Come on, man. Or rather: Don't come on, man.
When Sophie Cunningham made the latter her position for female sports and spaces, the sports media and establishment lost their minds. The Minnesota Lynx attempted to strip fans of their signs supporting Cunningham during a Fever road game shortly afterward. The Guardian accused Cunningham of being "anti-Black" for defending the separation of biological males from females in sports competition. Lynx head coach Cheryl Reeve trolled Cunningham by wearing a "Trans Kids Belong" t-shirt.
Reeve wants to cheer male poaching in female spaces. Except, as it turns out, when it might threaten her career prospects. Breitbart caught this glaring hypocrisy from a podcast interview in which Reeve lamented that colleges don't apply Title IX to coaching positions in women's basketball. Now she wants a "Rooney rule" for the WNBA to make sure males don't poach head coaching positions in her league ... while cheering for males poaching team spots from women in girls in all sports, including her own:
Irony alert: Cheryl Reeve, the WNBA coach who wore a "Trans Kids Belong" shirt to troll Sophie Cunningham, gets upset whenever men take coaching jobs from women. pic.twitter.com/jhjsno3ftT
— Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) August 3, 2026
WNBA coach Cheryl Reeve, who wore a shirt with the message “Trans Kids Belong” as an apparent troll of Indiana Fever star Sophie Cunningham, previously called for a “Rooney Rule” in her organization to protect women’s coaching jobs from being taken over by men.
In an interview on the podcast Good Game with Sarah Spain, Reeve openly expressed fear about men taking women’s jobs in coaching positions.
“We had more women coaching college basketball before Title IX. After Title IX, when it became more important and more investment – that was code for, ‘well, that’s a man’s job.’ You got paid more; it became a man’s job,” she said.
“To this day, we still don’t have more women coaching in college basketball than we do men. Apply that same thing to two years ago, we lost seven WNBA coaches, they got fired, because all of the sudden, this money, the WNBA blew up,” she continued. “Valuations of franchises. In comes the NBA folks again, who had cast us aside for many years. Now, they want their franchises back. That sorta thing. It’s more important again. And then we have more men.”
There's actually a better argument for males in WNBA coaching than there is for males on the court against females. The biological reality is that males have strength and endurance advantages that not only make women unable to compete but can actually put women at much higher risk for serious injury. That's not hypothetical either; women have been injured while competing against men in physical sports, even when no contact is usually made. One young volleyball player suffered brain damage from absorbing a spike delivered by a male player allowed to compete under trans-friendly rules of the time, as just one example. The women forced to compete against a male in Olympic boxing are other examples.
None of that applies to coaching, however, which means that the exclusion Reeve really wants is likely illegal. That's why Reeve wants a "Rooney rule" rather than an outright ban on male coaches. The NFL's Rooney rule requires that teams looking for a head coach must interview at least one candidate of color, which came in response to a clear disparity between players and coaches in the league at that time. (The NFL has pretty much solved that issue and is considering whether to retire the rule.) Reeve wants a Rooney rule to force teams to interview at least one woman, which would address no actionable disparity, since men are not a protected identity in the first place.
When it comes to her own profession, Reeve is suddenly an "XX-XY matters" activist. Quelle surprise.
The "Trans Kids Belong" t-shirt is not just hypocrisy, but sheer demagoguery. Reeve wants a safe space for her own paycheck, but dismisses the unease girls and women have when forced to share intimate spaces with males. Reeve said this in response to Cunningham's interview:
In response, Reeve said that “every kid has a right to sports regardless of (being) gender diverse, transgender.”
“… Now, what gets nuanced is when you’re beyond puberty, when you’re in Olympic sport, when … we have scholarships at stake and that sort of thing,” she added. “That’s where I say that common-sense people get together, and you find common ground to find a way to be inclusive. The answer isn’t no. It is not the case that we have ‘biological men in girls’ locker rooms,’ the way it’s being phrased, the innuendo there that somehow transgender women are predators. … There’s a lot of narrative that is problematic that we need to address. That is simply not what’s happening.”
We'll put aside the debate over the word "right" and stipulate to the sentiment for the purpose of this argument. Even if one thinks that "every kid has a right to sports," then why can coaches cut kids who try out at practically all levels above T-ball for failing to reach a proper level of competitiveness? And even aside from that point, a kid's right to "sports" does not equate to a right to girls' sports. Trans kids can belong by playing in competition with others of the same biological sex, especially after puberty when the biological differences become even more acute. If schools and leagues want to form a trans category, they should feel free to do so.
Reeve thinks she's being brave. Instead, she's being transparently selfish and performative, hoping to get famous for virtue-signaling while doing her best to protect her own coaching space from "predatory" males she blames for women losing jobs in sports.
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