On the court, the WNBA is thriving. After 30 years, its players are receiving a historic payout, along with a massive TV distribution deal that will mean more games, and hopefully even more fans. But off the court, all that attention has some downsides. Most recently, it means that the culture war has come for the WNBA.
Specifically, the league has found itself at the center of a debate over transgender athletes and women’s sports, one that Indiana Fever guard Sophie Cunningham ignited last month.
Cunningham, 30, has gained a reputation as an “enforcer” for her All-Star teammate, Caitlin Clark. In July, she told ESPN that “I think that I am here to extend love, but I also think that with 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.”
No known trans athletes have ever played in the WNBA, but that hasn’t much deterred pundits from weighing in. It’s the latest instance of the WNBA playing a central role in conversations about race and gender — even as most of the outrage is happening outside the court, while players and coaches would rather focus on basketball.
To get a better sense of what’s going on in the league — and why — Today, Explained co-host Noel King spoke with Ringer staff writer Seerat Sohi, who covers the NBA, WNBA, and women’s college basketball, about why the WNBA can’t seem to escape the culture wars.
Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
What is it about the WNBA ?
The WNBA is a league that invites, frankly, a lot of distraction, both because of its own institutional failures — I do think the WNBA really struggles at telling its own story and has at times run away from its own story — but I think in general, the WNBA has become fertile ground for the culture wars, as we put them, because the league has exploded in popularity at the same moment in the country where we are embroiled in this cultural, political, legal fight over what the role of women is in society.
Let’s break this down to the two pieces you mentioned. You referenced institutional failures. What do you mean?
The WNBA, from the top down, has been understaffed, and it has historically been marketed in a way that is obsessed with trying to bring in some apocryphal average American, the nuclear family. And at the same time, this has been a league that has been defined by people who have historically existed on the margins. They are female athletes at a time when historically female athletes were not paid much attention to, and in fact were mocked.
It’s the league that is primarily Black, that is openly queer, that is politically outspoken. And the league has always tried to toe the line of marketing the faces that feel more like a girl-next-door type of vibe.
To the point that early on, we can look at, for example, Sue Bird, who, when she entered the league [in 2002], was encouraged to not come out.
And if you look back at pictures of her, she is dressed in a way that not only is it feminine, but it is also not the issue. The issue is that she’s very clearly uncomfortable in her own skin. Diana Taurasi, whose jersey was just retired — if you look back at her awards, it’s the same thing.
Fast-forward to 2026, these are queer icons who are highly marketable in the media environment that we are in right now, but the WNBA has always been behind the eight ball in that regard because it has run away from its identity.
So by institutional failures, what we mean is maybe a lack of bravery or a lack of spine. You also said this exploded because the WNBA is of great interest at this moment to right-wing figures. What do you mean by that?
The right cares about the WNBA in the same way that it cares about who becomes a Disney princess. It understands the power of a good story. It understands symbolism. To see women on that stage thriving, to see them sweaty, to see them wanting, to see them be the main character instead of the object of somebody else’s affection or interest, to see them be the subject and be the ones that are going for something as opposed to being on the sidelines.
That in and of itself alone is very, very powerful. And then you think about where the WNBA is politically. This has always been a league that has been very outspoken. This is a league that in 2020 helped flip a Georgia Senate election and actually ousted their then-owner of the Atlanta Dream who spoke out against the Black Lives Matter movement.
I always understood the WNBA to have a smaller fan base. But the situation with Sophie Cunningham has made me realize it is much larger and much more middle-of-the-road than I would have thought. Did something change recently? Did the fan base of the WNBA grow?
[Indiana Fever All-Star] Caitlin Clark was an explosive figure. Caitlin Clark was really a gateway drug for WNBA fans. The sheer amount of eyeballs that she has brought to the game, the attention, her logo threes. She is the type of player that makes children out of all of us. And then there’s also this right-wing movement that has latched onto her as a symbol.
Why is that? For someone who doesn’t watch many games, what’s going on?
Caitlin is white and straight. That is a demographic that I guess you could say is maybe underrepresented in the WNBA. And there was a feeling when she came into the league that she wasn’t welcomed in the same way that maybe other stars in the past have been. There was a sense that maybe there was some resentment.
Now, I don’t know if that’s true. I would imagine, look, these are human beings that we’re talking about. There was probably a spectrum of feelings when you think about it. This was a league that didn’t have charter flights. Caitlin Clark comes in, they get charter flights.
Now, obviously that’s great for the players, but I also think that there was a feeling of, “Oh wait, the WNBA could have done these things that we’ve been advocating for for a long time. Now they’re finally listening because Caitlin is here.”
She is, ironically, an organic phenomenon that is bringing to light the manufactured failures of the WNBA in the past.
Caitlin Clark goes to the WNBA. The WNBA grows its fan base to include people who traditionally were not watching. And then what is the leap from that fact? More people at games, more eyeballs on games. More eyeballs on players, to a conservative movement seizes upon the WNBA and says, “We’re gonna make something out of this.” How did you see that play out?
It started with the 2023 college national title game, when Caitlin was still in college. And she went up against Angel Reese from LSU. LSU won that game. And after the game, Angel Reese did the “You can’t see me” taunt by John Cena, and it was actually something that Caitlin did [previously] in the Elite Eight. It was taken as trash talk. Angel then repeated that symbol to Caitlin after they won and pointed at her ring.
In the aftermath of that, Angel Reese was called all kinds of things by not only conservative commentators — a lot of this was conservative commentators, but you also had people like Keith Olbermann, who’s a former SportsCenter anchor and probably somebody who’s a little bit more in the middle of the road, calling her classless.
I think a lot of the WNBA fans took those things to be dog whistles, that it was a form of racism. And there was also just overt racism. There were just words that you and I would not say and would not repeat here that were thrown at Angel Reese, who has also dealt with a lot of vitriol since that moment.
That moment changed both of their lives, frankly. And that was really the inciting incident. From then on, I think that there were a lot of people in the new media landscape that recognized that the WNBA was a fault line for a lot of our modern discourse in America.
It is a league that you can use as a proxy to talk about race, gender fluidity, femininity, DEI, labor politics. It is probably the most modern American league that we have.
And if you look back at the history of sports, I think Americans have always used sports as a proxy to talk about things that aren’t actually about the sport. And the WNBA is really just the latest vessel of that.
