Protecting Women’s Sports Is Not Hatred: Why Sophie Cunningham’s Position Deserves Support

Indiana Fever guard Sophie Cunningham has stepped into one of the most emotionally charged debates in modern sports: whether athletes who experienced male puberty should be eligible to compete in women’s categories.

Her position has produced applause, criticism, protests and political commentary. But beneath all that noise is a legitimate question that cannot be answered by name-calling: Why were women’s sports categories created in the first place?

Cunningham has made it clear that her concern is not rooted in hatred toward transgender people. She has said that she wants to extend love to everyone while also protecting young girls and women in sports. She described her position as “kind of common sense” and said she would not abandon her belief that female athletes deserve a protected category.

On the central principle, Cunningham is right.

People should be treated with dignity regardless of their gender identity. Transgender people should have opportunities to participate in athletics, experience teamwork and enjoy the physical and emotional benefits of sport. But inclusion does not require us to pretend that biological sex becomes irrelevant once competition begins.

Respecting someone’s identity and determining eligibility for a competitive category are two different questions.

Why women’s categories exist

Women’s sports were not created because women lack talent, determination or courage. They were created because, after puberty, male and female bodies develop differently in ways that materially affect athletic performance.

Before puberty, the athletic performance gap between boys and girls is relatively small. During and after male puberty, higher testosterone exposure contributes to greater average height, lean muscle mass, upper-body strength, bone size, heart and lung capacity and oxygen-carrying capacity. These differences create measurable advantages in speed, power, strength and endurance. Scientific reviews identify puberty—not identity, effort or morality—as the point at which the performance gap becomes pronounced.

The results can be seen in virtually every sport in which speed, strength, jumping ability, throwing power or physical contact matters.

The men’s 100-metre world record is 9.58 seconds, while the women’s record is 10.49 seconds. That represents an approximately 8.7% difference in finishing time. In long jump, the men’s world record is 8.95 metres and the women’s record is 7.52 metres—a difference of roughly 19%.

Those percentages may look modest to someone unfamiliar with elite sport. In reality, they are enormous. Olympic medals are frequently separated by hundredths of a second or a few centimetres. A persistent advantage of even 2% can change who qualifies, who makes a team, who receives a scholarship and who stands on the podium.

Women’s categories exist so that female athletes are not required to overcome the physiological effects of male puberty before the competition even begins.

Serena Williams understood the difference

Few athletes have represented female sporting excellence more powerfully than Serena Williams.

Williams won 23 Grand Slam singles titles, possessed one of the greatest serves in tennis history and dominated women’s tennis through several generations. Yet when the possibility of playing Andy Murray was discussed, she was direct about the difference between the men’s and women’s games.

“I would lose 6-0, 6-0 in five to six minutes,” Williams said.

She explained that men’s tennis involves greater speed, harder serves and harder groundstrokes. She was not insulting herself or women’s tennis. She was acknowledging the physical realities separating elite male and female competition.

A frequently cited historical example occurred at the 1998 Australian Open, when Karsten Braasch, then ranked outside the top 200 among men, played one-set exhibitions against the teenage Serena and Venus Williams. He defeated Serena 6-1 and Venus 6-2. This was an informal exhibition involving young players rather than a controlled scientific experiment, so it should not be exaggerated. Nevertheless, it illustrated that rankings within the men’s and women’s tours cannot be treated as directly equivalent.

Acknowledging that distinction does not diminish Serena or Venus. Their achievements within women’s tennis remain historic precisely because women’s tennis is a meaningful competitive category of its own.

What soccer scrimmages demonstrate—and what they do not

In April 2017, the United States Women’s National Team played an informal training scrimmage against the FC Dallas Under-15 boys academy team. The boys won 5-2.

The result was not an official international match. The women were preparing for upcoming friendlies, coaches could experiment with tactics and personnel, and the outcome had no bearing on the USWNT’s status as one of the greatest women’s soccer programs in history. It should not be used to ridicule female players.

But the fact that elite women’s teams train against teenage boys is relevant. Such opponents can provide a level of pace, physical pressure and transition speed that is difficult to reproduce within women’s training.

A similar result occurred in 2016, when Australia’s women’s national team, the Matildas, lost 7-0 to the Newcastle Jets Under-15 boys in a training exercise. Once again, it was not an official competitive match and should be described honestly. But reports from the exercise identified the boys’ superior pace as a major factor.

These matches do not prove that every boy can defeat every woman. Obviously, that is false. An elite female soccer player would outperform the overwhelming majority of untrained males.

What they demonstrate is a population-level reality: once talented boys progress through male puberty, their speed, acceleration and physical power can become comparable to or greater than those of elite adult women. Competitive categories are designed around such population-level differences, not around whether a particular individual is guaranteed to win.

Does hormone therapy remove the advantage?

This is the most important scientific question in the transgender-sports debate.

Feminizing hormone therapy lowers testosterone and produces meaningful physiological changes. Hemoglobin can fall toward the typical female range, lean body mass decreases, and strength can decline. It would therefore be inaccurate to claim that a transgender woman taking hormones retains every aspect of male performance unchanged.

However, several influential studies have found that testosterone suppression does not necessarily erase all the physical characteristics developed during male puberty.

A 2021 systematic review found that hormone therapy reduced strength, lean body mass and muscle area in transgender women, but that average measurements remained above those observed in cisgender women even after 36 months. The authors concluded that strength may be relatively well preserved during the first three years of treatment.

A study of United States Air Force personnel found that the pre-treatment performance advantage of transgender women declined after hormone therapy, but that their average running speed remained approximately 9% faster than their female counterparts after one year of testosterone suppression. The researchers did not claim that this finding answers every question in every sport, but it raised serious doubts about whether a one-year hormone requirement was sufficient.

A more recent review published in 2025 found that transfeminine participants generally had greater strength than cisgender women but less strength than cisgender men. It also concluded that strength reductions occurred primarily during the first year of hormone treatment, with results varying considerably between studies.

Scientific honesty also requires acknowledging evidence pointing in the other direction. A 2026 meta-analysis reported broadly comparable physical-fitness measurements between transgender and cisgender women after hormone therapy. However, the authors emphasized the shortage of elite-athlete and sport-specific data, many evidence ratings were low or very low, and a correction was later published after methodological concerns were raised.

The science is therefore still developing. There is stronger evidence about the differences between males and females than there is about exactly how every physical attribute changes through long-term hormone treatment in trained, elite transgender athletes.

That uncertainty is not an argument for ignoring the female category. In elite sport, eligibility rules should not require female athletes to prove unfairness after medals, records or scholarships have already been awarded.

Different sports involve different risks

The importance of male-puberty advantages varies by sport.

In archery or other precision-dominant activities, physical differences may have less impact. In sprinting, swimming, cycling, basketball, weightlifting, combat sports and rugby, characteristics such as height, reach, acceleration, muscle mass and explosive power can be central to performance.

Contact sports raise an additional issue: safety.

World Rugby currently permits transgender women who did not experience male puberty to participate in women’s rugby, subject to its eligibility requirements. It does not currently permit transgender women who experienced male puberty to compete in women’s contact rugby. The organization says its rules are based on player welfare and the sport-specific consequences of size, force and power in tackles and collisions.

That distinction is important. A policy based on whether an athlete experienced male puberty is more scientifically relevant than a policy based only on identity or a single testosterone reading.

Other major governing bodies have reached similar conclusions. The NCAA’s policy, effective February 6, 2025, does not permit athletes assigned male at birth to compete on women’s teams. The International Cycling Union prohibits transgender women who transitioned after male puberty from women’s international events. In March 2026, the International Olympic Committee announced a new policy specifically focused on protecting the female category in Olympic sport.

These policies do not settle every ethical or scientific argument. They do show that Cunningham’s concern is not a fringe idea invented for social media. Major sports organizations have examined the evidence and concluded that protecting female competition can be a legitimate and necessary objective.

Fairness is about opportunity, not just winning

Supporters of unrestricted inclusion sometimes respond that transgender women do not always win.

That is true—but it misses the point.

An unfair advantage does not guarantee victory. Height does not guarantee that a basketball player will score. A powerful serve does not guarantee a tennis championship. Performance depends on skill, coaching, psychology, training, tactics and countless other variables.

Anti-doping rules do not require a drug to guarantee victory before it is prohibited. The relevant question is whether it can provide a meaningful competitive advantage.

Similarly, the purpose of a female category is not merely to prevent someone from winning every event. It is to give female athletes a reasonably fair field on which talent, preparation and courage determine the outcome.

A transgender athlete might finish fifth, tenth or last and still possess particular advantages associated with male puberty. Conversely, a talented female athlete might defeat that competitor. Neither result settles the category question.

Eligibility policies address the conditions of competition, not the moral character of individual athletes.

What an inclusive solution could look like

Protecting women’s sports does not mean excluding transgender people from every form of athletic participation.

Sports organizations can consider open categories, mixed recreational divisions, skill-based community leagues and non-contact alternatives. Policies can distinguish between recreational participation and elite championship competition. They can also distinguish between athletes who transitioned before puberty and those who experienced male puberty.

At the youth recreational level, participation, friendship and physical activity may properly receive greater emphasis. At the elite level—where scholarships, records, roster positions, prize money and international medals are at stake—fairness requires more precise eligibility standards.

No solution will satisfy everyone. But the answer cannot be to erase the category women spent generations fighting to establish.

Sophie Cunningham deserves a fair hearing

Cunningham should be judged by what she has actually said, not by the most hostile interpretation of her motives.

She has argued that transgender people deserve love and a place in society while maintaining that female athletes’ rights must also be protected. One may disagree with her wording or with particular policies, but her core concern is supported by clear evidence that male puberty creates significant physical advantages relevant to sport.

Calling that observation hateful does not refute it.

Women’s sports have created opportunities that did not previously exist: scholarships, professional careers, national-team positions, sponsorships, records and championships. Those opportunities depend on maintaining a category in which female athletes can compete meaningfully against other female athletes.

The debate should be conducted with compassion. Transgender people should not be mocked, threatened or treated as less human. Female athletes should not be silenced, insulted or told that acknowledging their biology is bigotry.

Both dignity and fairness matter.

But when those principles appear to conflict in competitive sport, the female category must continue to serve the population for whom it was created. That does not make Sophie Cunningham hateful. It makes her willing to say something many athletes believe but are afraid to express publicly.

Protecting women’s sports is not an attack on transgender people. It is a defence of fair competition, athletic opportunity and the right of women and girls to have a category of their own.