On Thursday, I will return to Minneapolis to the Target Center – where I am not wanted – for the final Indiana Fever regular-season game of 2026. I was last there on August 2, when a man with a bullhorn harassed me, screaming obscenities in my ear.
It was my first WNBA game. I did not go as a tourist. I went to thank Sophie Cunningham.
In an ESPN interview, she said she wanted “to protect young girls in a locker room, or young girls in sport who shouldn’t have to go against biological men.” That was the whole of it. Empathy. Compassion. A grown woman saying little girls should not have to undress in front of, compete against, or lose to males. She did not call for anyone’s erasure. She did not demand the WNBA start sex-testing its own roster. She stood up for little girls.
The response was not debate. It was a pile-on. She was met with calls of Bigot. Transphobe. Grifter and future conservative pundit lining up her next career move. And of course, terrible basketball player.
These are the usual types of slurs reserved for women who notice reality.
Those of us who have been in this fight for years recognize the script. We know how lonely it gets when institutions, media, and your own community treat a sentence of truth as heresy. So women and girls and radical feminists and men with daughters and common sense, those on the Left and the Right and everything in between, started showing up at Fever games. Not to protest Sophie. To thank her.
In Seattle, 16-year-old Ahnaleigh Wilson wore an XX-XY Athletics shirt and held a sign that read thank you. A Storm co-owner screamed at her so viciously that it brought Ahnaleigh to tears. Other attendees spat at the teenager. The shirt states a biological fact. That was enough to unleash their wrath. Anyone who challenges their worldview must be punished, silenced – even, especially perhaps, 16-year-old girls.
On August 2 in Minneapolis, the welcome for us was even worse. Protesters met a group of middle-aged women and teenage girls who had come to say the same two words: thank you. A man called us “c*nts” over and over again — the ugliest, most misogynistic word I know. He then tried to put his hands on Riley Gaines when she arrived. He put a bullhorn in our ears and would not let us speak, even to each other.
They are losing, and they are frantically deploying the same tactics of silencing, bullying, coercion, physical attacks – that they’ve been using for years to “win.” Only those tactics aren’t working anymore. We aren’t afraid. And we won’t be silenced.
One of the young athletes standing with us was Kendall Kotzmacher. She is not a symbol invented for a rally. She is a four-year letter winner from Hugo, Minnesota, a four-time All-Conference player, and First Team All-State as a senior. She transferred to White Bear Lake for her senior year to chase a state championship with her little sister. In the 2025 Class AAAA semifinal, she was behind the plate as catcher when Champlin Park sent a biological male to the mound — about six feet tall, with a man’s hands, a man’s frame, and a man’s power. She had to hit against him, too. The ball spun in a way no girl her age in Minnesota can produce. Her team scored two runs, the most anyone managed off him all postseason. It was not enough. In the last inning, he hit a half-swing double and set up the winning run. They lost 3–2. The championship she and her sister had dreamed about since they were little kids was gone.
Kendall has said she would have been fine losing to a team that got there fair and square. She was not fine losing to a male in a girls’ tournament. After the game, she fell into her sister’s arms and sobbed. The little girls she coaches asked why she was crying. She told them she hoped they would never have to understand. Her team had a record-breaking tournament. Kendall hit a home run that helped get them there. None of that was the story. The story was him. They were pushed aside in their own sport, on the day meant to celebrate female excellence.
When she spoke afterward, she was harassed and threatened. At that Minneapolis rally, a man with a megaphone told her — in front of her mother and her sister — that she should have been aborted. This is the movement that markets itself as kind, tolerant, and protective of the vulnerable.
Kendall is not finished. On September 23, she will be in Washington, D.C., for a Senate hearing on males competing in women’s sports. She submitted testimony. She is refusing to be silent — for her sister still playing in Minnesota, and for the10-year-olds she coaches.
On September 24, I will sit in that arena with Kendall and with Amy Sousa. Amy was recently thrown out of a Portland Thorns game before kickoff for wearing the same shirt Ahnaleigh wore in Seattle. She and her friends then went to The Sports Bra, a bar that advertises itself as a home for women’s sports. They ordered food. They faced the television. They did not engage other patrons. When the plates arrived, they were told to leave. Their shirts had “offended” people. The shirts say there are two sexes. They have come to mean something simpler: I stand for protecting women’s sports.
We are going back to watch the Fever in their final regular season game because we will not be pushed out of public life. The culture was taken with force — policy capture, institutional cowardice, social punishment, and the redefinition of woman as a feeling anyone can claim. We will take it back with the same stubbornness, but not with the same lies. We are speaking truth. We are standing up for women and girls. That is not a campaign against “trans.” It is a campaign for the categories that make sport, safety, and fairness possible.
Title IX was not written so males could take podiums, scholarships, and locker rooms. Little girls should not have to absorb the cost of an adult ideology.
Sophie Cunningham said that out loud and paid for it. Ahnaleigh paid for it. Kendall paid for it on a softball field and then again on a Minneapolis sidewalk. Amy paid for it at a soccer stadium and a women’s sports bar, and that was 10 years after full cancellation and ostracization from her community.
We have fought too hard and too long to surrender the category of woman because it offends the people who benefit from erasing it – the men who say they are women.
We are not giving up. We are going back. This is bigger than Sophie or any one player. It’s bigger than a t-shirt.
It is about whether girls still have a right to their own sports, their own spaces, and their own future. It’s about whether girls and women have the right to a firm boundary.
It’s about the truth; the fundamental truth of biological reality.
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Jennifer Sey is the CEO of XX-XY Athletics. She is an author, filmmaker, and retired national champion gymnast.
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