Fascist frenzy targets transgender athletes in blatant attempt at distraction

For the last few years, the WNBA has been the unfortunate, unwilling battleground for a number of America’s cultural wars. Since the league’s burst in popularity in 2024, the American right has made a habit of spinning narratives out of perceived injustices in the league. Most recently, conservatives have been particularly embittered by comments made by one Sophie Cunningham, a bench player for the Indiana Fever. Cunningham, also known as “MAGA Barbie” (earning the nickname after making a name for herself as a right-wing microcelebrity). Cunningham has previously used social media to comment on divisive topics like immigration enforcement and family separation, but her most recent point of concern has been the topic of whether or not transgender women should be allowed to play in women’s sports leagues. Stating her concerns about “young girls in sport” having to play against “biological men,” Cunningham, in a simple press conference, reinvigorated the right’s dreams of removing transgender people from sport altogether. Since then, conservatives have begun rallying outside of WNBA events, protesting the league’s policy which allows transgender players to participate, as well as the inclusion of transgender people in sports as a whole.

Conservatives don't actually care about women’s sports. Most conservatives don't even watch women’s sports. If they did, they’d probably know that the WNBA has only ever had one openly transgender player: Layshia Clarendon. While Clarendon did have a rather respectable career (12 seasons in length), she certainly possessed no noticeable “biological advantage” over her competition. Even if that were the case, though, if the American right regarded women’s sports in the same way they regarded men’s sports, they’d have no problem with any supposed “biological advantages.” Not every basketball player is 7’4”, but nobody would think to ban Victor Wembanyama from the NBA because he has an “advantage” over the other players—that’s just how sports work. That doesn't occur to conservatives, though, because it simply isn’t about sport for them. It’s about hurting transgender people. The past two years have been proof that the right’s ideal vision for America is one without transgender people in it. Banning transgender people from sport is only about establishing legal precedent for legislation restricting these Americans. Once you can ban trans people from sports, you can justify bathroom bans, and when you justify bathroom bans, you can justify—as awful as it sounds to the reasonable person—individuals being forced to expose themselves to prove that they're cisgender (there are documented cases of this happening to both transgender and cisgender athletes). It’s not exactly like this is the first sign of America descending into an authoritarian surveillance state seemingly structured around the basic disregard of human dignity, but it absolutely still merits alarm.

Even if there was some guaranteed advantage that all trans athletes had over cisgender athletes, it simply isn’t an issue because there just aren’t that many trans athletes, period. The American right has worked itself into a frenzy over an imaginary boogeyman—the very possibility of a trans athlete ever being allowed to compete. The non-existence of this issue, however, has yet to deter conservative outrage. The right frames it as an issue of “common sense,” acting as though there is no good  reason that a transgender woman could have to want to play sports in a league with other women. That’s the thing, though. You will never hear a conservative say the phrase “transgender woman,” you’ll hear them say things like “biological men.” At the same time, they’ll refer to cisgender athletes (regardless of their age) as “girls.” They try to frame the narrative as though every transgender woman is a predator looking to prey on innocent, helpless, infantilized women. They are anything but deterred from the fact that there are no credible instances of this occurring, and fixate on the possibility that it hypothetically “could” happen.

Conservatives like to act as if transgender people are inherently evil, and that there is absolutely no possible way anyone could reasonably believe otherwise. Perhaps this may be a tad alarmist, but spinning narratives such as this is exactly what fascists do. Elsewhere in this issue, a writer is commenting on the Trump Administration’s ongoing policy of capturing migrants deemed as “illegal” and detaining them in prisons that would be considered inhumane for a rabid animal. There are so many parallels between Nazi Germany and today’s America that it gets easy to dismiss when people point out the obvious similarities. Still, it shouldn’t be lost on anyone with a basic understanding of what fascist Germany was like, that the way the Trump Administration has been incarcerating migrants en masse, and demonizing transgender people as though every member of this one minority—just one percent of the American population--is a part of  a coordinated movement seeking to prey on American girls, that what we’re seeing now are the actions of a state that wants to eradicate a portion of it’s population. Perhaps it’s time to stop dismissing the obvious parallels between these two regimes and start being alarmed.

Back to the topic of sport, though. When the debate about transgender athletes isn’t used to demonize trans women and paint them as predators, it’s usually when someone dwells on the fact that, yes, technically, if someone really wanted to, they could dedicate years to “faking a transgender identity” in order to use the slight difference between bodies of different sexes to somehow “dominate” a sport. Maybe such a thing would be an issue in a universe where women’s sports get the respect they deserve, and where female athletes get the pay they deserve, but that is not the case. To argue against trans athletes, one has to go through so much mental gymnastics, make so many wild assumptions, and go through such wild leaps in logic, that it’s confidently safe to say that transgender athletes are a non-issue, and the fact that so many influencers and politicians are so passionate about this non-issue is really weird. The few transgender athletes that do exist aren’t predators; they’re just human beings who want to play and compete in the sports that they love. Sport and competition are an integral part of the human experience, and it’s inhumane and draconic to ban a segment of the population from that because of the “possibility” of issues that don’t ever happen. People like Sophie Cunningham are not “activists” for advocating against trans athletes—they’re just mouthpieces for a fascist regime who are gullible enough to care about petty culture wars while their planet is trudging towards its demise.

by Veronica Holladay

Published October 5, 2026

Oshkosh West Index Volume 123 Issue 1