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Our August Book Club selection is Swole: The Making of Men and the Meaning of Muscle by Michael Andor Brodeur. I’ll be sending out date details and a registration link later this week so stay tuned for that!

Following Sophie Cunningham’s unnecessary and uninformed comments about trans women in women’s sports, media discourse reached a fever pitch (I’m so sorry, it was right there). Most of that coverage has been a nightmare, especially because right-wing media that mostly ignores the WNBA unless they can use the league to fuel their culture war has joined the fray. Not only that, players are being dragged into the news cycle, even when they have avoided being involved.

A clip of Gabby Williams saying that she would support a trans woman in the league went viral, and even I shared it in a newsletter and said I wish more players would take the same stand. What I didn’t know, however, was that the clip had been taken out of context. The quote was not in response to Cunningham’s comments, but was an answer to a question about what issues remain for queer athletes, asked by Jackie Powell of The IX during a Valkyries practice back in May. Black Rosie Media, who was at that practice and part of that media scrum, set the record straight in their newsletter this week. Williams acknowledged that the backlash to the clip has been “rough” for her.

For their part, the WNBA created a task force and released a statement following its first meeting. It read, in part: “There are no immediate eligibility matters affecting the WNBA and we strongly denounce the bad-faith efforts to use these topics to demean or marginalize others.”

Over at Media Matters for America, they’ve been tracking the coverage cycle in right-wing media. What they found was that, since June 25, Fox News has dedicated at least 13- hours and 34 minutes of airtime to the WNBA, most of which was critical of the league’s handling of issues related to race or trans inclusion. Since Cunningham’s comments about a month ago, the network has aired more than 8 hours of coverage regarding trans athletes in the WNBA, including segments on Sophie Cunningham, her comments about trans women’s participation in women’s sports, and the fallout of those comments.

I spoke to Brennan Suen, Deputy Research Director for Special Projects at Media Matters for America, about what this research can tell us about media coverage of trans inclusion in sport.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Out of Your League: When I was reading this study, I couldn't help thinking about similar reports Media Matters had written when Lia Thomas was swimming at UPenn, and the way that Fox News really latched on to that story and put so much airtime towards it. Can you talk about how you see the Sophie Cunningham WNBA segments comparing to that coverage in terms of a right-wing playbook to ramp up this anti-trans sports narrative?

Brennan Suen: Right-wing media definitely is using a consistent playbook when they attack trans athletes. There are a lot of parallels between the Lia Thomas story, but also a lot of other trans athletes competing, as there is with the Sophie Cunningham stuff. One of the things that right-wing media does is it really focuses on isolated stories to stoke outrage over something that's relatively uncommon. This kind of thing happens with trans athletes, but it happens with a lot of different topics, whether it's certain immigration stories like immigrant crime narratives, or stories about healthcare like COVID reactions, or even some of the attacks on educators, particularly LGBTQ or or ally educators, so this is a really common tactic where they latch onto a specific story. 

What's cynical about this is that typically in the past with trans athletes, they focused on a specific athlete like Lia Thomas, like AB Hernandez, but in this case there's not actually an example of a trans athlete in the WNBA. There's not an example of any trans women who are trying out to be in the WNBA, or even in the NCAA pipeline to be doing this. So it's showing that they really don't need a lot to create such a fury. 

OOYL: Even knowing that there is such a specific playbook, and these outlets do the same things over and over again, it seems like mainstream media gets swept up in this and allows the right-wing outrage to shape so much of the mainstream coverage, as well. Do you have any thoughts on how mainstream media can do a better job of avoiding this trap?

BS: The right has done a really good job of making a non-issue into an issue, and I think that puts mainstream media in a tough place because are we going to tell them to cover something that is a non-issue, or are we going to tell them to just not cover it and cede the narrative to the right? I think that avoiding the issue and not covering it after the right has done so much to perpetuate the narrative just allows the right to control the message. 

What's important is that the story that mainstream media needs to cover is not about trans athletes in the WNBA. The story is about the tactic. The story is about the right manufacturing this outrage from nothing. The story has to reject the premise that the left is trying to ‘allow men into women's sports,’ and it needs to stress that this is not a widespread phenomenon. After so much coverage in right-wing media, it is important for mainstream media to cover aspects of this story, but they don't need to be arguing on the right's terms. 

What's interesting is that the key component of the right’s attacks is the misconstruing of trans women as ‘men in women's sports.’ That's why you have these male athletes who are saying now they're going to try out for the WNBA, because what the narrative has done is has completely misconstrued what a trans woman is. You can look at these attacks as something that is impacting the trans community's ability to participate in public life. But I think what's even more scary is that the attacks are aimed at altering the public's perception of the validity of trans identities. The argument on the right is about a completely different thing than they're saying it is. They're saying it's about trans athletes and trans WNBA players, but they're saying ‘men in women's sports,’ and they're talking about people who identify as men applying for the WNBA.

OOYL: I think about this a lot because, as someone who covers this, as soon as I see ‘XX-XY Athletics,’ as soon as I see Jennifer Sey’s name, I'm immediately like, ‘oh, this is one of the handful of people who has managed to create these massive media cycles.’ During the Boston Marathon, there was all of this right-wing coverage on a trans woman running in the women’s category (she came in almost 9,000th). I was able to track all of it back to one video from Jennifer Sey’s XX-XY Athletics YouTube page that had then created a week-long news cycle around the issue of a trans woman in the Boston Marathon. 

These stories are being started by one or two groups of people but once they get picked up by all these media outlets, it creates the perception that there's so many people who feel this way when in actuality, it's a very small number of people who have figured out how to be very vocal.

BS: I think it's it's interesting to look at the broader feedback loop between right-wing groups and the media, Fox News, and elected officials and other decision makers. I've followed this issue for a long time, and in 2019, the Heritage Foundation set off on a series of anti-trans panels that have really shown where the right-wing movement is heading on these issues. All of the things that they talked about in the years since have become big galvanizing issues in the anti-LGBTQ right. And of course, one of their panels was attacking trans athletes.

We were following just general coverage of trans athletes on Fox in 2019 and 2020, and there was relatively consistent coverage, but it wasn't a ton. And then in 2020, we saw a big influx, and ever since then, we've seen, if not consistent, high coverage, then time periods where there was a lot of coverage. So you have groups like Heritage that are creating a policy framework for this kind of thing, and then you have media outlets that cover it. They bring on electeds or decision makers who they ask questions about it, and then those people create policies, often in tandem with right-wing groups, or at least following messaging that's on right-wing media. There's a whole ecosystem out there designed to make those stories into national headlines and those national headlines into electoral issues and into policies.

OOYL: Is there anything else that you think is important for people to know about this issue?

BS: I think one thing to stress is just that Fox has been framing its coverage about ostensibly ‘protecting women in sports,’  but it's attacking the WNBA. It's directly trying to harm women athletes by harming the WNBA. I think that it's very cynical how they claim to care about women's sports, but are attacking a league that has become so successful over the last few years and have really become a phenomenon. At the end of the day, they're actually doing direct harm to women's sports by making this the key story about the WNBA, as opposed to covering it as an actual athletic event. They don't care about the games. They don't care about the athletes. They care about the political message that they can create from a few comments from one athlete.