Sophie Cunningham and the cynical economics of the anti-trans athlete

Before this summer, the WNBA player Sophie Cunningham was probably most famous for her decision, in the waning seconds of a 2025 game, to more or less tackle an opponent who had poked the eye of her Indiana Fever teammate Caitlin Clark. In the weeks that followed, Cunningham signed a bunch of endorsement deals and picked up more than a million new TikTok followers. She earned a second wave of social media-driven attention this season, when her exaggerated, taunting finger-point at another…