This Week in Barrel Scraping (TWIBS) is Assigned Media’s longest running column! Every Friday, Aly Gibbs digs deep from the well of transphobia and finds the most obnoxious, goofy thing transphobes have said or obsessed over during the week and tears it to shreds.
Hark, friends, and hear me: A cisgender athlete said some stupid shit about transgender women! Sit by the fire and let me relay to you this super shocking, unprecedented story…
Sophie Cunningham is a shooting guard / small forward (whatever that means!) for the Indiana Fever, a team in the Women’s National Basketball Association. She was first drafted to the Phoenix Mercury in 2019, and was then traded to the Fever in 2025. She leans heavily on her faith as, I guess, some sort of Christian, having been baptized as an adult—which is, in my humble opinion, a hilarious thing to go out of your way to pursue as a grown ass woman—and she is a decent athlete, unlike fifth-place sore loser Riley Gaines, the collegiate swimmer who has made a career out of anti-trans activism.
Like Gaines in ‘23, Cunningham has decided to dip her toe in the anti-trans pond and see what scum she can churn up from the bottom. An ESPN feature on Tuesday, of which Cunningham is the star, begins by explaining her meteoric rise to national attention last year after she violently assaulted another player for no good reason. The feature drones on masturbatorily about Cunningham’s beef with Caitlin Clark and her skills on the court (tl;dr: she put ball in hoop good sometimes!), her troubled adolescent brawling, and what a loyal teammate she is, before finally getting to the part I actually give a shit: her undying HATRED of trans people!
Okay, the way it actually reads is that Cunningham says she’s accused of being a “MAGA Barbie,” which she calls projection (What?), before declaring: “I got a lot of negative feedback about me hating trans [sic]. And I’m like, ‘I never once said that.’ I think that I am here to extend love. But I also think that love is truth, being honest. 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.”
Nothing says love like referring to a whole category of human being using a singular form adjective! I hate to say it, Sophie, but the trans don’t find your truth and honesty particularly truthful or honest. I mean, do I really have to ask what the hell a biological male is again? It’s not a meaningful descriptor. It isn’t useful to anyone except bigots. It’s a dog whistle that says a whole lot about the people who use it, whether they know it or not.
“I’m very much in the middle,” she adds, like every poorly informed dipshit Libertarian you’ve ever met. “I agree with things on both sides, disagree with things on both sides. And that’s all I’ve ever said about my political beliefs.”
It’s unfortunate to hear women in important role model positions speak so disparagingly about trans people. She says young girls in locker rooms must be protected… from what? I’m sure that, if pressed, Cunningham couldn’t produce a single real-world example of a trans woman doing harm to a cis woman in a bathroom, changing room, locker room, or any other single gender space. Ever. It’s not a real concern. When men want to assault women, they don’t pretend to be trans, much less transition. They become cops, or priests, or coaches.
Speaking to the media on Tuesday, Cunningham doubled down, saying: “I said what I said. I think it’s common sense … I think it’s really important to protect children, that’s little girls who are also involved in that category, so I stand on what I said, and I’ll always believe that.”
Asked whether or not she sees her anti-trans advocacy taking a more concrete shape in the future, Cunningham said, “I’m not a very political person, but I do have beliefs, I have morals. I’ll always stand on those and be true to who I am. People are gonna take it how they wanna take it, but I’ve never really even said anything about that, so… when it comes to protecting young girls in sport, and women in sport, I feel very strongly about that.”
She blathered on, saying stupidly, “That’s why you have Title IX, that’s why you have some of the greats in women’s sports.”
It’s clear Cunningham is deeply uninformed, and the cavalierness with which she’s spouting this transphobic drek is gross. She smiles sweetly as she says, “I extend love, I don’t dislike anyone,” and talks about finding common ground with people who are dissimilar to you… all while she implicates trans girls and women as predators against whom cis girls and women must be protected. I don’t know if she’s an idiot or a liar—perhaps some mixture of the two—but it’s an old, tired song and dance at this point.
The Fever have refused to apologize for their player’s blatant bigotry, saying in a soft-spined statement: “Our players are thoughtful adults with their own perspectives and voices, and those views are their own. We are committed to welcoming fans from every background and treating everyone with respect, and that’s what guides us as an organization.”
I think there’s a case to be made that refusing to intercede as one of your players slanders an entire demo of people as dangerous predators isn’t an example of treating everyone with respect, but what do I know?
Many WNBA fans have decried Cunningham’s blatantly transphobic statements, even demanding that she be suspended from play, but it seems unlikely that anything productive will come from this backlash. The only question that truly remains is whether or not Cunningham is going to lean hard into her newfound anti-trans activism and become a full-time grifter like Gaines, the other MAGA Barbie in that sphere.
