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The Indiana Fever's Sophie Cunningham is pictured in a pre-game news conference July 31 in Portland, Oregon.
Commentary
The Indiana Fever's Sophie Cunningham is pictured in a pre-game news conference July 31 in Portland, Oregon. Cunningham has become a flashpoint in the cultural battle over men playing in women's sports. (Amanda Loman / Getty Images)

Beyond Unbelievable: Sophie Cunningham Views Banned on WNBA Reddit Page

 By C. Douglas Golden  August 18, 2026 at 7:16am

I’ll concede I don’t know as much about the WNBA as the diehards do, but I know two things.

First, the league is profoundly eager to sabotage whatever goodwill it might have accumulated over the past few years by maintaining a stridently woke branding while claiming that it doesn’t want to engage in culture wars. Second, it’s profoundly hypocritical by allowing its own to engage in those culture wars, so long as they’re on the Right Side™, which is left.

Nowhere is this more self-evident than the case of Sophie Cunningham, the Indiana Fever guard who’s garnered significant attention for her stance on keeping men out of women’s sports. She’s also a good player, albeit the third- or fourth-best on a team that’s in title contention.

But if you want to mention her on the WNBA’s Reddit board, you might have your post filtered out — because if it contains anything about Cunningham’s political views, the moderators are going to delete it posthaste.

Over the weekend, reports began to emerge that Cunningham’s name was being banned from /r/WNBA, the biggest subreddit dedicated to the league. For those of you unfamiliar with how Reddit works, it’s a social media platform that functions much like the message boards of the early internet — just all in one place, Reddit, which is divided into subreddits. This comes with all of the quirks and snags of the early internet message boards, including censorious moderators.

As it turned out, the moderators weren’t banning Cunningham, but they were effectively removing the only reason most people were talking about her.

“We filter content based on Sophi [sic] because it tends to being [sic] out trolls and people that arent[sic] fans of the W,” one mod said to an inquiry. “If you want to post freely aout [sic] Sophie you can go to a different sub[reddit].”

Cunningham, who first became a national name due to That Pointing Meme, became the summer’s sports cultural flashpoint after she stood up for keeping boys out of girls’ sports during an interview with ESPN.

"I got a lot of negative feedback about me hating trans. And I'm like, 'I never once said that,’" she told the outlet.

Since she has now see just how horrible the left is, will Sophie Cunningham begin getting more and more openly patriotic and even pro-MAGA?

"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."

After that caused an uproar, she then had the temerity, in the ultra-woke WNBA, to stick to her guns, telling reporters, “I said what I said.”

In the wake of these posts on other socials, /r/WNBA mods “clarified” their rules for Sophie Cunningham content, which was that it must be “related to basketball, including games, highlights, interviews, statistics, marketing endorsements, and other WNBA-related news.”

Now, if you want to hide the elephant in the room, go right ahead. The rules of the forum do state, after all, that one must “[k]eep critiques focused on basketball-related topics (performance, strategies, team dynamics) and ensure discussions remain civil and welcoming.”

Which is why these were trending posts I saw when I visited the subreddit:

So to be clear, political viewpoints on the transgender issue are totally welcome, just so long as Sophie Cunningham’s viewpoints are actively silenced by the mods, because the people who are on her side — the majority of the American people, that is, which means the majority of the WNBA’s potential fanbase — “arent fans of the W.”

Yeah, and now we know why: Here’s a woman standing for women and some fans of a league that can’t even figure out what a woman hate her for it.

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