In July, ESPN published a profile of Indiana Fever guard Sophie Cunningham, and one quote altered the course of the 2026 WNBA season.
“I got a lot of negative feedback about me hating trans,” Cunningham said. “And I’m like, ‘I never once said that.’ I think that I am here to extend love. But I also think with 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.”
Before we go any further, it must be noted that two nonbinary players have played in the WNBA, though none currently, and the WNBA has never had a known transgender player, per ESPN’s Katie Barnes. Of course, given the times we live in, facts didn’t factor into what happened next.
Shortly afterward, organizations against transgender women in women’s sports rallied around Cunningham and descended upon Fever games. Cunningham posed with Riley Gaines, and suddenly, the WNBA didn’t feel as safe a space it has historically felt for marginalized groups. (Thank goodness for Cheryl Reeve.)
Eventually, ex-NBA player Enes Kanter Freedom used Cunningham’s comments and the ensuing chaos as an excuse for a publicity stunt: declaring for the 2027 WNBA Draft and harassing Natasha Cloud at a game.
Those were real-life consequences. And regardless of Cunningham’s intentions when expressing her opinion about transgender athletes, she opened the door for entities with ulterior motives to take her comments and run — both to cash in personally and to push a harmful agenda to further divide the country.
According to an exclusive report from CT Jones of Rolling Stone, citing the data analytics company GUDEA and its founder, Keith Presley, “there were only a handful of tweets that ever got more than 3,000 retweets” related to the transgender athlete debate engulfing the WNBA.
“If you take out the eight top posts, this [narrative] didn’t happen. Nobody would be talking about this,” Presley said.
EXCLUSIVE: New Report Says WNBA Trans Debate Is Being Pushed Online For Profit: ‘The Point Is to Sow Division’
The trans athlete fight feels inescapable online. Data startup GUDEA says the data shows a different story.
Read: https://t.co/HcM9bf6a4o https://t.co/j3K4NQq5ld
— Rolling Stone (@RollingStone) October 10, 2026
GUDEA analyzed 188,631 relevant posts from July 20 to Aug. 12, per Rolling Stone, with nearly 99% of posts living on X and 3.57% falling in the “non-typical” bucket of influencers, pundits, and aggregation accounts.
“Georgia Paul, GUDEA’s head of customer success, tells Rolling Stone that the online conversation’s domination by ‘non-typical’ accounts is important because these individuals have the highest incentive to drive up engagement,” Jones wrote. “Since Elon Musk’s purchase of the platform in 2022, the founder has publicly stated that his goal is to make the app’s algorithm — and people’s feeds — free of political bias and more equitable for conservative posters. Not only can people who pay for premium X subscriptions now make money off of their most popular tweets, but they’re prioritized in comment sections, driving their tweets to the top.”
“You’re going to make money in these divisive ways because you’re tugging at real world conversations. Anger has turned into dollars for other people. The point is to sow division.”
— Jackie Powell (she/her) (@ClassicJpow) October 14, 2026
Paul and Presley both emphasized to Jones that the empirical data isn’t enough to conclude that “people don’t care about the trans debate in the real world,” but rather serves as proof that the agenda all along was to prey on (and inflame) people’s concerns to manufacture engagement and spin an overblown narrative.
“The primary motive for posting on the internet is no longer to have an opinion, a unique point of view, or add substance to the conversation. It is to make money,” Paul told Rolling Stone. “You’re going to make money in these divisive ways because you’re tugging at real-world conversations. Anger has turned into dollars for other people. The point is to sow division.”
Now, while GUDEA introduced raw data to the conversation, the writing has been on the sports media wall all along. Katie Nolan called out the hypocrisy and manipulation, while several prominent voices saw right through Kanter’s stunt. Even Jesse Watters aired out Fox News for pretending to care about the WNBA.
The best barometer is simple. As the WNBA season draws to a close — the Atlanta Dream and Golden State Valkyries are in the WNBA Finals — watch all those so-called WNBA fans, claiming visceral concern for women and the league, suddenly stop caring about the WNBA and transgender athletes. How can they cosplay without their culture war arena du jour?