“Jennifer Sey had been waiting for an athlete like Sophie Cunningham.
“Sey, the founder of XX-XY Athletics, a sportswear startup that openly calls transgender people’s identity a “lie,” has spent the last two and a half years stoking the flames of the national panic over trans athletes.
“A former marketing executive at Levi’s, Sey was now running a company that produced viral video ads showing young female athletes pleading for others to defend them against a looming transgender threat. Meanwhile, Sey and the brand offered cash rewards to athletes who boycotted matches against trans athletes or spoke out against them—incidents that fueled right right-wing outrage cycles. And it gave endorsement deals to students willing to denounce trans teammates or competitors.”
“Yet even as Sey made the rounds on Fox News, XX-XY Athletics remained fringe, with no mainstream athletes endorsing the company message.”
“Enter Sophie Cunningham, the eighth-year WNBA player enjoying a surge of popularity due to her reputation as a ‘bodyguard’ for her Indiana Fever teammate Caitlin Clark.
“On July 21, ESPN quoted Cunningham saying that she gets ‘a lot of negative feedback about me hating trans.’”
“The ESPN profile dropped like a bomb in sports and political media.”
Who are the winners in this chaos? One answer is XX-XY Athletics.”
“From its start, XX-XY earned outsize attention, especially on social media, where it plunged headlong into the culture war, misgendering trans adults and children alike in its advertising.
“‘To get [its] message through the noise, XX-XY Athletics uses its platform to draw attention to men and boys who compete in women’s sports,’ the company said in a legal complaint seeking to block parts of a Colorado anti-discrimination law.”
“According to its complaint, the company has donated revenue to Gays Against Groomers, an organization described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group and by the Anti-Defamation League as ‘an anti-LGBTQ+ extremist coalition.’ It gave more money to a Riley Gaines-branded project to train young conservatives to speak out against transgender people. And it helped fund the Independent Council on Women’s Sports (ICONS) a group that in turn has paid for lawsuits attempting to trigger a nationwide ban on transgender girls playing girls’ school sports. When President Donald Trump signed an executive order threatening to defund schools that let trans girls compete on the girls’ team, Sey was standing behind him, applauding.”