Sophie Cunningham Is The Moral Compass Standing Up To The WNBA Coots

This is republished with permission from the author. The original, from House of Strauss, can be found here.

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I am kindly asking the WNBA to stop generating so much news. Please. I can barely keep up. The league’s main Twitter account posted and deleted a video where two of the sport’s most prominent stars bet on a game they were about to play against each other. A similar incident might qualify as the biggest NBA news item of the year, but it’s not even the main WNBA story out there right now. This is.

The wild scene among spectators at Fever-Storm on Tuesday broke sports-world containment and became a political flashpoint. The vignettes are surreal because it’s like archetypal NPR tote bag owners are acting like classic inebriated bleacher hooligans. But these people aren’t tilted off booze. They’re drunk on politics. These Seattle louts are so unhinged over people agreeing with Sophie Cunningham’s support for a supermajority position that it’s now helping the side they despise.

Sophie Cunningham’s comment of, “I want to protect young girls in a locker room, or young girls in sport who shouldn’t have to go against biological men,” apparently set the stage for a Seattle standoff on Tuesday. Ahead of the Fever-Storm game, protesters and counterprotesters streamed to the steps of the hilariously named Climate Pledge Arena.

There’s a state ballot measure called Washington Initiative 638 which aims to keep K-12 girls’ sports exclusive to females, and it’s scheduled for the November ballot by the force of over 400,000 resident signatures. It was spearheaded by hedge fund man Brian Heywood as “not a partisan issue,” but no state Democrat supports the measure. Indeed, House Speaker Laurie Jinkins (D) and Senate Majority Leader Jamie Pedersen (D) refused to even hold legislative hearings on I-638.

The “save women’s sports” I-638 supporters didn’t achieve a mass gathering on Tuesday. As Seerat Sohi of the Ringer argued, this cohort could all so easily have been ignored. But they weren’t.

From Yahoo Sports:

Seattle Storm minority owner Celeste Keaton has been fined by the WNBA and suspended for her team’s next five home games following an incident Tuesday night involving a pair of Sophie Cunningham fans, according to the Seattle Times’ Percy Allen and USA Today’s Mitchell Northam.

The incident reportedly occurred when the two young women, wearing shirts for a brand advocating against the inclusion of transgender women in women’s sports, held up signs reading “We love you Sophie” and “Thank you Sophie for speaking up for girls” while sitting courtside for the Fever-Storm game. Their appearance came a week after Cunningham made comments against transgender inclusion.

I’d say that’s a loaded characterization of Cunningham’s position from Yahoo Sports, but you get the general gist of the incident. From what I can tell, Cunningham and these girls aren’t broadly opposed to “transgender inclusion.” They’re specifically against biological males in women’s sports, a stance that New York Times polling tells us 79% of the country shares.

Here’s an aspect that might be obscured if you’re only reading about this situation in a publication like Yahoo: The optics are comically favorable to what I’ll call the non-Left. The two teen girls come off as polite and well-adjusted. Co-owner Celeste Keaton, who apparently berated the girls with “F*cking insane!” is obviously far older and also out of shape. If the male equivalent yelled at girls for some different reason, mainstream journalists would freely describe this individual as “gross-looking.” So on the one side, you’ve got presentable teenagers quietly conveying their majority-backed views, and on the other side you’ve got an angry fat franchise partner verbally abusing them.

I mention this not to be mean, but to describe reality and also highlight how it doesn’t always fit conventional media narrative. I grew up on the baked-in assumption that the progressive protester represents ascendant youth and the person yelling at them represents aging decline. While polling suggests younger people are relatively more open to the inclusion of biological males in women’s sports, even a solid Gen Z majority opposes the idea. One reason a teen might physically show up to protest males in girls’ sports is that they, unlike a liberal boomer yelling at them, have skin in the game.

My impression is that in sports journalism circles, it’s largely assumed that non-lefty Indiana Fever fans are all MAGA GRIFTER CHUDS. These types are angry men who probably look like they just stepped off the set of “Deliverance.” None of them care about women’s sports. All of them just enjoy triggering the ladies out of mean-spirited revanchist resentment.

A dominant narrative in WNBA media circles is that Caitlin Clark has a moral obligation to cool off these out-of-control freaks. To be clear, a lot of conservatives online enjoy using the WNBA as a piñata, but there have been scant examples of Fever fans acting tangibly abusive IRL.

So it’s quite counter-narrative to see, in the wake of Cunningham taking up this “protect girls” position, fans acting out of control from the other side. I can’t vouch for the veracity of descriptions in every clip, but multiple examples of allegedly abusive Seattle Storm fans were posted from Tuesday’s action.

The aforementioned girls were also yelled at by a mustachioed man who looked a bit like a skinny Taylor Lewan. He said, “Security: Take the trash out.” Conservative political commentator Brandi Kruse claims that two Seattle Storm fans attempted to trip a teen wearing an XX-XY athletics shirt. Kruse posted a photo of the two alleged offenders, but I’m not linking to it. Absent video, I lack solid evidence that this happened, even though it’s plausible based on the night’s events. I am, however, linking to this video of a Storm fan allegedly spitting at a Fever fan. Maybe there’s some other context here, but barring AI magic, I can at least establish that this dude hawked a real loogie.

Black Sports Online proprietor Robert Littal posted:

Curiously, there is no mainstream attention or visceral social outrage about this fan interaction at a WNBA game….. The Storm, the WNBA, ESPN, USA Today, etc etc no one has said anything and it is on tape so not like someone made it up…

Littal, hardly a Trump supporter, is getting at a massive double standard. It’s an article of faith in mainstream sports media circles that politically activated fan misbehavior only goes in one (MAGA) direction. That assumption arguably fuels transgression from the side they align with. I’d hazard that the people lashing out at teen Sophie fans believe themselves to be good and righteous. If you’re wholly bought in on the idea that your enemy is cartoonishly evil, and you’re generally averse to countenancing their perspective as potentially valid, that can be interpreted as a justification for abuse. These aren’t human beings. They’re just avatars for “hate.” Why not harass them?

This is how an old woman finds herself aggressing courtside teenagers during a nationally televised basketball game. She’s likely lost herself in this sanctimonious certainty, totally oblivious to how the world might regard her as psychotic.

She’s in a bubble, of course. And an amusing one at that. Quoting HoS guest Jesse Singal:

Maybe the Seattleiest, richlibbiest Seattle richlib story ever. Keaton’s actually the long-time partner of Storm coowner Lisa Brummel (est. 9-figure net worth). Keaton is a “Feng Shui & Intuitive Consultant” and an “ordained holistic minister.”

As a clairsentient and clairvoyant, my main divination modality is through reading Tarot cards & by empathically tuning in to the Client.” (All via LinkedIn.) This is just a *deeeeeeply* 2026-America story, when you think about it.

I laughed at the silliness of her biography but also saw notes of transferred religiosity in this woman’s background. Communion with God replaced with clairsentience and clairvoyance. A crusade against heretics replaced with a vulgar sermon for high schoolers. A steadfast belief in morality undergirded by absolute spiritual certainty.

Maybe there’s no way for mainstream sports outlets to get through to a woman like this, but it’d be nice if they did more humanizing of her target. Those teen girls don’t see themselves as advancing “hate.” They doubtless believe they’re protecting women because, on the same field of competition, males have obvious physical advantages over females.

It’s reflexive among many of my peers to sneer at anyone who takes up the “save women’s sports” stance. This is somehow both a “non-issue” and a contemptible cause. It’s “a distraction” but somehow also important enough that one must never cave to the majority. It’s simply all a pretext for being mean to a marginalized group, even if any sane person can reason out why males in female sports could be a problem.

Okay, but I-638 is a real bill, designed to curtail actual incidents in Washington state. It’s a “for or against” proposition. There’s a shelf life on this cool kid media game of perpetually pretending these bill supporters are prima facie freaks, absent articulated counter positions. You can act like such people are “weird,” but who looked especially weird on Tuesday night, in images that went viral?

I’m not saying this sort of optically toxic progressive activity loses the midterm for Democrats, but I do wonder. The election should be a layup. The party in power almost always gets crushed, and I shake my head whenever I drive past a gas station.

But if your side keeps making cameos as loud and angry proponents of a fringe position, there’s a cost to this that even sympathetic prestige media can’t save you from. The evidence was strong that the transgender sports issue helped Donald Trump win the 2024 election. It’s not “concern trolling” to observe that digging in on males in girls’ sports can deprive a major political party of power.

At first, it appeared that Sophie Cunningham might distance herself from the protesters. In response to accusatory questions, the Fever read a PR statement denying that “Sophie had any knowledge of this demonstration and no contact with its organizers.”

On Wednesday night, Sophie Cunningham tweeted:

I truly believe there is a safe space and love for EVERYBODY. Biological girls, biological boys, trans women, and trans men. Everyone is welcome at my table! You can disagree and still be kind.

Bravo to those girls for standing up for what they believe. You’ll be hearing from me soon (hearts emoji) yay for gifts. Truly embarrassing of the co-owner. Unfortunately shows the type of leader she is.

I don’t know if this is purely an extension of Cunningham’s moral intuition. Perhaps that’s unfair, and I’m just too cynical. I do, however, know that Sophie has quite a grasp of optics and popularity. A day later, after looking at the scenes, she chose to endorse the pleasant-seeming teen fans and dump on the angry old coot. You could argue that Sophie Cunningham is purely being rational here. You could argue she’s surrounded by a league and media ecosystem that regards rationality as immoral.

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Ethan Strauss is the creator of the Substack House of Strauss. He is a former NBA PR gopher, basketblogger, and NBA beat writer.