Posted August 03, 2026
Indiana Fever guard Sophie Cunningham is one of the best-known players in the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) and a committed Christian. She was re-baptized as an adult prior to this season and regularly speaks up about her faith on social media.
She has been in the news recently, however, for a subject that is relevant whether we follow women’s basketball or not. In a long profile published by ESPN, a few sentences in a single paragraph caused a cultural uproar. Here’s the quote:
I got a lot of negative feedback about me hating trans. And I’m like, “I never once said that.” 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.
As her opposition to biological men in women’s sports made headlines, those who agree have been staging rallies at her games to show their support, including yesterday in Minneapolis when the Fever played the Minnesota Lynx. Last Tuesday, as the Fever played the Storm in Seattle, two Cunningham supporters sat courtside at the arena holding signs. A co-owner of the Storm had an exchange with them for which she was later fined an undisclosed amount and suspended for five home games by the WNBA.
However, here’s the part of the story I want to focus on today: the fact that it is probably news to you. There has been little coverage in the larger media regarding Cunningham’s position on transgender sports.
This is very good news for a reason worth contemplating today.
My thoughts were prompted by Kat Rosenfield’s Free Press article titled, “Sophie Cunningham’s Common Sense.” While some of her language is “colorful” and she makes statements with which I do not agree, her overall point is one I want to emphasize today.
She notes that criticisms of Cunningham’s statements, which the athlete has refused to retract and calls “common sense,” have been muted in a way that “would have been virtually unimaginable not all that long ago, when just uttering the phrase ‘biological men’ in reference to trans athletes was a kick to the proverbial hornet’s nest.”
Rosenfield cites Lia Thomas (formerly William Thomas), a swimmer at the University of Pennsylvania “who had been a relatively unexceptional competitor on the men’s team but catapulted to record-shattering dominance after undergoing hormone therapy and getting approval to compete against women.” Thomas was the subject of laudatory profiles by Sports Illustrated, ESPN, and ABC, and was nominated for the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s Woman of the Year award.
Those who objected, including the female swimmers on the Penn women’s team, were “excoriated as bigots, bullies, and grifters,” and women who were uncomfortable with Thomas’s presence in competition or the locker room were instructed to address their biases with a therapist.
However, as Rosenfield explains and many of us have been saying for years, biological males are still males, even if they undergo hormone therapies and “gender reassignment surgeries.” They still possess significant physical advantages over females in a variety of sports, swimming included.
As Sophie Cunningham noted, you don’t need a medical degree to know this—it’s just common sense. And as Kat Rosenfield shows, common sense eventually makes sense even to a post-truth culture.
This is good news for those of us who believe biblical morality to be the best morality for society. It is logical that the God who made us knows us better than we know ourselves. And it is logical to believe that because “God is love” (1 John 4:8), he can only want what is best for us.
Put these facts together, and we can conclude that whatever God’s word tells us about morality must be best for us as individuals and as a society.
Now add common sense derived from experience. Is abortion best for preborn children? Is sex trafficking best for those who are trafficked? Is adultery best for marriage? We could go on, but you get the point: God’s word works, which should incentivize us to know and do what our Father says about every temptation, issue, and decision we face today.
But there’s even more: The God who teaches what is best for us in his word will also empower us to choose what is best for us by his Spirit. If we submit every day to him (Ephesians 5:18) and then turn to him in the face of every challenge (1 Corinthians 10:13), the risen Lord who prays for us and lives in us will enable us to “receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need” (Hebrews 4:16).
I’ve heard preachers say, “God said it, I believe it, and that settles it.” I appreciate the sentiment, but I prefer to say, “God said it and that settles it, whether I believe it or not.”
To this end, may I ask you: What is your next step of biblical obedience today? What does your Father want you to do or stop doing in order to experience even more fully the abundant life of Christ?
I encourage you to agree with your Lord now. Thomas à Kempis observed, “Instant obedience is the only kind of obedience there is; delayed obedience is disobedience.” And Leonard Ravenhill noted,
“Maturity comes from obedience, not necessarily from age.”
How mature will you be today?
“Great moves of God are usually preceded by simple acts of obedience.” —Steven Furtick
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