Sophie Cunningham appears to troll transgender community with hat at Missouri football game
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- Indiana Fever player Sophie Cunningham appeared at Missouri’s homecoming game with a hat bearing a slogan that seemed to imply that transgender women are not actually women.
- Cunningham has previously defended excluding transgender women from women’s sports, calling the position “common sense” and saying she wants to protect girls and women.
Indiana Fever guard Sophie Cunningham caused a stir this summer by speaking out against transgender women participating in women’s sports.
Now she seems to have expanded her message beyond sports — without saying a word.
On Saturday, Cunningham appeared at her alma mater Missouri’s homecoming football game wearing a hat that read, “No Cis Just ... Woman.” The first three words are in smaller print on the side while “woman” is in large lettering across the front.
Las Vegas Aces star A’ja Wilson received a technical foul late in her team’s playoff loss to the Fever after leaving the court to confront a fan. She later said the fan’s behavior was ‘unacceptable.’
When the 2026 Mizzou Alumni Assn. Hall of Fame inductee was announced on the field before the game, she pointed both fingers at the hat with the slogan that seems to imply that transgender women aren’t actually women, rendering the word “cisgender” useless.
The university’s athletic department declined to comment for this article.
A three-time All-Southeastern Conference selection in college, Cunningham has become more of a role player in the WNBA. Her profile has been high the past two seasons, however, as the enforcer for superstar Fever teammate Caitlin Clark.
Cunningham created one of season’s most memorable (and meme-able) moments in June when she silently pointed at Phoenix’s DeWanna Bonner for roughly 22 seconds after the Mercury player got into a confrontation with Clark.
Valkryies coach Natalie Nakase on Sunday addressed Sophie Cunningham’s stance about trans athletes in women’s sports with reporters. Caitlin Clark mostly avoided doing so.
Cunningham reiterated her previously stated views on “protecting young girls in sport and women in sport”
in an article ESPN published July 21 — this time for a much larger audience.
“I got a lot of negative feedback about me hating trans. And I’m like, ‘I never once said that,’” Cunningham said in the article. “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.”
The next day, Cunningham told reporters that while “there is room to love everyone,” her view is “kind of common sense.”
‘Property of Sophie Cunningham’: How a fan got Fever star to troll a rival player with her autograph
An Indiana Fever fan gets Sophie Cunningham to sign a card featuring her on-court rival Jacy Sheldon so it reads as a major troll. Here’s how he pulled it off.
“I think it’s really important to protect children, and that’s little girls who are also involved in that category,” she said. “And so I’ll stand on what I said, and I’ll always believe that.”
In the aftermath of the article, demonstrators from both sides of the issue gathered outside of Fever games, while Cunningham sometimes was booed in by opposing crowds. After a July 31 game in Minnesota, Cunningham posed for pictures with Jennifer Sey and Riley Gaines, two outspoken political activists against transgender women in women’s sports.
