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Credit: Casuals Podcast; Trevor Ruszkowski - Imagn Images
Sophie Cunningham is the latest sports star to take on the issue of trans athlete participation, leading to yet another politicized news cycle in the WNBA.
The comments prompted supporters and counterprotesters to stage a demonstration over the issue in Seattle before a Storm-Fever game, and the Storm’s co-owner was suspended for confronting Cunningham’s supporters during the game.
SiriusXM’s Katie Nolan perhaps had the most thorough deconstruction of Cunningham’s perspective on her Casuals podcastthis week.
In a monologue addressing Cunningham directly, Nolan contrasted Cunningham’s support of the UFC with her purported desire to protect women in sports, while calling out Cunningham for failing to understand the broader context of her comments despite playing alongside many LGBTQ women in the WNBA and even cohosting a podcast with a straight man who recently called the trans athlete conversation a “borderline nonexistent issue” and said it was distracting from far more urgent problems facing the U.S.
“One side politically is incredibly invested in this issue, and that’s because one side politically doesn’t have a lot of other issues that they’ve got pretty big approval on,” Nolan said.
“And now I am of the belief that the reason they have big approval on this is because people keep saying sentences like, ‘I don’t want little girls to have to go against biological men.’ Because on its face that sounds like something is common sense. That’s not what anybody’s asking for. Nobody is saying we should get rid of, for example, the WNBA and the NBA, and everybody should just compete together. Nobody’s saying that. And so the people that are packaging it as that are doing so on purpose. And when you are consuming it and going, ‘How could anyone disagree with this statement?’ You never consider that it’s because the statement itself does not reflect the actual issue that we’re discussing.”
A widely cited NBC News poll last year showed that three-fourths of respondents were against trans women competing in women’s sports. Nolan, however, believes that the argument has been twisted by the right wing’s extreme language rather than focusing on the actual considerations at hand, such as how to sort children in youth sports or how to scientifically evaluate sex and gender at the highest levels of professional competition.
Previously, Nolan has argued that figures like Fox News contributor Riley Gaines are also manipulating the conversation around trans athletes while not adequately standing up for actual issues facing women in sports, such as the abuse in the U.S. Gymnastics program. On her podcast Friday, Nolan grouped Cunningham into a similar bloc, arguing she is failing to apply basic critical thinking around the issue and its media coverage.
“All you’re telling us, Sophie, is that you don’t really have critical-thinking skills, or that you aren’t interested in employing them,” Nolan said. “You’re taking the message that’s being given to you by people who are highly invested in this dividing stuff, and you’re helping them sell it by not questioning it at all. Which is extra crazy given the fact that you’re surrounded by people you could talk to about this issue to better understand it.”
In this case, the hypocrisy Nolan pointed out in Cunningham is that she would partner with Dana White as a UFC ring girl on a card featuring Conor McGregor. While White was once caught on camera striking his wife, a civil jury found McGregor liable for the sexual assault of a woman, and he has since lost two appeals.
“You couldn’t catch me dead at that fight. F*ck Conor McGregor, respectfully,” Nolan said. “And you [follow up] by saying that it’s really important for you to protect little girls. From some theoretical transgender person who might take advantage of — so many things would have to happen for the harm you’re claiming to be worried about to actually be carried out — meanwhile men come into women’s sports in various positions of authority … and they take advantage of women all the time. And where were you, Sophie, on any of that?”
Nolan also pointed out that many sports governing bodies throughout the decade have essentially banned trans athletes from competing. In the U.S., the Trump administration has aggressively pursued restrictive policies, with both the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee and the NCAA following suit by adopting rules requiring athletes to compete against others of the sex they were assigned at birth.
“You’ve already ‘won,’ quote-unquote, in that way. And yet you and others seem unwilling to let this go,” Nolan said, again addressing Cunningham. “Or to even learn a little bit more about it, consider what the other side is trying to say. You just keep saying, ‘Well, I’m against men fighting against women, and I think it’s crazy that you’re not.’ What if you considered that that’s not what other people are arguing? What if you considered you’re misunderstanding the issue, and then consider that that’s because that was beneficial to whoever’s f*cking playing you?”
Judging from the support Cunningham’s comments received from mainstream figures like Stephen A. Smith and the way the Imane Khelif saga in the 2024 Olympics galvanized major sports personalities against the Algerian boxer, the more conservative viewpoint is winning this argument among the public (as illustrated by the NBC poll) as well as the media.
Still, Nolan has been consistent in her argument that women athletes should put more energy behind actual breaches of women’s safety in sports rather than the far less prevalent problem of trans women competing against cisgender women.
The post Katie Nolan calls out Sophie Cunningham over trans athlete take: ‘You don’t really have critical thinking skills’ appeared first on Awful Announcing.
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