Sophie Cunningham has spent the past few weeks positioning herself as a guardian of women’s sports, and just like Katie Nolan, Danny Parkins is having a hard time squaring that with who she’s chosen to align herself with.
Speaking on The Colin Cowherd Podcast, Parkins argued that the Indiana Fever guard’s association with the UFC, and by extension Dana White, contradicts the idea that protecting women is the singular principle guiding her recent advocacy.
Advertisement
“I thought Katie Nolan made a great point,” said Parkins. “You showed up at a UFC fight with a president who has hit his wife on camera, for Conor McGregor, who has been accused of sexual assault. Your North Star isn’t protecting women in all cases. It’s just this particular issue that again is a lightning rod issue that has helped some people become very influential in the right-wing media commentator grifter space.”
Cunningham’s saga began last month, when she told ESPN she wants to “protect young girls in a locker room” who “shouldn’t have to go against biological men.” The comments turned the Fever guard into an instant fixture of conservative media, drew a pointed rebuke from Minnesota Lynx coach Cheryl Reeve, who wore a “Trans Kids Belong” shirt onto the court ahead of facing Indiana, and fractured Cunningham’s own podcast partnership, with co-host West Wilson publicly breaking with her on the issue, and calling the entire issue a “borderline nonexistent” distraction from housing, healthcare, and other problems facing the country.
Cunningham has since tried to reframe herself as the aggrieved party, telling local reporters that WNBA media covers “everything except basketball” and that she’d rather the focus return to the court. Part of that media coverage includes Nolan, who in a monologue on her Casuals podcast contrasted Cunningham’s support of the UFC with her purported desire to protect women in sports, while calling out Cunningham for failing to understand the broader context of her comments despite playing alongside many LGBTQ+ women in the WNBA.
Advertisement
“You couldn’t catch me dead at that fight,” Nolan said. “F*ck Conor McGregor, respectfully. And you follow up by saying it’s really important for you to protect little girls from some theoretical transgender person who might take advantage of them, when men come into women’s sports in various positions of authority and take advantage of women all the time. Where were you, Sophie, on any of that?”
Building on Nolan’s criticism of Cunningham, Parkins made the case that outrage over transgender athletes has become far more valuable currency in the current media landscape than most other issues affecting the trans community. He also questioned whether the scale of the outrage bears any meaningful relationship to the actual harm at stake, or to the people that outrage ostensibly claims to protect.
“I just wish that people had a little bit more empathy,” he said. “If they actually cared about this stuff, some of the discussion would be about the suicide rate in the trans community, or the difficulty of housing in the trans community, and not this mysterious person who is coming to take a roster spot in the WNBA who nobody can name.”
Parkins wasn’t saying the concern is misplaced, given that a widely cited NBC News poll last year showed that three-fourths of respondents were against trans women competing in women’s sports. He just isn’t convinced it’s the crisis it’s been sold as.
Advertisement
“I personally don’t get the sense that we are anywhere near a tipping point where one of the 20 biggest issues facing our country is going to be trans athletes coming into women’s sports and taking spots away from girls playing on a fair level,” the FS1 personality said. “I just wish that trans people be treated with decency and humanity, and then we can deal with issues as they crop up when it comes into other arenas.”
The post Danny Parkins: Sophie Cunningham’s ‘North Star isn’t protecting women in all cases’ appeared first on Awful Announcing.
