haterade: angel mccoughtry's anti-trans turn hints at something deeper

also, your weekly links and memes

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Former WNBA player Angel McCoughtry has always been outspoken. Throughout her decorated WNBA career — which included a Rookie of the Year award, two scoring titles, two seasons leading the league in steals, and seven All-Defensive First Team selections — she also built a large social media following, never shying away from controversial issues. She features prominently in the documentary “Power of the Dream,” about the WNBA players successfully campaigning against Dream owner Kelly Loeffler during her run for Georgia Senate. In an interview with Julie Kliegman at Sports Illustrated in 2020, McCoughtry said she was opposed to Loeffler’s proposed bill to ban trans women from women’s sports.

However, this past week, her outspokenness came at the detriment of the trans community. She posted a (since deleted) video to her Instagram account with the caption, “Creating inclusive space for All in sport, Open conversation to learn better ❤️.” The video consisted of McCoughtry “lending her opinion” on trans women in women’s sports, using language I will call “benevolent transphobia.”

She begins, “The first thing I'm going to say is I don't judge people. Who you want to love, what you want to be. I'm going to show love to you. I'm going to show God's love to you. Because guess what, what a person wants to be? Gay, straight, blue, black, yellow. It's not your business. We judge people too much. It's between them and God. And what we're supposed to do is show God's love to people and let it be between them and God. That's my beliefs.”

From there, she offers an extremely uneducated take on trans women playing women’s sports, while claiming to care about fairness and everyone's well-being. I wish I didn’t have to debunk each of her false claims, as these are things that have been disproved time and again for anyone who cares to look, but here we are. These claims include the following, and are direct quotes from McCoughtry:

• “The biological makeup on the inside, it's still showing, from the data, it's still showing a level of testosterone that is on a male level… Yes, you identify as transgender, and we respect that, but the biological makeup on the inside is showing otherwise.”

• “So you're coming on the women's side, killing these women in sport, because that inside biological makeup is still there… So for example, there was one swimmer who was transgender winning by 54 seconds ahead of everybody.”

• “This transgender swimmer still had genitalia as a male and going into the women's locker room, slinging it around.”

• “Someone start up the transgender leagues. Let's have the transgender women leagues. Let's have the transgender men leagues. Then that way that cuts out so much drama and lawsuits that are that is going on in all of this on both sides. Okay, you have just like you have Olympic sports and you have a Paralympic sports. The reason we have Paralympic sports, it gives people a chance who may have had a disability to be able to perform on the highest level. It's not fair for them to perform in the Olympics because of the disability, it just gives a disadvantage, unfair disadvantage. So what I'm saying is, when it comes to transgender on the women's side, I still think it gives that unfair disadvantage. So hey, let's start up the transgender leagues. Go ahead and somebody start it up. Why hasn't it been started yet? Correct me if I'm wrong, let's start it up, get it going, then there's no more drama. You can play freely, no drama. Nobody's complaining. Be yourself, be loved, and compete.”

This take obviously includes a ton of misinformation—here’s a rundown of what McCoughtry gets wrong:

• Research continues to show that trans women on testosterone suppressing medications do not have the same testosterone levels as cis men, and in many cases actually have levels below most cis women in order to meet the criteria required of them to compete at elite levels;

• Trans women are not “killing” cis women in sports and have really only won a handful of championships across all sports;

• Lia Thomas, the swimmer in question, won a national championship but she is still nowhere near Katie Ledecky’s records, for example;

• Thomas was not “slinging it around” in the locker room, and in fact, trans women are more likely to be victims of assault in a bathroom or locker room than to be perpetrators of assault;

• Research shows that trans women actually have a disadvantage compared to cis women in several key areas related to athletic ability;

• There are trans-only leagues at the club level but the reason they don’t happen at the elite levels is because a) it’s completely “othering” to silo trans people into a variation of “separate but equal” (something that’s already been deemed unconstitutional when it comes to race), and b) there aren’t enough trans people competing in these sports to offer any form of meaningful competition.

I also love the claim that “nobody’s complaining” about trans people having their own leagues, which is really just a way to say, “No cis people are complaining.” The concerns or perspectives of trans women are nowhere to be found in this discussion or framing of the issue.

Now that that’s out of the way, I want to address what I think is the most important point here: the fact that seemingly well-meaning supporters of marginalized groups and women’s sports are being swayed by anti-trans rhetoric. When I talk about the language of “benevolent transphobia,” it’s a lot like the idea of “concern trolling”—expressing harmful beliefs out of concern for someone’s well-being.

In McCoughtry’s video, this showed up in language like, “I don't judge people;” “You identify as transgender and we respect that;” “Be yourself, be loved, and compete.” All of these seemingly kind statements were used to promote claims that contribute to the violence and discrimination that trans women face on a daily basis, as well as justify their exclusion from sports.

Perhaps most troubling to me is that McCoughtry then asked for people to have a conversation and educate her about the issue, claiming she was still learning. For someone with such a huge platform in the world of women’s sports to come out with a video like that and then try to claim that she doesn’t actually know what she’s talking about is deeply irresponsible. Don’t wade into a conversation that impacts the lives and livelihoods of marginalized athletes unless you’ve done your research.

Not only that, but as a former WNBA player, she has no idea the fire she is playing with when she advocates for policing women's testosterone levels. Black and brown athletes are disproportionately negatively impacted by sex testing restrictions. In a majority-Black league with many masculine women, the likelihood that large numbers of WNBA players would be deemed ineligible to play based on these arbitrary testosterone levels is quite high. Policing the womanhood of one group of people inevitably leads to the policing of the womanhood of other groups—particularly those women who don’t conform to white, Western ideas of femininity.

I am hoping that she was called in by her community and that’s why her post has been deleted. But I am troubled to see that someone who had formerly been supportive of trans women in women’s sports has changed her tune so drastically. It speaks to how pervasive and insidious the current anti-trans rhetoric has become in this country, and how deeply the push to exclude trans people from women’s sports has taken root.

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Links and memes

• I discovered that one of my stories was selected as a “Notable” in The Year’s Best Sports Writing 2024, edited by

  Jane McManus
  . The story, “What It Looks Like When Trans Kids Are Simply Allowed to Play Sports,” was published at SELF and edited by Rachel Miller and Sally Tamarkin. I have been a Notable or featured story in The Year's Best Sports Writing/Best American Sports Writing every year since 2018!

• My bathroom was featured on Apartment Therapy! I’m so tickled about it, it’s been one of my dreams to have my house featured on AT.

• For Xtra magazine, I took a look back at the state of labor organizing in women’s pro sports, with input from sports economist

  David Berri
  .

• This 2014 infomercial staring Hilary Knight is… incredible?