EmailPrintOpen Extended ReactionsPORTLAND, Ore. -- Here was the disunited United States in late July 2026: The national carousel of wrangling and grievance had rotated to the Pacific Northwest. The intricate issue of transgender women in sports had spent the waning days of the month hurling another loud groan into the WNBA's optimistic era.That meant a smattering of people opined and argued outside an arena on a late Friday afternoon while the wildfires burned out in Oregon and the great Mount Hood stood in a shroud.Some brought tripods and recorded their own viewpoints. Some called other people "insurrectionists" a time or two. Some accused others of racism even as all did seem to agree racism is vile, which might count as a start. One guy hollered, "Trans in women's sports is the patriarchy!" A man dressed as a frog carried a sign reading, "TRANS PEOPLE JUST WANT TO LIVE." Maybe 50 people demonstrated, and maybe 20 others asked the 50 about their demonstrations.Quite a few held little posters that read, "Thank you, Sophie," acknowledging the recent words of the 29-year-old Missourian and Indiana Fever guard Sophie Cunningham, who voiced her opposition to transgender athletes in women's sports to ESPN. The woman who had the 100 posters printed joshed, "You've always got to make a friend with a printer, you know." Some carried golden balloons with the numeral "8," Cunningham's jersey number. One held a tall poster of the 6-foot-1 Cunningham. Other signs read, "Democrats for Single-Sex Sports," or, "Title IX, Hold the Line." People wore black T-shirts with green lettering showing a clearly delineated XX and XY, sold by a company that says it donates part of its sales to help fund "the fight to protect fairness and opportunity in women's sports" and was founded by former gymnastics national champion Jennifer Sey. This all came three days after another, thinner "Thank you, Sophie" demonstration had happened in Seattle, and a Seattle Storm co-owner had wound up suspended for berating teenage girls holding "Thank you Sophie" signs inside the arena. This was the disunited United States in late July 2026.Well, a basketball game would happen inside the Moda Center in Portland, almost as if from some separate plane. The fourth-place Fever (19-10) would best the ninth-place Portland Fire (11-18) by 112-98 to extend the Fever's WNBA record of triple-digit scoring to five games. A sold-out 19,959 would attend even as the uppermost decks looked either half full or half empty. A sublime Caitlin Clark would go 26-10-10 for her fourth pro triple-double with field goals pretty, her free throws (14-for-17) prettier and her passes prettier still. The Fever outscored the Fire 31-15 off turnovers. How quaint, the stats.People with signs were scarce in the arena, but the two planes sort of did intersect sometimes. Cunningham told reporters before the game, as quoted by The Associated Press, "I have honestly had nothing to do with [the demonstrations]. I think it's just people practicing their rights of freedom of speech and doing what other fans have been doing since the WNBA has started. And so props to them, props to everyone who is able to be competent and be bold and courageous enough to speak their truths."Fans booed Cunningham in repeated swells, especially when she entered the game at 6:26 of the first quarter and all the way through her steal and breakaway layup just before halftime, out-throating the pro-Sophie cheers that came from her 13 points and her 3-for-5 shooting from yonder. On the bustling concourse at halftime, a woman held up a sign -- "Thank you, Sophie" -- seemingly the only one in the hall. Four women approached her. They wished to say that, among other things, Cunningham's language that she hoped to "protect young girls in a locker room" rang as patently absurd given that no trans person would harm young teammates in a locker room. The argument flickered a while without getting fiery. (Minnesota Lynx coach Cheryl Reeve would echo that during the weekend, telling reporters in Minneapolis, "It is not the case that we have 'biological men' in girls' locker rooms. The way it's being phrased, the innuendo there that somehow transgender women are predators of some kind in the locker room. There's a lot of narrative that is problematic that we need to address.")All around, including in the 87-degree sun outdoors beforehand, there burned reminders of the rare capacity of this particular issue to sow disagreement in those who often unite on other matters. It places an "out lesbian for 50 years," as Sherrie Taha identifies herself, in quibbles with others who share the "L" in the vast-and-vaster LGBTQIA+ umbrella. She knows her basketball enough to recall when Drake lost by "just a smidge" to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's UCLA in a 1969 national semifinal -- 85-82! -- and she says she long since familiarized herself with the concepts around transgender issues to find her particular viewpoint. "And so now," she said, "what's happened in the last 15 or 20 years is just, it's been just real sad to see, ... it's been marketed as a civil-rights issue but it's not. [It's a] mental health issue to some degree, you know, maybe mild. Many different reasons. Maybe social contagion. ... It's just a horrendous quagmire and mess now."She belongs to Women's Liberation Front, an organization advocating for the rights of women and endeavoring to remove transgender girls and women from girls' and women's sports. She's the one who printed the posters.Nearby, organizer Amy Sousa reeled off her own CV of demonstrating: around Washington after then-President Biden's 2021 executive order that expanded protections based on gender identity, around swimming during the case of transgender athlete Lia Thomas, around the NCAA, in state legislatures, school boards, city councils. "We are kind of old-school liberals," she said. "We are Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the basis of sex and women. And we think that sports need to be played on the category of sex. You know, identities are all fine and good, but we don't play sports with our identities, and frankly, there's always going to be people of all kinds of identities in the female category who are female. This category is for our sex. And males can claim alternate identities whether it's nonbinary or whatever, they can play on the men's team, the men's team is a great space for nonconforming men."A 62-year-old three-time Olympic cyclist who oversees a cattle farm in eastern Oregon with 160-odd head stood nearby. Inga Thompson uses scientific terms such as "46,XY DSD 5-ARD male," the DSD a scientific reference to "differences of sexual development," the part that can make the whole issue confusing to the verge of indecipherable. She said, "When you race against the very top in the world, you're seconds apart. And so, like, when I'm racing against a woman, I can tell when she's doping. I can tell when she's on something because suddenly she's just that much faster than me than she was the year before." She spots a parallel in "the clear male advantage" and said she finds it fair for the governing bodies of sports to test for sex, as World Athletics recently has done with requiring cheek swabs or blood tests."If you don't want invasive procedures going on, do not get into sports," she said. "Because every time that you win, you are going to strip naked in front of the people who take the urine test to make sure you're not carrying anything [related to doping]. You go in there naked. That's invasive. But you know what, I was willing to do that because I wanted to compete and that is one of the rules. If you don't want that type of inspection, don't get in sports. You don't get to have it all. You don't get to say, 'I want my privacy protected but I want to be in sports.' You don't get to have that."And near all of the above stood the cisgender heterosexual man dressed in an inflatable frog costume, a bit of a Portland trend that sprouted from protests against ICE. "I just saw that this gathering was going to be happening here," Edward Niedermeyer said, "and I saw what happened in Seattle, and I just thought what's going on is really not cool. My sign here says people just want to live, my perspective on this, and I don't understand why these people aren't able to go about their lives and let other people live theirs. I don't know why they are trying to make other people's literal lives, you know, debating their lives as content, to make content and get attention on the internet. Debating the lives of real people who are just trying to live their lives. I think it's despicable, and I think there's no place for that here in Portland, and I just wanted to show up and get a little sweaty in my frog suit."He said, "So, I think that this is an issue that is being instrumentalized. I think people understand it's an issue that gets attention, right? Things go viral. It doesn't mean for good or bad. They just do. This is an issue that people know goes viral, and to me, it's a sign of low character that people are willing to make this quote-unquote debate about people who just want to live their lives, under considerably oppressive conditions, right? They want to make those lives harder, and they want to debate making those lives harder for content. That's a sign of bad character to me. ... I just don't believe that's how we as Americans should be living our lives. The women who are going viral who are stirring this issue up, I don't see evidence that their lives, their personal lives, have been affected by this issue."He stood near other people's signs that read, "Fix Your Heart," and "F--- Transphobia," plus a banner that seemed displeased with President Donald Trump, who has adopted the issue.It became the latest round of noise around an issue that impacts few. In 2024, NCAA president Charlie Baker told Congress that he knew of only 10 transgender athletes out of more than half a million students on college teams. Last year, the NCAA banned anyone assigned male at birth from women's sports. Twenty-seven states have laws that restrict transgender girls from playing in school and college sports.This was the disunited United States in late July 2026, and when the evening wound down, the players and coaches talked basketball in a league trying to steer through the noise in a season that keeps taking on various strains of it. The Fever did not bring Cunningham or Clark to the press gathering. A reporter asked about dealing with that old sports ghoul "outside noise" in general, and the great Aliyah Boston of the Fever said, "I think there's always going to be outside noise. I think we've been professionals long enough to know that if we let that affect us, we're thinking about the wrong thing."But wait, then another reporter began to ask about Cunningham, but the moderator already had given last call for the questions, and so Boston and teammate Makayla Timpson and coach Stephanie White got up and hurried out while wishing everyone a good day, the players appearing to smile at having escaped another tangle with the country outside.
