The Common Sense of Sophie Cunningham

    “In the end,” the omniscient narrator of 1984 explains, “the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it.”

    So it goes when the unstoppable force of political ideology crashes into the immovable object of immutable truths. It doesn’t matter if you know the former thing to be false; you have to believe it. And not only that, you want to, if only because you have seen what happens to people who do not, and so you know what a profoundly cold comfort it would be to maintain your grip on reality when tribal belonging demands you let go. The people who guard the door to the clubhouse have declared that two plus two is five, that we have always been at war with Eastasia, and — to borrow from another cautionary tale about the dangers of conformism — that the emperor is not, I repeat, not parading around with his penis out, but rather wearing a pair of pants so innovative they are beyond the ability of ordinary people to comprehend or even perceive.

    This is what all the so-called right-thinking people believe — and now all the right-thinking people are looking at you, because you are one of us, aren’t you?

    “Aren’t you?”

    “AREN’T YOU?!!”

    For a certain amount of time, in certain political climates, this will be enough to produce the appearance of a consensus. But even the most successful campaign of forced conformity to outright lies cannot last forever — which brings me to the curious case of Indiana Fever player, Sophie Cunningham.

    Cunningham is one of a few Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) players who you will likely recognize, whether or not you watch women’s professional basketball: very tall, very blonde, and very internet-famous for elevating the act of aggressively pointing at someone to an art form. She is also presently at the center of a controversy stemming from comments made earlier this month in an interview with ESPN, when she spoke candidly about the issue of transgender inclusion in women’s sports.

    Cunningham doesn’t hate trans people, she said, 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.”

    A week later, confronted and asked to clarify or walk back these remarks, Cunningham replied, “I said what I said. I think it’s kind of common sense.”

    Some took umbrage at this, of course. Because, first of all, this is the world we live in. Secondly, there are a ton of stupid people in the world. A smattering of online commentators called Cunningham transphobic and demanded she be suspended. The Ringer writer Joel Anderson posted something sneering about her “grift.” But all told, the attempted cancellation of Cunningham has been lackluster, unpopular, and entirely unsuccessful. The WNBA declined to condemn her comments; the legacy press has either ignored the incident or covered it with a “just-the-facts” style neutrality. A demonstration by Cunningham’s supporters in advance of the Indiana Fever game in Seattle a couple of weeks ago barely made a blip on the outrage radar.

    All of this — the original comments, the lack of apology, and the muted backlash — would have been virtually unimaginable not all that long ago, when just uttering the phrase “biological men” in reference to trans athletes was a kick to the proverbial hornet’s nest (except that in this case the hornets’ capabilities included not just stinging you but also getting you fired, banned from social media, and uninvited from Thanksgiving dinner). Recall, for instance, the intense enforcement of the 2022 discourse surrounding Lia Thomas, née William Thomas, a swimmer at the University of Pennsylvania who had been a relatively awful swimmer on the men’s team but, lo and behold, catapulted to record-shattering dominance after undergoing “hormone therapy” and getting approval to compete against women. Imagine that. 

    Thomas’ astonishing success was either a triumph for trans inclusion or a farcical atrocity against the most basic notions of biology and fairness, depending on your perspective — except that the latter perspective was so effectively stigmatized that you’d be forgiven for thinking it didn’t exist, except in those dark and squalid corners of the discourse where bigots gathered to marinate in hatred and lies; kind of like the anti-intellectual, childish bullshit that this blog was subject to. It wasn’t just that mainstream media coverage of Thomas was uniformly positive; it was that a narrative had been born. There was a laudatory high-five, fist-bump, and metaphorical carrying on the Left’s shoulders of Mr. Thomas for giving the finger to the unwashed masses who were deemed to be too too dense to comprehend that 2 + 2 does, in fact, equal 5. 

    At the same time, women who objected to this state of affairs were excoriated as bigots, bullies, and grifters—including the female swimmers on the Penn women’s team who reported that Thomas’ behavior in the locker room was making them uncomfortable. Thomas’ teammates were cautioned not to speak to the media; those who were uncomfortable with Thomas’ presence in competition or comportment in the locker room were instructed to address their biases with a therapist. Riley Gaines, a swimmer from the University of Kentucky who became an outspoken activist for barring natal male athletes from women’s sports after competing against Thomas in 2022, was widely portrayed in the press as an opportunistic, attention-seeking loser and physically attacked by demonstrators during a college speaking engagement. As recently as last summer, The New York Times described Gaines as an activist whose goal was nothing less than “the legal and cultural dismantling of the belief that transgender people exist.” 

    The message was clear: Lia Thomas was a hero. Lia Thomas was an avatar of the defining civil rights issue of our time. Lia Thomas was the vulnerable, sympathetic victim of atrocious mistreatment by both cruelly bullying teammates and society at large. Please… All the while, the Left seemed to forget that while they were calling Riley Gaines a “loser,” their guy couldn’t compete with his own guys so, ignoring basic biological science, he decided to pick on the girls, leaving them bullied and bloodied on the altar of farcical competition, while the aforementioned Left, who were always so obnoxiously proud of “protecting” young girls’ rights against big, bad Neanderthal conservatives, were turning their bitchy backs on those same young girls and leaving them hanging on the cross of politics to whither and die…laughing all they way to ESPN and The New York Times since they had found a new poster-boy to lay down in front of and prostrate themselves. 

    Most of all: Lia Thomas was just a girl who wanted to swim.

    None of this is to pick on Lia Thomas personally…sort of. I personally think he’s the biggest loser for starting this whole idiotic opera in the first place. So you suck as a competitive swimmer! So what? Grow up! Try something else, like pickle ball! Everyone else is! Or, you could keep swimming against your own sex, keep your head down, and at the end of the day you’ll know you did your best and at least you will be able to look at yourself in the mirror…honestly. That is what amateur sports is all about. But, of course, the movement needed a protagonist; and if it hadn’t been him, it would have just been someone else. But because it was Mr. Thomas (and because the standard uniform for female swimmers leaves so little to the imagination), the visual record of this moment makes for a startling retrospective into just how extreme its demands are; like an old Far Side cartoon. What was required was not just the subversion of our instinctive sense — what Sophie Cunningham calls “common sense” — that it was both unfair and immoral to force women to swim against a post-pubescent male; it was the rejection of the epistemic reality that undergirded our moral intuitions. Photographs from this period depict the six-feet-four-inch Thomas literally towering over the competition: broad-shouldered, square-jawed, intact penis and testicles bulging conspicuously beneath a women’s tank-style swimsuit. As naked emperors go, this one was both indelible and undeniable — and yet, denying it was what the party demanded.

    And so deny it was what people did.

    Behind all this was a growing sense that to acknowledge male and female as biologically distinct categories of human was no longer acceptable for those who wished to remain liberals in good standing; the new party-approved truth, handed down from on high by politically captured academics, institutions, and media outlets, was that trans women were actually women, but also that sex was a spectrum, and that the athletic advantage of men over women — whatever those were — was itself a sexist and outdated myth.

    Americans of all political stripes are sick and tired of pretending they can’t see the emperor’s whole, entire ass.

    “Separating Sports by Sex Doesn’t Make Sense,” The Atlantic declared. “Scientists have long said there is no single biological factor that determines sex,” explained The New York Times. “Wave of Bills to Block Trans Athletes Has No Basis in Science,” said NPR. At the same time, scientific journals engaged in a yearslong campaign to, as independent science journalist Jesse Singal described it, “debunk the concept of biological sex, or at least complicate it so much that it is no longer seen as a reasonably accurate model for carving up the human world into biological males and females.”

    In light of all this, the response to Sophie Cunningham just a few short years later — or, in the case of many of the aforementioned outlets, the lack of any response at all — is even more striking. And while it might be tempting to ascribe this sea change to the current occupant of the White House, I suspect that both Donald Trump’s reelection and Cunningham’s non-cancellation are in fact both symptoms of the same cause: Namely, again, that Americans of all political stripes are sick and tired of pretending they can’t see the emperor’s big, fat ass.

    In hindsight, the breadth of the untruths a person was supposed to believe in, or at least not profess disbelief in, in order to escape ostracism during these years is staggering — and yet unsurprising. It takes a lot of scaffolding to hold up a lie this big, to keep it from collapsing under its own weight. It also takes a lot of intimidation, a lot of power — or at least the illusion of power — to make people so afraid that they dare not risk pointing out even the hairline cracks in the scaffold’s foundations, let alone admit that they can still see the emperor perched at the top, big as life and more naked than ever, turning pink in the noonday sun.

    But even as this mechanism is what makes the lie work, it is also, ultimately, what makes it ludicrous, not to mention a galactic waste of time. This is the problem with movements that traffic in stigma rather than reason, persuasion, or conversation: Even if you can blackmail people into biting their tongues, shutting their eyes, and nodding along to the falsehood that passes for your party line, you are living on borrowed time and squandering valuable trust every step of the way. And once the trust runs out, if you are the party in charge, everything you’ve been doing up until this point will begin to backfire. This is what happens to presidents when they say anything they damn well please, no matter how stupid and/or untrue. Wait, did I just type that out loud?

    This phenomenon is visible now in the response to Cunningham, whose critics appear to be discovering in real time just how thoroughly they’ve overplayed their hand and how much power they no longer have. The institutional buy-in that forced people to nod along to the narrative of 2022, which flipped our intuitive and appropriate sense of the smaller, weaker, more physically vulnerable sex as the one requiring protection in sport and in intimate spaces, has evaporated; today, the backlash against Cunningham and her supporters only further undermines the credibility of those attempting to enforce it. Far from a source of moral authority, people like WNBA team co-owner Celeste Keaton, who confronted a pair of teenage girls holding a “Thank you Sophie” sign in Seattle last week, now look to mainstream onlookers like exactly what they are: a group of fanatical ideologues bullying and berating young women for speaking the truth.

    That includes Cunningham, who posted on X that she would be in touch with the girls; of Keaton, she wrote, “Truly embarrassing of the co-owner. Unfortunately shows the type of leader she is.” The WNBA appeared to agree with Cunningham: The other day, the body confirmed that it had fined Keaton and banned her from attending her team’s next five games.

    For the vast majority of people, I imagine all of this is a welcome development purely for what it says about the current state of the culture. No matter where you fall on the specific question of trans women in sports, there is great relief in just being able to admit, without fear of ugly backlash, that two plus two makes four. But for activists of all stripes, there’s an important lesson here about the value of persuasion over intimidation. Yes, with some effort, and if you are the party in power, you may create a culture where your preferred crazy beliefs are treated like incontrovertible facts — at least among members of your own tribe, whose fear of being exiled from the clubhouse will eclipse their desire to tell truth from lies or right from wrong. You may, for a time, tell people that two and two make five and convince them that they have to believe it.

    But unless your influence extends beyond cultural trendsetting to the totalitarian license to punish dissenters with death, disappearance, or elaborate tortures involving close encounters with rats, then the inevitable outcome of your movement will not be an Orwellian Party victory. It will be the one from that other story—the one where everyone, once they’re at liberty to admit it, turns to their neighbor and says: “I didn’t want to say anything, but I knew the emperor was nude all the time.”

Write to Peter: magtour@icloud.com