Front Burner - The culture war comes for the WNBA

Episode Date: August 28, 2026

For most of its history, the WNBA existed on the margins of American professional sports. Its players were outspoken on race, gender and LGBTQ rights, while the league struggled for the money and attention enjoyed by men’s sports. But today, the league has never been more popular.Women’s basketball has entered a new era of mainstream attention, driven in part by stars like Caitlin Clark. But that attention has brought something else with it: the American culture war.Recently, a WNBA player has become a conservative media celebrity for her views on transgender athletes, former NBA players are trolling the league over the same issue, and even the Trump administration has taken an interest.Guest host Matthew Amha speaks to Seerat Sohi of the Ringer about how the WNBA got entangled in culture war issues and what happens when a league with a distinctive cultural identity suddenly finds itself with a much bigger, and more politically diverse, audience?For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit:  https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts 

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This is a CBC podcast. Hi, I'm Matthew. I'm up. In for Jamie. Something is changing in the WMBA. After decades closer to the margins of American sport, women's basketball has become a real cultural force. And with that has come some unexpected attention. One player has become a conservative media celebrity for talking about transgender athletes, former NBA players are pretending to be trans so they can play in the women's league, and U.S. President Donald Trump is weighing in.

Also, people who have seemingly never watched a game of women's basketball in their lives are now turning up outside of arenas to protest. The whole thing is objectively strange, especially for those who have watched the once-nacent league enter what many consider to be its golden age. Sirat Sohi covers the NBA, WMBA, and Women's College Basketball for the ringer. And she's our guest today. Hey, Surat. Hey, thanks for having me.

Why don't we begin with the place in which the WMBA finds itself today? This is a league that, you know, many might think of as still in its nascent stages, though it's been around now for about three decades. These last few years have felt like a kind of golden age for the W. But why don't you give me a little bit of an overview of what, you know, the league was like prior, you know, what the conditions of competition were like for players, what pay was like, what the fan culture was like, and what the, the kind of attention the league was generally subject to.

Yeah, in the years prior to this golden age, the fan culture was a lot more niche, a lot more, almost like, you know, the band that you love is now becoming the band that everybody loves. And there is, you know, there's a bittersweet nature to things like that. The league was surviving, but it wasn't necessarily thriving. The games were a lot more physical. Think NBA prior to hand-checking being illegal. 90s basketball. Yeah, it's similar to 90s basketball.

We got some stuff going on here between the league of Boston and Bree Jones. He ended up on the deck. A lot of people had issues with the physicality. The players, in fact, even had issues with the physicality of the league. They felt like it had crossed a threshold that was putting the players at risk. And the game in and of itself was also changing as well. The game is modernized, the three-pointer. is a much bigger factor in the game. And you also had this golden generation of point guards that

have entered the league. Headlined, of course, by Caitlin Clark. Cattonigham off to Clark, right wing three is good. Clark a deep three. You bet. Clark behind the back. Oh, my. It's kind of a before-Katlin after Caitlin league. And then you also had Paige Beckers drafted the year after and Olivia Miles the year after that who are changing the way the game is played. They have the ball in their hands. They're creative, their highlight real. machines. Come on. Miles.

Tanditrading. Dump off. From the spectacle. It's just, it's a league that is in the midst of a lot of change, a lot of growth. And with that comes conflict. Yeah. I mean, one of the things that has always kind of struck me about the WMBA's history is that, you know, this was a league that had a very different cultural identity from a lot of the other

mainstream North American professional sports leagues. This was a league that was, you know, disproportionately black, but also one which had a very visible LGBTQ plus community and, you know, whose players have often been, you know, pretty outspoken about issues like racial justice and just politics generally in a way that many of the other major leagues and, you know, other major athletes simply were not. How important do you think that particular history is to understanding some of the dynamics currently ongoing in the league today? You know, if you want to take it back to 2020 during the bubble season, the dream were owned by Kelly Loebfler, who was the senator in Georgia at the time, and she criticized

the WNBA players for their public support of the ongoing protests against racism and police brutality that were taking over the nation at the time in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. The WNBA has embraced the Black Lives Matter, political organization. This is a very divisive organization based on Marxist principles. This week, they threatened to burn the system down literally and figuratively if they don't get what they want. I mean, this is an organization that, you know, seeks to destroy American principles. And from there, the WNBA players actually started a movement to support her opponent, who is Raphael Warnock. They wore shirts.

They, you know, were supporting his campaign. They had a lot of fans actually sent funds to his campaign. It got a huge national and local boost as a result of the WNBA. Dream player, Elizabeth Williams, tweeted this photograph right here, wearing a Vote Warnock shirt. Social media was filled with WNBA players wearing that same shirt tonight. And they also helped turn arenas into voting booths. And he won a narrow election. And frankly, he probably wouldn't have been able to do it without the WNBA.

And that was at a moment when the league was not nearly as popular as it is now. So when you consider how powerful this version of the WNBA could be, then that would obviously pique the interest of people in place of power. One of the most famous conservative operator, Steve Bannon, has talked about how politics is downstream from culture. So now if you have this culture in the WNBA that is vibrant, that is leaning into its queerness more than it ever has and doing it with great financial returns because the world that we live in is very different than the world that existed when the WNBA was first

founded, that's going to pick interest, you know, that is going to raise some eyebrows. Why don't we get right into the controversy currently embroiling the WNBA? Much of it revolves around a player named Sophie Cunningham, who plays on the Indiana Fever, alongside the league's biggest star, who you've named, Caitlin Clark. Last month, Cunningham in a print interview with ESPN, talked about, quote, I got a lot of negative feedback about me hating trans. And I'm like, I never once said that. I think I am here to extend love.

But she continued. 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 a sport who shouldn't have to go against biological men. Then doubling down. When it comes just to protecting young girls in sport and women in sport, I feel very strongly about that. Probably worth noting that the WMBA has never had a trans woman play in the league,

but I should say that much of the article seemed to be built around the creation or kind of framing of Sophie Cunningham as a figure of controversy. I mean, the article itself was titled, love her or hate her, Sophie Cunningham won't be ignored. Can you talk to me a little bit about who Sophie Cunningham is and the argument that she has spent the last several weeks making? Yeah, Sophie Cunningham is a role player for the Indiana Fever. She's one of those defensive-minded players. She's a three-point shooter who definitely does have something about her that sticks out before any of this even happened.

I think she's one of those players where if she's on your team, you love her. If she isn't on your team, you hate her. She's a hustle player. She's definitely somebody who, even in Phoenix, you know, before any of her political inclinations became clear, was definitely a bit of a fan favorite, you know, and I think now that she plays alongside Caitlin Clark, she plays in Indiana. She has become a national figure, right? She first came to prominence when she got into a physical altercation on the court with J.C. Sheldon during a Connecticut Sun game. Her and Caitlin had gotten into it. And Sophie kind of emerged as a bit of a protector out of that.

Sheldon going coast to coast. Break is here as Jacey Sheldon goes right after Sok to Cunningham. It was a hard found, no question. That in and of itself, I think, got to some fault lines that have been present in the WNBA for a while, especially since Caitlin Clark has entered, just in terms of who gets labeled a thug and who gets labeled a protector, right? Like, there have been a lot of players who have been in altercations with Caitlin Clark, who have then, you know, gone on on social media and faced just a point. levels of racism, homophobia, even transphobia, right?

Like the implication that some of these players are actually men, they're targeting a certain type of woman. And oftentimes that woman is black. And with Sophie, she's, you know, this blonde, conventionally attractive woman who is actually getting a lot of endorsements. Like, you know, she gets his endorsement from ring after this altercation. So I think, like, for a lot of people, they saw some issue there as well. So she does this story with ESPN.

And I think like, first of all, like, I think we should have to talk about the framing, right? Like girls versus biological men in locker rooms. That framing alone is one that has been very prevalent in conservative circles. And I think that it makes it seem like you have like these 40-year-old men trying to play high school women sports and trying to be in locker rooms. These are 15-year-olds and 15-year-olds. So I just want to make that part very clear as well. Penningham, it should be said, has really gone on. to double down on this argument around trans women in sports.

And she has been citing it in subsequent social media posts, really kind of embracing the newfound notoriety that's come with a lot of this. This has also spilled over into confrontations between Cunningham's fans and I know the owner of the Seattle Storm WMBA franchise. Yeah, so I think the first pro-Sophie Cunningham protest happened in Seattle after the story came out. A few dozen people gathered outside the arena in Seattle to support Cunningham and promote a statewide ballot initiative that would bar transgender students from participating in girls' athletics at Washington schools. And a lot of it was organized by this group called XXY, which is an apparel

company that is on the same side of Sophie when it comes to this issue. The Seattle Storm co-owner, she saw these two teenage girls wearing the XXY shirts and essentially berated them. And she was suspended for five games. Obviously, you shouldn't be doing that. Like, I think, I think that's obvious. You know, you are the co-owner of a team. You know, it's fair for them to have their political views. You know, these are two teenage girls that one of them, I believe, had actually lost a race to a trans girl as well.

So that's how she kind of got involved in the issue. But I think the thing that's worth noting about this is that the seats were reportedly gifted by a mysterious donor. And XXXY itself is a political organization that likes to say that it's Democrat aligned. Like the founders are people that say that they were former Democrats that, or even current Democrats, that have become alienated from Democrats because of how they feel about this issue. Dear Nike. Dear Nike. Why won't you stand up for me? Why won't you stand up for me?

Why won't you? Why do you claim to support women and girls? Yeah, when we need you most. You remain silent. Today, males are claiming our identity. Our sports. Our spaces. But this is also a organization that has like right-wing connections as well.

Like their LLC originally was actually registered by a Denver area couple, Ryan and Griffin O'Shaughnessy, who are the heirs of laryo oil and gas and have donated to conservative politicians, have supported organizations and, you know, accounts that are. much farther along in the spectrum of being anti-queer and anti-trans than the sports issue. The sports issue is essentially their Trojan horse to get into the things that they really want to change about American society. So who decides which authors are featured on your favorite book interview podcasts? Hey, I'm Eile. I'm a producer on bookends with Mateo Roach, which means my desk is covered with books that might end up on your podcast feed. So this summer on the show, we've got Go Gentle by Maria Semple.

It's about a stoic philosopher who gets involved in an art heist. We also talk to Maggie O'Farrell about her new book. She's the Oscar-nominated author of Hamnet, if you're a movie fan. Anyway, my desk is a mess because we want to make sure we're bringing you authors that actually resonate with you. So check out bookends with Mateo Roach, wherever you get your podcasts. This has all really everything that we've talked about is connected to this broader cultural war and some of these questions surrounding trans athletes and women's sports more broadly,

Cunningham has very quickly become a lionized figure in parts of the American right and a regular subject of discussion on, you know, platforms like Fox News. Cunningham says the league that cannot seem to define what a woman is may need a new leader. Sophie Cunningham has a message for her critics telling her to stick to basketball.

She tells USA Today she can do both when it comes to playing the game and speaking out for fairness in women's sports. The WNBA really needs to get it together because I wonder about the future of this league. They're proving that women shouldn't have a league. It's too dramatic. Why can't you just play? Donald Trump has also been talking about Cunningham on his personal social media pages, it should be said. What has also happened, though, is that a small collection

of former professional men's basketball players led by former NBA journeyman, Ennis Kenter Freedom, have been essentially trolling the WMBA, claiming they now identify as trans women and plan to play in the league. So I know I'm 34 years old. And I think I will be the best draft pick in WMBA history. Right now, if you identify as a woman, you're allowed to play. And I am identifying as a woman, and I am actually allowed to play. They are, of course, you know, operating as provocateurs, trying to force the league to make a decisive stand

against the inclusion of trans women in the sport. Kenter was actually thrown out of a game earlier this week. Can you talk to me a little bit about what happened between him and Chicago Skyguard, Natasha Cloud, and really some of what, and as Kenter, is actually doing here. Yeah, so Ennis Cantor attended a Chicago Sky game. The fever were playing the Chicago Sky. He had courtside seats.

And in the third quarter, he got into a back and forth with Natasha Cloud. That is Enis Cantor in the building today. And he has voiced how he's felt about the situation, Natasha Cloud, voicing her opinion as well. You could see Cloud yelling and pointing at Cantor, who was wearing a black t-shirt that said, quote, woman-nown adult human female. Now, he went on Fox News the next morning and said that Natasha Cloud was the one that started talking to him.

So thank you for having me, brother. So at the end of the third quarter, right, they put Sophie Khan and Emin, which was my friend. She shot at three. I literally put my hand up in the air to celebrate it. The next position, Natasha Clark, came back and said, she's not going to sleep with you. Then the Chicago Sky owner, Michael Alter,

then said that, no, it was actually. actually Ennis Cantor, who started trash talking, Natasha Cloud. She's a queer woman herself. She's also been a strong proponent of queer rights. And she's also been somebody who's always been pretty politically active as well. I think the sight of Ennis Cantor at these games, him going back and forth definitely riled something up in her. So, you know, after she hit a layup, they started going back and forth. And then Cantor actually stood up and he walked onto the court. And that is an automatic ejection no matter who you are. So he was the security immediately, you know, separated the two, and he was ejected from the game, and he has been banned from all Chicago Sky Games at the WinTrust Arena.

The league has come out and said that, you know, players like Ennis, like Royce, they will not be eligible for the WNBA draft. They have started a task force to look into their policy around transgender participation in the WNBA. Not that, by the way, this is something that they've ever had to deal with or even at this point really have to deal with. no actual trans woman has ever tried to play in the WNBA. I think that's the reason that they never had a policy around it. They are looking into it. However, I think that they are also trying to make clear that people like Ennis Cantor and Royce White are not going to be the ones that are putting public pressure on them to come to a decision. Very much in the same kind of fashion as Cunningham. Cantor has also become a kind of right-wing social media and media star generally. He's

been all over Fox News, doing primetime interviews and appearances of all kinds. It should also be said that following Cantor's ejection from that game, Indiana's Lieutenant General tweeted, quote, Chicago's Natasha Cloud threatened former NBA player and future WMBA first pick tennis Cantor. There was simply no place for this type of woman-on-woman violence in our society. Oh my gosh. And it needs to stop. Like, when you are encountering things like this, as someone that covers this league, like what do you make of something as ridiculous as that? I mean, it's all political theater. It's all spectacle at the end of the day.

I think that there are a lot of people that are trying to make a spectacle out of the WNBA and they feel for different reasons incentivized to use the WNBA as a vessel to gain more attention, right? Like you have these crypto bros that are also throwing dildos on the court. A WNBA player was hit by a sex toy during a game in Los Angeles. It was thrown from the stands appearing to hit Indiana fevers, Sophie Cunningham. she had posted online just days ago urging people to stop. It's the third time something like this has happened in the past week. And police have charged.

In hopes of pumping up this coin so that they can basically pump and dump it. You have Enos Cantor using the WNBA as a springboard to become a, you know, a famed conservative commentator, right? You have the lieutenant general who I'm at, I don't know. Like, let's see what their, let's see what their political aspirations are. Right? Like, I don't know what the lieutenant general's political aspirations are. And they are also someone who has been called out for never having come to a WNBA game before. I don't know if you saw this, but there is a video put out by Sportico ahead of the New York Liberty game where there was a anti-trans protest and there was also a pro trans rally at the same time. And Sportico interviewed people from both sides. And the people on the, on the Sophie side of things, couldn't name any WNBA players. Can you name five WNBA players? I sure can. I can. Could you name five for me? Sure.

Sophie Cunningham. It's always fun when I get a Caitlin Clark, Reese, Aja. These aren't people that actually care about women's sports. They care about using women's sports as a cudgel for whatever cause

that they might have. I think that a lot of people try to use women's sports is sort of like a woke one point. like they scour this complicated institution for in search of hypocrisies to present them as proof of a flawed value system, which is like a very common thing in the conservative movement. It's to find the edge case of every purported value, right? In this case being inclusion or protecting trans rights and looking for the gotcha in them.

And at the end of the day, look, yes, do we need to have a conversation about transgender women, transgender girls participating in sports? Do there need to be scientific guidelines on that? Yes, absolutely. I also think that's a conversation. It's very difficult to have in earnest in a moment when transgender people are being targeted the way that they are by the legislative agenda in America. We have all of these real pressing issues around the survival of trans people in society right now, to the point where, like, I think it's very difficult to have this conversation. And look, does it need to happen? Yes.

Does it need to happen in the WNBA? Probably not until the issue actually comes up, you know? And I think that sometimes, like, the thing that the conservative movement tries to target is people not speaking plainly about things like this. And I do think that the WNBA is a league that historically has struggled to speak a little bit plainly about its issues. But ultimately, where I fall is like, this is ultimately just very cruel. It's cruel. It's calculated. And I think it's quite transparent. I did an episode of this show some two years ago now about the WMBA and the then bubbling controversy, which surrounded

one of the biggest stars that women's basketball has ever produced. Caitlin Clark, we've mentioned a number of times now. Clark was drafted to the W in 2024 alongside another woman named Angel Reese, both of whom have been party to a year's long rival. which extends to their time in college basketball. Kaelin Clark is a white woman from Iowa. Angel Reese is a black woman from Baltimore, Maryland. And very quickly, these two young women became pitted against one another. Clark pushes Angel Reese and Angel Reese gets right up into Cayman Clark.

Afterwards, has something to say as Clark walks away. We know there are always increased eyeballs, energy and attention. around the matchups between Reese and Clark and Angel Reese. And became avatures, really, for two very different Americas. This rivalry, yeah, I mean, it just has these kind of racialized undertones, you might say. And the WMBA has itself actively played into this. And I think it's just been able to be something that is negative, but also positive. I think it shines light on women's basketball.

So I'll take that of being able to be the person that gets the hate. But I know that at the end of the day, I'm growing women's basketball and helping women's basketball. How much of the current politics around the WMBA would you say is downstream from the enormous cultural attention that Clark and Reese and this kind of racialized rivalry has brought to the league? Yeah. That's what started all of this, right? I think I think Caitlin, in and of herself, is a very popular basketball player. She has the type of game that just draws eyeballs. And she's been huge for the league.

But I think her having this foil in Angel Reese is. is what has allowed the league to become a vehicle for conversations that have nothing to do with basketball. And it's unlocked this way of using the WNBA, which I think, you know, I think is ultimately a league that has a lot of fault lines that make it a really great vessel for America to argue with itself. And it is particularly vulnerable to the flattening of just human beings that you see with the attention economy as well. I think that's happened to both of them. Like, I think that they are both far more complicated individuals than any of the narratives around them would suggest like any of us are. They are human beings with diverse political, cultural views

standpoints on a number of different things. But they have been, and look, they were about to play together in the FIBA tournament representing Team USA. Caitlin's, that's the ironic part, is it kind of fit really well together. Like Caitlin throwing pick and roll passes to Angel Reese, Angel Reese grabbing rebounds, throwing them ahead to Caitlin Clark. Like, I think the next month of basketball, we're going to see just how much two players like that fit really well together. But they have been pitted against each other. And it has allowed people who don't care about basketball to come in and use that WNBA

as a proxy war to talk about whatever it is that they want to talk about, whether it's race, whether it's gender, whether it's anything, you know, like any of any of the animating issues around American politics, you can kind of find a way to tell them through the WNBA. Sophie Cunningham, stating that the WMBA commissioner, Kathy Engelbert, might be out of a job at the end of the year in the league, could use a bold leader who wants the best for the players and not herself. I know that the commissioner of the WMBA has been subject to, you know, a lot of criticism around her handling of this issue, as well as some of the other issues that the league has

seen over the years, whether the handling of athlete pay, to her promotion of the rivalry between Angel Reese and Caitlin Clark that we've been talking about. Can you talk to me about the job that you think that Commissioner Kathy Englebert has done kind of handling this gender situation that we've been discussing? I think she's botched it. Look, I think the League took way too long to respond. In a memo to teams, Commissioner Kathy Engelbert called the topic complex and nuanced. Adding player eligibility is governed by the League's collective bargaining agreement.

It is part and parcel for this regime, though. They are very avoidant when it comes to dealing with any level of controversy. diversity. They have a habit of letting things blow up. They also have a habit of letting other people hijack their story. Like, why is Ennis Cantor not banned from every arena right now? That is just, like, not every decision that the commissioner has to make is easy. I understand that she has a lot of uneasy alliances as far as fans that she has to balance. I think you can ban Enis Cantor from an arena, and most people that actually pay tickets and pay attention to the WNBA are going to be completely cool with that. You know, like, there are easy decisions that they can make. And, you know, there are easy decisions that they can

make, but I think ultimately, I don't think that she has ever really fully understood the direction and the potential of the league in a way that, frankly, the players and the individual teams have really run away with, like, you know, the Golden State Valkyries, their games are basically like a censorium for queer life, like the fans, the mascots, the music, the players, Gabby Williams, like hitting game winners and saying she's doing it for the gays. The planes have been taught in the Valkyries have shown. Everything about that arena screams, It's basically like if you combine a pride parade with a game seven, they unveil a pride collection, their merchandising sales jumped by 70%.

Those things are connected. And I think sometimes the problem the league has is it's almost stuck in 1997 when it was founded because it's so scarred from past failures that it can't see that the road ahead of them is actually pretty clear. Like this is a league that is very much in a position where they can swim in the direction of what they are and they are not going to face a lot of headwinds. The headwinds that they face are from allowing things like this to happen. Like they're keeping the door open for bullies, for provocateurs to come in.

And they also are then putting at risk what I think is a WNBA's most sacred and powerful asset, which is the actual in-game experience at a time where, look, people are starved for affordable connection, for feeling community. you have this in arena experience that oozes with excitement and it makes bigger the world of everybody who enters it. WNBA games are, I think, the best part about the WNBA and having these people like canter attending and interrupting games, having these protests happening,

it's the fans that have been stepping up on the other side of it to actually show like, no, we're not actually going to let you control what this environment is. We know what this environment is. We know what the league is about. You have teams on the Jumbotrons hosting very trans-affirmative messages as well to remind the trans fans, remind the queer fans that they are welcome that this is their place. And at a certain point, you have to ask, like, who is this for? I guess when looking toward the future of the league, right? I mean, is there a world in which a lot of what we've talked about is really just a story about the mainstreaming of this league?

I mean, the paradox here is that the league finally got some of the enormous attention in audience that it had spent all these years trying to cultivate. And is perhaps one consequence of that, the fact that they are now kind of becoming subject to the same political and cultural battles that have consumed really every other major American sporting institution? Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Look, I think that with growth comes conflict. And I think that this was a conflict that was somewhat inevitable, just given what the WNBA represents and the moment that America is happening politically right now. Like, those two things are, we're going to come at ahead against each other. I think it's been exacerbated by the social media age. It's been exacerbated by algorithms that are incentivized to court controversy, to rage bait,

to get people to feel like there is some sort of thing that makes them have to click. So there has to be some sort of conspiracy going on. And I think a lot of the time, what feels like conspiracy is actually incompetence. You can take it back to the physical play, which I think is a big thing that first drew a lot of like the negative eyeballs to the WNBA. Like, why is, is Caitlin's part getting beat up? Well, you know, you fast forward to two years later, Naphisa Collier is out for the remainder of the playoffs because she gets both of her ankles busted on an overly physical play, right?

This is the thing that happens across the WNBA. It's reffing has been an issue across the WNBA for a long time. Marketing has been an issue across the WNBA for a long time. Leadership has been an issue across the WNBA for a long time. and the league was just wholly unprepared for this moment. And that's why you're seeing that it's in a mess. And that's why you're still seeing that the people who are leading us out of this mess, none of them are coming from inside the league office.

They're the players and they're the coaches. You know, despite the fact that this is a kind of complicated time for the league, I'm happy that we were able to talk about the WMBA. So thanks so much for coming on the show, Sirat. Oh, thank you so much for having me. That's all for today. Front Burner was produced this week by Joytha Sangupta, Kevin Sexton, Cecilia Armstrong.

Sam McNulty, Mitchell Stewart, and Mackenzie Cameron. Our YouTube producer is John Lee. Our music is by Joseph Shabison. Our senior producers are Elaine Chow and Imogen Burchard. I'm Matthew Amha, in for Jamie Pousson. Thanks so much for listening. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca slash podcasts.