Indiana Fever guard Sophie Cunningham was knocked to the floor by a blow to the head and neck from Chicago Sky’s DiJonai Carrington on Saturday, adding another episode to the growing series of, until now, verbal confrontations over transgender players in women’s basketball.
Carrington caught Cunningham from behind as she drove for a layup, and officials upgraded the foul to a Flagrant 2 after finding ‘windup, impact and follow-through’, automatically ejecting her. Cunningham later said she ‘absolutely’ believed the hit was intentional.
Former NCAA swimmer Riley Gaines, one of the most prominent supporters of Cunningham since she spoke out against biological males competing against women in July, posted a photograph of the foul shortly afterwards. ‘The price of standing for girls and women,’ Gaines wrote. Cunningham said she had barely spoken to Carrington before the incident and had no personal feud with her. ‘I guess she has some pent-up stuff,’ she said after Indiana’s 90–86 victory.
Minutes after being ejected, Carrington posted ‘WHITE PRIVILEGE @indianafever’ on Threads. Cunningham rejected the accusation, pointing out that she herself had previously been thrown out for a similar foul. Carrington had also backed former professional football player Megan Rapinoe’s criticism of Cunningham days earlier, responding ‘Clock it, Megan!’ beneath a post attacking the Indiana guard over her views and her association with Gaines.
The dispute has grown rapidly since Cunningham told ESPN that she wanted to ‘protect young girls’ and said they ‘shouldn’t have to go against biological men’. Her remarks have met both praise and outrage, while figures including Rapinoe and Minnesota Lynx coach Cheryl Reeve have spoken against her position. Reeve wore a ‘Trans kids belong’ shirt during Indiana’s game in Minnesota last Sunday.
The controversy gained even more momentum on Friday, when former NBA players Enes Kanter Freedom and Royce White announced that they intended to enter the 2027 WNBA Draft while identifying as women, mocking the phenomenon of biological males competing against biological women and girls as a whole.
Kanter said that if ‘simply declaring who you are is all that’s required’, he met the requirements to compete in the league. White, the 6ft 8in former NBA first-round pick, described himself as a ‘sometimes identifying transgender woman’ and wrote that his ‘wig is in the mail’. He later doubled down with a video of himself playing basketball. ‘I haven’t even been publicly trans for 72 hours and I’m already getting so much hate,’ White wrote. ‘I just want to hoop with my girls in my feminine era! Why can’t y’all be happy for me?’ he wrote in the caption.
Whether Kanter and White could eventually end up in the 2027 Draft is not clear. The WNBA’s new collective bargaining agreement says that ‘only players who are women are eligible to play in the WNBA’, but does not define the word ‘women’ or set out a public rule covering transgender players.
Commissioner Cathy Engelbert has now told teams that the issue will be discussed by a task force of team presidents and general managers at a previously scheduled meeting next week. Engelbert said ‘ensuring fair competition’ remained one of the league’s highest priorities. In other words, as Polymarket put it on X, the WNBA is preparing to ‘review what a woman is’.
The debate comes after President Donald Trump moved federal policy firmly against allowing male athletes to compete in women’s sport. His February 2025 ‘Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports’ executive order directed federally funded schools and colleges to enforce Title IX on the basis of sex and declared that allowing males into female competitions was unfair to women and girls. The order does not directly govern the privately run WNBA.
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