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<\/p>\nAlain Stephens is an investigative reporter covering gun violence, arms trafficking, and federal law enforcement.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
In the ever-shifting theater <\/span>of America\u2019s culture wars, conservative media has found its newest gladiatorial conscript: Indiana Fever guard Sophie Cunningham.<\/p>\n It\u2019s an unlikely promotion\u2014and from backers who, until recently, probably couldn\u2019t have named five WNBA players.<\/p>\n The reason for her esteem probably has little to do with her faultless three point precision<\/a>. In an interview with ESPN<\/a>, Cunningham declared she opposed transgender women\u2014whom she referred to as \u201cbiological men\u201d\u2014competing in women\u2019s sports, arguing the issue was about \u201cprotecting young girls.\u201d Later, she cheekily doubled down on the statement, posting an outfit photo on Instagram<\/a> with the caption: \u201cI said what I said\u201d with a saluting emoji.<\/p>\n That was enough.<\/p>\n Almost overnight, Cunningham became more than a WNBA player. She became one of conservatism\u2019s newest culture-war combatants: blonde, white, conventionally attractive, and playing in a league overwhelmingly composed of players of color<\/a>, and with one of the largest openly LGBTQ+ player populations in professional sports<\/a>.<\/p>\n For generations, conservative movements have sought to anoint and weaponize cisgender white women as public-facing enforcers of social and racial hierarchy.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n Within days of Cunningham\u2019s remarks, conservative media had found its new protagonist.\u00a0<\/p>\n Fox News host Riley Gaines, who herself rose to prominence<\/a> as an anti-trans NCAA swimmer, called Cunningham<\/a> \u201cthe first current high-level female athlete\u201d willing to publicly oppose transgender participation in women\u2019s sports, and praised her for speaking out from inside what Gaines called \u201cthe most woke league of all time.\u201d The Daily Wire cast the now-famous finger-pointer<\/a>\u2014and on-court defender of Caitlyn Clark<\/a>, another white player whose first season with the WNBA sparked racialized conversations<\/a> that cast her Black opponents as too \u201caggressive\u201d\u2014as someone \u201cnow fighting for us<\/a>.\u201d Trump\u2019s Department of Education joined in, posting a Grok AI-generated image<\/a> of Cunningham wearing a crown with the caption: \u201cCommon sense prevails.\u201d<\/p>\n Cunningham\u2019s ascent into the right\u2019s zeitgeist is by design. For generations, conservative movements have sought to anoint and weaponize cisgender white women as public-facing enforcers of social and racial hierarchy.\u00a0<\/p>\n While the specific rallying cry has changed throughout history, their use and ideological framing to the conservative movement has remained largely intact: They serve narratively as bulwarks against some grave impending demographic or social upset, which if allowed to come to fruition would be an assault on the current status quo of women at large.\u00a0<\/p>\n American political history is thick with appeals to white womanhood as something endangered and therefore requiring protection, particularly against the encroaching civil rights gains of Black, brown, and LGBTQ+ communities. Since the Academy Award-winning Birth of a Nation<\/em><\/a>, the idea that straight white women are in peril simply by living in proximity to minority groups has been repeatedly used to justify racial exclusion and stir up moral panic.<\/p>\n In the wake of Brown v. Board of Education, southern governments launched what\u2019s now known as the \u201cMassive Resistance,<\/a>\u201d a series of laws to prevent integration. The campaign mobilized a movement of white women<\/a> to organize through schools, newspapers and civic groups in an effort they sold as defending white children, neighborhoods, and public education. It was largely these communities that performed the on-the-ground enforcement of segregation, going so far as to pluck out children suspected of being mixed-race from white schools. This changed the packaging of the politics of segregation: Rather than snarling racism, the message could be framed more politely as a threat to the sanctity of motherhood and child welfare<\/a>.<\/p>\n By the 1970s, overt defenses of racial segregation had become politically untenable on the national stage. The conservative movement\u2019s next great cultural fight shifted toward gender. As the sexual revolution, second-wave feminism<\/a>, and the promise of the Equal Rights Amendment <\/a>changed family structures and challenged traditional gender roles, conservatives increasingly looked to white women to make the case against the nation\u2019s expanding vision of female equality.<\/p>\n In the impeccably dressed mother-of-six Phyllis Schlafly<\/a>, the conservative movement found its most formidable duelist against progressive feminism. Through her \u201cSTOP ERA\u201d campaign, Schlafly argued the Equal Rights Amendment wouldn\u2019t liberate women\u2014it would endanger them by exposing women to the military draft, undermining mothers\u2019 custody rights, and destabilizing the American family.\u00a0<\/p>\n Her message was overwhelmingly effective; the Equal Rights Amendment was never ratified. As prominent legal scholar and feminist theorist Joan Williams put it,<\/a> \u201cthe ERA was defeated when Schlafly turned it into a war among women over gender roles.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n For decades, conservative politics has repeatedly tapped into this vein, transforming cultural anxieties\u2014over motherhood, children\u2019s safety, crime, sexuality, and gender roles\u2014into mass movements by placing cisgender white women front and center.\u00a0<\/p>\n At the turn of the late 70s, conservatives promoted Anita Bryant, a wholesome pop singer who warned that gay rights threatened America\u2019s children<\/a>. During the rise of evangelical moralism of the 1980s<\/a>, the religious right elevated Patricia Pulling, the suburban Virginia mother whose campaign against Dungeons & Dragons<\/a> helped ignite the Satanic Panic. From matronly children\u2019s book authors<\/a> to buxom blue jean models<\/a>, the conservative avatar is exceedingly familiar: a woman whom white men are encouraged to protect and one whom other white women are encouraged to empathize with and emulate.\u00a0<\/p>\n <\/p>\n In her research on anti-feminist women<\/a>, sociologist Rebecca Klatch found \u201cmost\u2026are white, middle-aged, housewives, married or widowed, new to politics, and oriented toward single issues.\u201d<\/p>\n But by screaming to \u201cremember straight white women,\u201d the right aims to make us forget anyone who sits at the edges of that definition, those long underserved by America\u2019s promise of a truly free and equitable land. It dehumanizes women of color even further in a league where all athletes still earn a fraction<\/a> of the paychecks their male counterparts take home. It shuts down any future good-faith conversations on how to allow trans athletes to compete and the sheer danger<\/a> to a trans community increasingly excluded from social participation. It also serves to drown out the voices of women who support trans athletes<\/a>, and often becomes a political Rorschach test to attack civil rights<\/a> far beyond who makes a starting line up<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n I don\u2019t know if that\u2019s what Cunningham signed up to represent, and quite frankly, I don\u2019t know if she did either. She most recently told the press that she wants to \u201cget back to basketball<\/a>.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n\n
Ride of the Valkyries<\/h2>\n
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The Girls We Don\u2019t Protect\u00a0<\/h2>\n