the answer is always to disavow it

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I’ve avoided writing about the Sophie Cunningham nonsense because I haven’t wanted to give it air. Not because I naively thought that if you ignored it it would go away (ahem Cathy ahem), but because I’m tired. I’ve been writing about trans inclusion in sport for the better part of a decade, and much of that writing has involved warning the public that ~all of this~ was going to happen and, well, here we are. As a trans person, it gets exhausting feeling like you need to constantly mine your community’s trauma and, on top of that, I have nothing new to say.

I have also not been able to bring myself to watch a WNBA game since this all started, because seeing such visible hatred be tolerated and allowed to sit courtside is devastating to me in ways I don’t really have words for yet. I changed my entire career after attending my first WNBA game as a fan in 2018; I explicitly stopped covering men’s sports and focused on women’s sports—and the W, in particular—because that game was the safest and most joyful I’d ever felt at a sporting event. The potential loss of the culture that made the WNBA what it was is something I don’t know how to process.

But I have hit a wall with this round of discourse and so I am writing a newsletter. It will not be edited or incredibly coherent because I just don’t have that in me right now. I am also putting it behind a paywall because I’m sick of writing about transphobia for free, and so a bunch of transphobes can find it and come scream at me.