the thing that infuriates me most about the sophie cunningham of it all is how profoundly performative the league’s response has been.
they were perfectly willing to respond to the alleged “backlash” surrounding paige and angel’s wager, and to make jonquel apologize for comments that were removed from their context during an all-star weekend stream - comments that ultimately have no meaningful bearing on the future of the league or any substantive impact on anyone’s life. yet when people ask the league to address the blatant transphobia being expressed by a player they are paying millions of dollars, suddenly the response is, “this is a new expansion of the league.” that is not an answer.
and then there is the argument itself, which is what frustrates me most about people like sophie cunningham, because there seems to be an almost complete inability to step back and consider what they are actually advocating for.
in the context of the wnba, there are not young girls in these professional locker rooms. there are adult women. so when the argument is specifically being made about transgender women allegedly entering wnba locker rooms and harming young girls, what exactly are we talking about? the hypothetical being presented is not grounded in the reality of the league or its locker rooms.
but more importantly, i think people are deliberately missing the larger point when they invoke the alleged protection of women and children. the issue is not whether a transgender person could theoretically be present in a recreational environment where children are playing sports. obviously, transgender people exist in every part of society. the issue is that you are taking the threat of sexual violence—which is very real—and assigning that threat disproportionately to a population that is not responsible for the overwhelming majority of it.
the people perpetrating sexual violence against women and children are overwhelmingly cisgender, and disproportionately cisgender men. so if your stated concern is protecting women and girls from sexual violence, why are transgender people being positioned as the central threat? why are you constructing elaborate hypothetical scenarios around a population that represents such a small proportion of the world instead of addressing the people who actually perpetrate the violence you claim to be so concerned about?
that is where the fearmongering becomes so transparent to me. you’ve taken a real and horrifying problem—sexual violence against women and children—and attached it to a marginalized group that has already been culturally constructed as suspicious. suddenly the conversation is no longer about preventing sexual violence. it is about whether transgender people should be allowed to exist in every day life. and because the original justification was “protecting women and children,” anyone who questions that premise can then be accused of opposing their safety.
and the consequences of that rhetoric do not remain confined to transgender women. once you establish that “woman” is something that must be externally verified in order to determine who belongs in an environment, you inevitably create a system in which women themselves become subject to suspicion: women with masculine features, women with higher testosterone, women who simply do not look the way someone expects a woman to look. we have already seen female athletes questioned, investigated, humiliated, and subjected to invasive scrutiny because somebody decided they did not appear feminine enough.
that is the contradiction i cannot get past. you cannot claim that you are protecting women from sexual misconduct while advocating for systems that make women more vulnerable to having their bodies inspected, questioned, exposed, and policed. you cannot say you are protecting young girls while creating an environment in which the solution to a hypothetical threat becomes determining of who is sufficiently female to belong in a space. eventually, someone has to decide what qualifies as “female enough”. and once that happens, women who fail to satisfy somebody else's arbitrary standard of femininity become collateral damage.
we have already seen how quickly this logic can be applied to women who have never had anything to do with transgender politics at all. imane khelif is a particularly obvious example: a woman who became the subject of global speculation about her sex because she did not conform to someone's expectations of what a woman should look like. that is the problem with turning femininity into a qualification that other people are entitled to authenticate. eventually, the question will stop being “how do we protect women?” and will become “which women do we believe are really women?” and it already has.
if your concern is genuinely about sexual violence, then talk about sexual violence. talk about the people who commit it, talk about why women and children are so often harmed by those they already know and trust, talk about institutional failures that allow abuse to continue. but do not take a problem overwhelmingly perpetrated by cisgender people, particularly cisgender men, and use it as an excuse to portray transgender people as uniquely dangerous. that is not protecting women and children. in fact it’s doing quite the opposite.
