The debate over transgender athletes took over much of the conversation around the WNBA this summer, after Indiana Fever guard Sophie Cunningham took a high-profile stance on the issue, even though the league has never had a transgender woman in the league.
Now, a new report has found that much of that discourse was driven by a small number of viral posts from accounts with a financial incentive to stir up anger, and plenty of people say they saw it coming from a mile away.
The controversy kicked off in July, when Indiana Fever guard Sophie Cunningham told ESPN that she wanted “to protect young girls in a locker room, or young girls in sport who shouldn’t have to go against biological men.”
From there, groups opposed to transgender women in women’s sports rallied around Cunningham at Fever games. Former NBA player Enes Kanter even declared for the 2027 WNBA Draft in what was widely seen as a publicity stunt.
But according to an exclusive report from CT Jones of Rolling Stone, the online conversation was nowhere near as widespread as it seemed.
The data analytics company GUDEA analyzed 188,631 posts about the topic from July 20 to Aug. 12, and nearly 99% of them were on X. The firm found that only a handful of posts ever got more than 3,000 retweets.
“If you take out the eight top posts, this [narrative] didn’t happen. Nobody would be talking about this,” GUDEA founder Keith Presley told Rolling Stone.
GUDEA’s director of client experience Georgia Paul argued that the conversation was dominated by influencers and pundits looking to profit off of engagement.
“You’re going to make money in these divisive ways because you’re tugging at real-world conversations. Anger has turned into dollars for other people. The point is to sow division,” Paul said.
Needless to say, most people were not surprised by these findings.