Days after Indiana Fever star Sophie Cunningham doubled down on her stance against transgender athletes competing in women’s sports, her podcast costar has taken a different point of view.
“Transgender athletes in American sports is such a borderline non-existent issue,” Summer House alum West Wilson said in a video via TikTok on Saturday, July 25.
Wilson, 31, and Cunningham, 29, are high school friends and host the “Show Me Something” podcast together.
“Right-wingers have convinced a massive portion of people in our country that these people are, like, a threat to sports in America, when mathematically it’s not the case at all,” Wilson said. “And by continuing to platform this — politicians, athletes, journalists, news outlets — you’re only isolating transgender people even more by making them seem like this giant group of people is a threat to society, a threat to sports, when that’s just not proportionately the truth in any capacity.”
He continued, “There’s like 10 transgender athletes in all the NCAA. I think there are unique questions that can be handled on [an] individual basis, but to allow this to take attention away from housing, healthcare, and wars and all the other actual harmful s*** in our country is dumb.”
There are more than 500,000 NCAA student-athletes, spanning the organization’s three divisions. There are, in fact, fewer than 10 transgender people in that group, NCAA president Charlie Baker said during a 2024 congressional hearing.
Cunningham previously weighed in on the issue in a story for ESPN published July 21.
“I got a lot of negative feedback about me hating trans. And I’m like, ‘I never once said that,’” she said in the story. “I think that I am here to extend love. 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.”
Asked about it the next day at a Fever practice, Cunningham said, “I think it’s kind of common sense. I think I’ll always believe in that. I think it’s really important to protect children.”
In addition to the low number of transgender athletes in sports, there’s also no conclusive evidence that transgender women have a tangible advantage over their cisgender counterparts. A study funded in part by the IOC and published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine in 2024 even found several disadvantages for trans women, including poorer lower-body strength and lung function.
“I think there is room for absolutely everyone here and I think there’s room to love everyone,” Cunningham said. “I truly think when you get people in the same room and have conversations, you have a lot in common with a lot of people. I’m there to love, but I’m also there to love biological women and I think there are rights that need to be protected.”
