Trans Sports Bans Are Oozing With Bad Faith
The hysterical effort to stop trans people from playing sports is dishonest to its core
Today's Bad Faith Times newsletter is brought to you by Caemeron Crain, a longtime BFT supporter who regularly writes on television for TV Obsessive.
It’s been a few weeks since the U.S. Supreme Court allowed states to ban trans athletes from sports. As Bad Faith Times' Denny Carter noted, the faith is bad, very bad, when it comes to these varied and furious right-wing efforts to stop trans people from playing sports, and from participating in society at large.
These people (transphobes and, I’d say, Republicans in general) don’t care about the integrity of women’s sports; they only use women's sports as a weapon against a group they fear and despise. But the bad faith goes deeper than that.
Indiana Fever forward Sophie Cunningham (who, as a WNBA player, arguably cares about women’s sports) recently made some remarks that I can’t help but view as transphobic, even as she described her politics as boring, ordinary, middle of the road stuff, full of love, naturally.
"I got a lot of negative feedback about me hating trans. And I'm like, 'I never once said that,'" Cunningham said, taking issue with her moniker of MAGA Barbie. "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."
Hold on. You’re telling me Sophie Cunningham has averaged 8 points per game over her WNBA career, and never more than 12.6 points per game?? She’s not even good???
— Denny Carter (@dennycarter.bsky.social) July 25, 2026 at 5:07 AM
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I don’t want to excuse her, to be clear, but I do wonder if she may be a victim of the bad faith that has come to define the discourse around transgender rights, and I want to approach the issue through that lens. Because maybe you or someone you know has fallen for some of the sneaky and insidious bad faith around this issue.
I want to help you pierce that bad-faith veil.
The phrase that sticks out from Cunningham’s interview is “biological men,” as this same phrase is used all over the place – including by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas – and it’s really the “biological” part of it that we’ll dig into. Because if we’re talking about sports and generally agreed that it makes sense to split competition between men and women, it might really feel like common sense to say that men shouldn’t be able to compete in women’s sports.
Let me put a little bit of pressure on that before we proceed to the real crux of things.
Clearly there are, on average, differences between men and women when it comes to physical strength that might make it such that women would not, in general, stand much chance competing directly against men when it comes to certain sports, like basketball, where the performance of an athlete is correlated with the performance of other athletes on the opposing team. I think it’s a bit more questionable already when it comes to things like golf, track, swimming, etc., where it is individual performance versus individual performance, but there’s probably enough data to suggest that splitting things by gender is justified. I don’t see any justification when it comes to things like darts or chess, unless it’s to protect the fragile egos of the men who would lose to women (not a real justification!).
Denny Carter
The point is that, while there is some warrant for thinking men have an advantage over women, that’s something that only holds up generally, or on average. I’m a man, and I can confidently say that any player in the WNBA would kick my ass at basketball. These are elite athletes who would dominate any guy outside the rarified air of major college basketball and the NBA.
The more important point, though, is that the term “biological sex,” as deployed by Cunningham and, unfortunately, justices on the Supreme Court, embodies a bad faith of its own. In short, these people don’t know what they’re talking about. Maybe you don’t either, but we should probably index how forgivable that is to how much power you have to discriminate against the vulnerable on the basis of your ignorance.
It might feel like common sense to think of sex as binary, and I’m happy enough to call it that so long as we agree that common sense is what Gilles Deleuze calls a “well-grounded illusion.” Sex is not assigned at birth through some rigorous scientific process so much as by the doctor looking at the baby’s genitals and saying, “It’s a boy!” or “It’s a girl!” The way of thinking behind that extends all the way through how we conceive of sex in a common sense way.
It holds up for the most part. The illusion is well grounded insofar as it gives us a handy means of categorization, but those categories aren’t based on much besides the feeling that individuals fit in the same bucket. It’s useful, even in biology, if we’re thinking about who can reproduce with who and so on, but the more you think about it the more any strict binary breaks down.
The fact is, in biological terms, sex is not binary, even if most individuals can be sorted in the categories of male and female in a way that makes sense to you.
The recognized percentage of intersex people varies depending on what metric you use, but the low end estimate is 0.018 percent, or one in 5,500. That’s a really small number, percentage-wise, but it becomes a large number if you think about how many people it is out of a human population of 8 billion (144 million).
This is not to suggest that all trans people were born intersex — I’m not sure if there’s even reliable data on the question — but to point out that we’re making a mistake if we think of “biological sex” as a strict binary. It isn’t.
Denny Carter
Let’s take this point further, beyond ambiguous genitalia to some thoughts about chromosomes, because you might be thinking that men have an XY while women have an XX and that’s just the science behind the whole thing.
It is, but none of us have the same chromosomes, exactly. For example, my X chromosome makes me colorblind. We’re again dealing with generalities that might help to make things easier to understand, but which fail to grasp the individual in all its distinctiveness. You might have heard about men with two Y chromosomes and so on, but the point is the broader one — these things are distinct for each of us. You already know this, because you know about DNA testing.
The idea that biological sex is binary relies on outdated science, which could be undergirded by outdated philosophy. It supposes that the form, or essence, pre-exists its particular instantiation, and this way of thinking goes back to at least Aristotle.
Modern biology, in contrast, tells us that species arises from random mutations selected on the basis of survival advantage, and while that’s a quick gloss on evolutionary theory, the point is that the form does not come first; it arises from a process of differentiation. Our categories come later, and they may be useful for the understanding, but they involve an illusion. We classify things based on how they look, or how they seem.
Asserting that a gender binary is a biological fact is like asserting that the Earth is flat because it looks like it.
But What If An NBA Player Puts On A Wig?
But what, then, about fairness in women’s sports? Even if it doesn’t hold up across the board in every instance, I admitted earlier that men probably have a competitive advantage, on average, when it comes to direct athletic competition, because those we categorize as men are, on average, stronger and so on.
Here, the most important thing to note is how trans sports bans are, by and large, an attempt at a solution to a problem that does not exist. Stephen A. Smith wondered this week about the fantastical possibility of an NBA player transitioning in order to play in the WNBA, and that’s just not something that’s going to happen. You might think it’s worth pondering anyway. I would argue it isn’t. Smith's entirely invented scenario should set off bad-faith alarms in your head.
But let’s take it seriously for a moment, since bad faith warriors want to bring up this sort of hypothetical. They seem to imagine that San Antonio Spurs center Victor Wembanyama could simply put on a wig and show up to try out for the Indiana Fever. This is patently absurd. If an NBA player were to actually transition while attempting to persevere as a pro athlete, it would be a fascinating story, but that has nothing to do with simply donning traditional women's aesthetics.
Our common sense notions of gender play a role to rule out the very thing that someone like Stephen A. pretends to be worried about. Trans women are women, but a man in a wig isn’t. No one disagrees about that. Living your life consistently as a woman on an everyday basis might just be a rigorous enough standard, when it comes down to it.
Sports organizations can, and have, instituted standards that are more strict when it comes to women’s sports, but, if you actually care about women we should probably be careful, since there’s a chance that some cisgender women won’t meet the criteria you’ve set about testosterone levels or whatever.
There’s a reason why Imane Khelif became a target of transphobes during and after the 2024 Olympics, despite the fact that she’s cis. It’s bad faith all the way down, until you reach the truth that the whole thing is about reinforcing repressive gender norms and bolstering the patriarchy. Persecuting a cis woman for being “too masculine” isn’t a mistake, it’s right in line with the point of the whole thing. The mere existence of Khelif had challenged bigots' contracted views of sex and gender, and for that they punished her.
When it comes to fairness in women’s sports, things might feel complicated in the abstract, but in the concrete there really isn’t a problem when it comes to trans athletes. When Ohio passed its trans sports ban, for example, it affected one person. Her name is Ember Zelch. She was interviewed by Pablo Torre. She was a backup catcher on a softball team.
These bans mostly affect young people who want to play sports for the love of the game, in order to do something with their friends and maybe get some exercise and feel the thrill of competition. Denying them that while using women's sports as a cudgel is deeply unfair and dishonest.
Denny Carter
A trans athlete competing at the highest level of a sport might create a question that could be difficult to work through; I don’t want to deny that entirely. But there’s nothing like a widespread issue here, and leaving the question to the governing bodies of whatever competition makes a lot more sense than getting the government involved.
The fact is that the whole question of trans athletes in sports is a bad faith attempt to bring people into a broader anti-trans agenda. They don’t care about women’s sports. They don’t care about sports at all, but if they can get you to view this as a legitimate concern, then they can use that as a wedge to get you to support their broader fascistic agenda. These anti-trans activists and politicians and judges may feign support for the landmark Title IX today, but that will be short-lived. Their goal, as outlined by the far-right Heritage Foundation, is to destroy women's sports in the United States as a way to force women back into traditional and repressive roles.
I don’t know Sophie Cunningham. Maybe she doesn’t really think about politics, and maybe she’s never really reflected on the details. Maybe she’s operating with that common sense kind of idea that women shouldn’t have to play against men and doesn’t realize the bad faith involved in the appeal to biology. Maybe she’s just confused.
Yet when MAGA tries to claim you as an icon, you can’t both sides/middle ground it. If you don’t reject them, you’ve accepted their premise, and, as Cunningham receives blowback, I fear she’s welcoming their cold embrace.
When someone tells you that you’re wrong, it’s easy to seek comfort with those who tell you that you’re not. It’s harder to interrogate yourself about whether you’ve been misguided and adjust accordingly. So, if Sophie Cunningham manages to do that, I’ll laud her. But in the meantime, she’s the enemy. For the right-wing agitator, public backlash is only proof that they are right.
Because again — and I cannot stress this enough — trans rights are not some marginal issue. This is a red line. Being on the left means celebrating difference, while being on the right means trying to crush it. Being on the left means siding with the vulnerable and disadvantaged, no matter how politically difficult or inconvenient, while being on the right means trying to oppress and marginalize them.
The concern about trans women in sports, as it presents itself in bad faith, is an attempt to do just that.
Follow Caemeron on Bluesky at @caemeroncc.bsky.social.
