Indiana Fever guard Sophie Cunningham, who is averaging 9.3 points off the bench heading into Tuesday night’s game against the Seattle Storm, ruffled a lot of feathers last week when an ESPN profile about her outspokenness touched on what she felt needed to be done to “protect women’s sports” in relation to trans girls being able to compete with and against other girls.

“I got a lot of negative feedback about me hating trans. And I’m like, ‘I never once said that,'” she said in the feature. “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.”

Cunningham would go on to double down on her comments when approached by media, saying, “I said what I said.”

Naturally, Cunningham’s stance was a spark plug for debate, with ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith saying she was “a thousand percent right,” and her childhood friend and podcast cohost West Wilson calling it a “borderline non-issue” pushed by “right-wingers.”

On Thursday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said that the President was monitoring the situation with Cunningham.

“I don’t believe he (President Trump) has reached out to her. I know he is following the story. As you know, this is something the president feels strongly about as well, and the American people do, too: that men should not be playing in women’s sports,” she said.

“It’s completely ludicrous that anyone could support that. It’s even more ludicrous you have Sophie Cunningham, a female athlete herself, very accomplished in her own right, coming forth and speaking that truth that men shouldn’t play in women’s sports — we want to protect women and girls — and the backlash she is receiving from Democrats and left-wing fingers across the country is astonishing.”

Wilson’s assessment that the “issue” of trans athletes competing in sports isn’t a real problem certainly has some basis in math. In 2024, NCAA president Charlie Baker said that there were fewer than 10 transgender collegiate athletes that he was aware of, while there were “five hundred and ten thousand” total student-athletes.

Still, that hasn’t seemed to matter to voices such as Riley Gaines or Cunningham, and on Monday, amid the hot-topic debate surrounding the inclusion of trans athletes, Trump spoke out against it during a public address at General Motors’s Milford Proving Ground in Michigan.

“The transgender mutilization of your children. I’ve looked at men playing in women’s sports,” Trump said. “It’s very unfair. I had a top NFL football player standing next to a wonderful female athlete, and they were playing a game of football, if you can believe this whole thing. This game did not work out very well.”

With this being an issue that targets an already vulnerable community, and also doesn’t affect many Americans, it’s interesting that so many parties are advocating against trans athletes when there are other much more pressing issues threatening the country.