thomas, for fifth place in the NCAA Division I Championships in 2022.
There seems to be a healthy conservative appetite for middling, conventionally attractive female athletes willing to use their perch to pretend to “protect” women and girls in sports by trafficking in anti-trans discrimination.
Well, at least if Cunningham leaves for her new lucrative career at Newsmax or whatever, the WNBA can finally be free of her.