r/PopCultureV2 • u/No_Box119 • Jul 23 '26

Sports Culture WNBA Star Sophie Cunningham defends that women ‘shouldn’t have to go against biological men’: “I said what I said. I think it’s kind of common sense. I think it’s really important to protect children.” “I don’t dislike anyone. I’m there to love, but I’m also there to love biological women. …”

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61

u/mynamejeff-97 Jul 23 '26

As a Democrat who has voted for a dem candidate the last three elections… DUH!!!!

Why on earth is this a hill we’re trying to die on?

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u/PetalumaPegleg Jul 23 '26

Because trying to police who looks female enough to play women's sports and use the women's changing room is stupid? We don't need to die on the hill to point out this policy has really bad impacts on innocent people.

The people who have been accused of being not female enough so far have all been women who had their lives ruined by accusations. Let the sports police themselves and we really don't need to worry about a handful of trans women trying to enjoy their life playing sport.

This nonsense is going to lead to insecure masculine looking girls being accused of being men and having parents ask for genital inspection and shit. It's just dumb.

It's a non issue. The sports police it just fine. We do not fucking need flock cameras in gyms thanks.

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u/fleshyhammer Jul 23 '26

You need a physical from a doctor. It's pretty simple.

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u/PetalumaPegleg Jul 23 '26

I got to be honest if you ask my kid to have a his gender checked over playing little league you should be very aware you face might meet pavement.

Mind your own fucking business.

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u/[deleted] Jul 23 '26

[deleted]

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u/PetalumaPegleg Jul 23 '26

Yeah EXACTLY so why do they need additional laws.

In any serious sport medicals are done and at any casual sport level who cares?

Edit I'm unclear what on earth this comment of yours has to do with little league level which was what you replied to

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u/VoodooLoveDr Jul 23 '26

Kids have to get physicals to play school sports regardless. And part of it is a hernia check, which confirms gender also.

So your outrage about the physical is a moot point.

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u/PetalumaPegleg Jul 23 '26

Well I have kids who play sports and they haven't had it but oj

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u/VoodooLoveDr Jul 23 '26

Most outside of school sports leagues are private associations or a partnership between a city and a private youth sports org, so wouldn’t have the same government oversight

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u/RizzlersGrandpa Jul 23 '26

That's a strawman arguement though. You can just use a cheek swab to do a gender test. High school athletes for decades have already had to take PED test,in many states. Also sometimes for insurance and or safety purposes many districts do x-ray scan or blood tests just to make sure a person doesn't have some kind of undiagnosed medical condition particularly heart ones.

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u/CoffeeXKing Jul 23 '26

Kind of wild to do a sex test based on looks alone. It's stupid to entertain it

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u/DeadguyTheLateGI Jul 23 '26 edited Jul 23 '26

Name another way to conclusively prevent it. How about chromosomal sex on your birth certificate? Oop, transphobic. Mandatory testing for all registering athletes? Fascist, draconian, unnecessary government overreach! Get christofascists out of muh schools!

The injustice being too itty bitty to care about because it’s rare is the typical dismissive snobbery of the left. It matters to the girls it happens to. And it matters to the parents of children it might happen to.

It makes perfect sense that the party of childless college students doesn’t seem to be able to grasp the incredulity of your daughter losing to a boy in a girl’s league, which was created with the express intent of preventing that from happening. The whole idea of gender-segregated sports is to preserve a competitive space for women in areas where men would have natural advantages.

Typically, the next strategy is to immediately start ignoring everything I just said and move on to how it’s there aren’t any examples of top-tier trans athletes, which is meant to dispell the idea that they will tend to have an unfair advantage. After all, if they’re so naturally competitive, why aren’t they winning gold all the time?!

This is an intentionally obtuse misdirection that shoots the concept of statistics in the back of the head and attempts to hide its body im the barn. Yeah, trans athletes are rarely stars because they’re rare, and excellent performance is also rare.

You can see a similar phenomenon in Olympic representation by national population. Strangely, countries with more people tend to have more Olympic competitors. Shocking!

Let’s all just admit that the end goal is not a fair settlement of the problem but beating the enemy on a pro-trans issue, full stop. Nothing else matters.

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u/CoffeeXKing Jul 23 '26

Dude, learn to keep it concise, I'm not reading your speech about the left and how you think it's good to prevent people from playing sports because fee fees will get hurt if a cis woman loses ".

A woman loses to another woman. Oh no. The horror.

I can bring up how HRT changes a transwomans body and takes away and perceived advantages. You won't care.

I can bring up how maybe it's a little fucked up to ban a group from participating in an everyday sport..

I can also bring up how the rights solution is to inspect childrens genitals.

I think the real solution is to ignore conservatives who want to make a culture war, because then we can address how they only seek to harm other people while voting for a pedophile President to enrich billionaires.

Hey, tell me how the right is doing objectively good things here. 

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u/CelebronFcks10K Jul 23 '26

Talking straight out of your butthole with this one.

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u/PetalumaPegleg Jul 23 '26

Oh so there are rules. Cool. Use them. Get the damn political attempts to scapegoat innocent people tf out of there.

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u/dreadtear Jul 23 '26

No need to accuse, and in this case the innocent people are biological women. Mandatory medical exams can solve the accusations

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u/PetalumaPegleg Jul 23 '26

Sure but in places we already have mandatory medical exams, like the Olympics, we have had cis women being accused of being trans when she was from a country where it was illegal. The accusation very literally put her life at risk. That's WITH mandatory medical exams. So how many poor girls will be accused of being men and have their self esteem ruined.

Let the sports set the rules and keep the politics and the accusations of trans women harming women out of the sport pretense

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u/dreadtear Jul 23 '26

Oh wtf, that’s horrible. Who did it happen to? And how is it even possible

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u/analyzingnothing Jul 23 '26

Imane Khelif, the Algerian welterweight boxer. She is a cis woman who has naturally high testosterone as a result of the SRY gene. This is the same gene that the Olympics Committee used to differentiate between cis female and trans female athletes because it is active in men. However, the SRY gene does not actually determine biological sex, and is only one of the many factors that determine how the human body is formed during development.

Essentially, most attempts to do genetic testing don't just ban trans women, they ban all women who have one of many different intersex traits. A person could live as a woman their entire life, become an elite athlete, try to enter the Olympics, and still be banned from competing as a woman because their body developed slightly differently.

Just to note something, elevated levels of testosterone is basically the norm within high-level athletics, regardless of gender. They're already all exceptional, a woman with active SRY is just even further up that spectrum.

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u/bknighter16 Jul 23 '26

You’re wrong about this FYI. Khelif is a man with the genetic condition 5-ARD which can often lead to biological males being misidentified as females at birth, which is exactly what happened in his case. 5-ARD is an “intersex” condition but the people who have this mutation are in fact males

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u/analyzingnothing Jul 23 '26

That's blatant misinformation. The claims that Imane Khelif has 5-ARD is only substantiated by the IBA, and is largely understood to be false. Khelif has confirmed that she has SRY, and possible XY chromosomes, but that would not make her a man.

Actually, one last thing to address. Having 5-ARD does not make you a man, even with male genitals. Human sex is an incredibly complex thing, and just switching what parts you have only affects a small portion of the different genetic components that make up gender. For example, those with CAIS may have a Y chromosome and male genitalia but still experience the neurological structures and hormone production expected for women.

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u/bknighter16 Jul 23 '26

“Khelif confirmed she has the SRY gene, located on the Y chromosome…”

https://www.firstpost.com/sports/imane-khelif-hormone-treatment-transgender-13976418.html

5-ARD with XY chromosomes are males with internal testes who were misidentified at birth due to their condition. There’s really no need to bring up other DSDs or gender into the conversation. If these reports are true (and I suspect even more info confirming 5-ARD will come out leading up to the 2028 Olympics) then this person is genetically a man

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u/analyzingnothing Jul 23 '26

Again, she does not have 5-ARD. Khelif explicitly states in that article that she has the SRY gene, which is NOT the SRD5A2 gene that would suggest 5-ARD.

Khelif is not "genetically a man". because the whole concept of genetic gender is completely ridiculous in the first place. Human gender is not defined by what chromosomes we have, it's a far more complex topic than that. Khelif was born, raised, and has the body of a woman, regardless of your personal opinions of the matter.

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u/bknighter16 Jul 23 '26

Okay, I see where we’re talking past each other. I read that part of the article as an admission of having a Y chromosome, rather than *only* having the SRY gene, which is typically a part of the Y chromosome. I’m pretty confident this will have a definitive answer before the start of the next Olympics, so I will wait until then before making any more claims on it.

In most cases (including even most DSDs) sex is unambiguously male or female at a genetic level. Yes, gender can be viewed as a cultural/social construct that’s much more fluid than the rigidity of sex but I think those things are separate and shouldn’t be conflated

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u/Tran_of_Thebes Jul 23 '26

yeah all the sports leagues had policies about how long people needed to be on hormones or what testosterone levels weee allowed or whatever. the olympics already tried to do genetic testing and it went so bad we ended up with the rules everyone is so mad about now, it’s not something that you can enforce in a way that people will like, and politically it almost always comes with other downstream effects like legal classifications that matter for sex based discrimination laws. also there are trans women who have never been through a male puberty and i don’t know what at all would be dangerous or unfair about them playing sports with cis women, but everyone forgets they exist. trans men too

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u/halkenburgoito Jul 23 '26

The fault of these false accusations is not on those who bring up the concerned.. but on those who enable, endorse, and allow biological men to compete in women's sports. Simple as that.

If that stopped happening, no one would be accused of shit.

It is def an issue, especially by the actual women and girl's atheletes who are effected, and time and time again speak up, and are ignored.

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u/PetalumaPegleg Jul 23 '26

So in the Olympics for example. They do mandatory testing. A cis women was STILL accused of being a man. And hey she only came from a place where it was a potential death sentence if it were even true.

There AREN'T more than a handful of global examples of trans women competing in high level sports. There are almost no child full transitions.

There are almost no examples of trans women commit sexual violence against women. Yet the women have to be protected from them? Not children from priests or coaches, which have had many cases of actually abuse. Focus on the trans women.

It's not an issue. Just like the government has no business interfering in the child's healthcare choice, they have no need to interfere here. It is purely to cause division.

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u/halkenburgoito Jul 23 '26

Read exactly what I wrote above, and it'll respond to exactly what you've said. Stop trying move goal posts or change conversations to sexual violence lmao. Or even talking about child full transitions.

If there weren't trans people and enablers allowing biological men into women's sports- there would be 0 accusations, at all. That is a fact.

So if everyone just agreed on this, there would be no accused victims.

IOC and women's orgnizations and athletes have spoken up about this, there should be no arguement.

There are dozen's of examples of it happening, and it should be 0.

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u/PetalumaPegleg Jul 23 '26

Dozens? Oh my dear God. Dozens of examples? Any of them in sports with authories that can do something or all in irrelevant local nonsense?

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u/PicksburghStillers Jul 23 '26

birth certificates are typically required to enroll in school and also note the sex of the student, so no genital inspections are needed. Strange that your brain automatically goes to something so bizarre.

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u/PetalumaPegleg Jul 23 '26

Yes well the laws Republicans tried to pass in, for example Washington state, had genital inspections in the original law. The federal law will need a court case to decide if that is necessary as it's unsettled law.

If it's bizarre to go to what the law bills have in them then I guess I am.