By Leah Asmelash

(CNN) — Last week, Celeste Keaton, a co-owner of the WNBA’s Seattle Storm, joined a group of angry fans confronting two teenage girls sitting courtside at a game between the Storm and the Indiana Fever. The two teens were wearing shirts reading “XX/XY” — a reference to human sex chromosomes — and one held a sign reading, “Thank you Sophie for speaking up for girls!”

The Sophie in question was Sophie Cunningham, a bench guard and the Fever’s fourth-leading scorer, who recently called it “common sense” to ban transgender athletes from competing in women’s sports. The T-shirts were the product of XX-XY Athletics, a brand by right-wing advocate Jennifer Sey dedicated to keeping transgender women out of women’s sports.

Keaton was fined and suspended for five home games by the league for her role in the incident, according to ESPN. When the Fever traveled to play the Minnesota Lynx days later, Sey — a former gymnast on the US national team who also campaigned against Covid school closures — sat courtside, accompanied by Riley Gaines, the former collegiate swimmer who has turned a fifth-place tie with a trans competitor in the national finals into a career as a spokesperson for banning trans girls and women from participating in girls and women’s sports.

Why were an ex-gymnast and an ex-swimmer taking a stand against trans athletes at a basketball game with no trans women playing in it, in a league that has never included any trans women players? The Indiana Fever — a habitual middle-of-the-pack franchise, 14 years removed from its only championship — have been on a hot streak on the court lately that has carried them up among the championship contenders. But they have become a very different sort of media sensation, for one particular niche fan base.

To right-wing activists, Fever games and Fever discourse have become an opportunity to air grievances about gender and race. One of the girls rooting for Cunningham in Seattle was Ahnaleigh Wilson, a high school runner sponsored by XX-XY. Wilson has been publicly opposing trans women in sports since 2024. The right-wing podcaster Brandi Kruse, who accompanied the teens to the game and promoted the story afterward, wrote on X that a “generous donor” had paid for the tickets. XX-XY did not respond to requests for comment.

The same day that the Storm issued an apology for Keaton’s behavior, the Harry Potter author and noted opponent of trans rights J.K. Rowling told her millions of followers on X that the teens were “heroines.” Sey, the XX-XY founder, wrote a column on Substack opposing trans girls’ participation in sports and painting the girls as principled victims.

Before Cunningham, the focus of conservatives’ praise and concern was the Fever’s young star guard Caitlin Clark — the all-time scoring leader in women’s or men’s Division I college basketball and, like Cunningham, a white player.

In early July, a group of 11 Republican lawmakers, led by US Rep. August Pfluger of Texas, sent a letter to WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert complaining that Clark had been “hip-checked, poked in the eye, and struck in the throat during games,” and speculating that the rough conduct “may be racially motivated.” The letter threatened to encourage federal investigations of the league and demanded “meaningful action” from the league.

Professional basketball is a physical sport, especially when a younger player with a flair for theatrical shot-making meets established veterans. Before Clark was born, the NBA in the ’80s featured the “Jordan Rules” strategy, as the Detroit Pistons and later the New York Knicks tested the limits of how hard they could maul the rising Michael Jordan.

But right-wing media and political figures saw a scandal in Clark getting bumped around. Fox News has covered the fouls against Clark more than sports networks have, even putting together something it called a “Caitlin Clark hard contact timeline: WNBA’s growing history of brutal hits against the face of the sport.” Newsmax host Greg Kelly this week replayed a flagrant foul on Clark by the Phoenix Mercury’s Alyssa Thomas from June, saying, “If the league won’t do anything, I think the cops have to show up and start making arrests.” (The WNBA suspended Thomas for one game for the foul). President Donald Trump has weighed in, saying Clark was “treated rather rough.”

That the Black women who predominantly make up the league all frequently get fouled doesn’t seem to matter. Thomas, whose flagrant foul against Clark was initially missed by referees and became the impetus for Republicans taking interest in the league’s physicality, said she received death threats because of the play. Last year, the WNBA investigated alleged racial abuse hurled at Angel Reese by Fever fans after an altercation between her and Clark, though ultimately the claims were not substantiated. Clark has said any harassment or hate is not OK, and noted that it can be difficult for referees to catch things in the pace of the game.

Nor does it matter that Cunningham is famous for dealing out hard fouls. She gets praised for her physicality, and her status as an “enforcer” on the court feeds into the anti-trans-athlete movement’s treatment of her as a dissident.

As a league, the WNBA doesn’t give conservative culture warriors much to root for. The league has numerous out LGBTQ players, and it was the first professional league to have a Pride night. The players have long spoken out about racial injustices and LGBTQ rights.

And though no trans women have played in the WNBA, the league has already welcomed Layshia Clarendon, who became the first out trans and nonbinary person in the WNBA in 2020.

During the Fever’s game against the Lynx, which aired on ESPN, Minnesota coach Cheryl Reeve wore a T-shirt reading, “Trans kids belong.” Fans could be seen on the broadcast waving trans flags, and commentators encouraged viewers to watch Reeve’s comments from the day before, in which she rejected the claim that trans athletes present a problem in women’s sports and said, “There is a faction of people in our country that are making this a massive issue.”

Back in 2024, Clarendon and the Las Vegas Aces’ Brianna Turner advocated for trans athletes at the college level after the NCAA announced a review of their policies. A small group of “select, vocal” conservatives don’t speak for all athletes, Turner and Clarendon wrote in a joint column.

“We can’t be silent as the future of the sport we love is threatened,” they wrote, “not by an imaginary, hate-manufactured myth about who transgender people are, but by a very real, terrifying drive to ensure there is only one way to be a woman or to be an athlete.”

Efforts to ban trans players from girls and women’s sports continue to spread, though the numbers of such athletes remain vanishingly small. A 2017 report in the journal Sports Medicine reviewing several studies found “no direct or consistent research” on trans people having an athletic advantage over their cisgender peers. With so little research behind the measures, critics say the bans only add to the discrimination trans people face. In June, just days after Cunningham’s comments in ESPN, the Supreme Court upheld state bans on trans girls playing on girls’ sports teams.

“When youth are excluded, they are denied this ability to thrive and learn,” said Sasha Buchert, counsel and director of Lambda Legal’s Nonbinary and Transgender Rights Project. “The ginned-up panic around trans athletes is meant to distract people from the real issues in their lives: the rising cost of groceries, unaffordable health care, and the soaring price of gas.”

Clark, like Michael Jordan before her, is a mainstream celebrity product endorser and has largely avoided taking sides on contentious issues. And despite Republicans telling the commissioner she’s “the face of your league,” in recent games she’s been outshined by teammate Kelsey Mitchell, who put up 37 points against the Lynx, one of the league’s top defenses.

Cunningham may have more to gain from seeking controversy. She made her original comments about trans athletes in an ESPN profile, an unusual forum for a bench player, and one justified less by her 9.3 points per game than by the 22 seconds she spent theatrically pointing her finger to taunt DeWanna Bonner of the Phoenix Mercury during a game, a gesture that delighted the right-wing internet.

But Cunningham is still a WNBA player. Despite the MAGA interest, she chooses to describe her politics as “very much in the middle.” Before the Lynx game, she spoke with Reeve. Later, Cunningham said the two “left with love and respect”; Reeve said, “It was nice to be in person.”

And one difficulty with choosing the WNBA as a culture-war battleground is that culture warriors don’t like the WNBA. Fox News host Jesse Watters complained about the saturation coverage of Cunningham on air, calling the story “ridiculous” and saying, “This isn’t a news story. It doesn’t matter.”

Watters said: “We don’t even cover the NBA. Why are we covering the WNBA?”

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