Thank you so much for being here! I am a full-time independent journalist and paid subscriptions to this newsletter allow me to continue to do work like this, as well as support the community that we are building here, which includes events like the book club and our (very active) paid subscriber Discord server.

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!

Oh my god you guys, you’ll never believe it but after spending weeks making inflammatory comments about trans women in sports and then courting and encouraging the anti-trans brigade to show up to all her games, Sophie Cunningham just wants to go back to talking about basketball.

Sure, she made a weird comment to ESPN about how she didn’t “hate trans” but women’s sports should definitely be protected from them and then when anti-trans protesters showed up outside her games and a few paid plants even sat courtside, she defended them, saying, “[The WNBA] preach[es] diversity and being inclusive, so what a great opportunity for them to actually be that.” And yeah, she offered to send gifts to the girls sitting courtside with their hateful shirts.

Yes, she took photos with Riley Gaines and Jennifer Sey in their XX-XY Athletics shirts, proudly smiling in between them, the trio all aging like curdled milk despite having more gender affirming care between than most dolls could ever dream of.

But now she is blaming everyone else for taking the focus off basketball and she just wants to “keep the main thing the main thing.”

So let’s talk about Sophie Cunningham’s basketball career, shall we?