Payton McNabb was just seventeen years old when a transgender athlete on the opposing girls volleyball team spiked a ball so hard into her face it gave her a brain bleed, a concussion, and partial paralysis on her right side. She's twenty-one now. She still has vision problems, balance issues, and had to quit playing sports for the rest of her life. Her college softball career immediately ended.
So when Sophie Cunningham stepped to a microphone and said she wanted to protect young girls in sports and locker rooms from biological men, McNabb paid attention.
Cunningham, the Indiana Fever guard whose career is currently taking off in one of the WNBA's best seasons, went on record in late July with a statement that would have been unremarkable a decade ago. "When it comes to protecting young girls in sport and women in sport, I feel very strongly about that," Cunningham said. "That's why you have Title IX. That's why you have some of the greats in women's sports."
McNabb — now an Independent Women's Sports Ambassador who has testified before Congress — praised Cunningham's willingness to speak up while her career is still climbing. "She didn't wait until it was easier, until it was safe to speak out," McNabb said. "Her career is taking off right now, and she still used her platform to stand up for women and girls."
McNabb has also spoken out about the dangers of biological males competing against girls in sports. She has appeared before the House Oversight Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency on May 7, 2025, for a hearing titled "Unfair Play: Keeping Men Out of Women's Sports." President Trump recognized her during his joint address to Congress on March 4, 2025.
"I got to learn exactly that day why men's volleyball nets are seven inches higher than women's," McNabb told OutKick. "There is a biological difference between a man and a woman." She added: "Everything that happened to me was 100% avoidable. The adults failed us completely."
The contrast between Cunningham's courage and the rest of the league's silence is hard to miss. Caitlin Clark, Cunningham's own teammate on the Fever — the most marketable player in the sport, the one with twenty-two jerseys in every stands section in America — was asked about the issue and offered this: "It's not really a discussion we really have in our locker room. It's for the leagues and the governing bodies to work with their athletes to find solutions, but our focus is on basketball."
McNabb wasn't buying the dodge. "Whether Caitlin Clark likes it, she's a part of the conversation," she said, "and it would just mean so much to the next generation. To all the little girls in the stands that are wearing number 22, it would mean a lot to them."
Meanwhile, Minnesota Lynx head coach Cheryl Reeve responded to the controversy by wearing a "Trans Kids Belong" shirt during a Fever-Lynx game. McNabb's take on that was blunt: "It just seems like women like Cheryl Reeve who were fighting against other women and girls, I just will never understand that."
She pointed out the logical knot that nobody on the other side has managed to untie. "You can't complain on one hand about not getting as much as the men or not getting as many opportunities or viewers," McNabb said, "and then on the next, you're encouraging men to take over the very category you're wanting separate from them."
There's a reason this argument never gets a coherent response. It doesn't have one.
McNabb also flagged a name that should worry everyone paying attention: Julie Tétart, a six-foot-three biological male currently dominating a French women's basketball league who has signaled interest in the WNBA. "I think it's gonna have to take this dude from France to come in here and like dunk on Angel Reese," McNabb said, "and then maybe they'll be like, 'Oh, maybe this isn't allowed.'"
Three years after a volleyball ended her athletic career and left her with partial paralysis, Payton McNabb is still explaining biology to Congress. Sophie Cunningham is saying out loud what every woman in the WNBA locker room already knows. One of them had to lose everything before anyone would listen. The other is risking a career at its peak to say the same thing.
The league's official position is that no transgender woman has ever played in the WNBA in its thirty-year history. Which raises an obvious question nobody at the commissioner's office seems eager to answer: if the policy is already working, why is defending it so controversial?