Mother Jones illustration; Christian Alminana/Cannes Lions/Getty
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-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. Its most famous face was Riley Gaines, the former college swimmer who leveraged the story of her fifth-place tie with a trans woman into a career as a MAGA pundit.
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. And I’m like, ‘I never said that.’” She continued: “I want to protect young girls in a locker room, or young girls in sport who shouldn’t have to go against biological men.”
The ESPN profile dropped like a bomb in sports and political media. Cunningham was the most prominent pro athlete to adopt talking points of the anti-trans panic: insinuations that trans women are locker room predators (research indicates that they are far more likely to be the victims of violence, including sexual assault) and claims that their bodies are the same as men’s (hormone therapy has been shown to diminish athletic performance, though studies vary on how much).
The right claimed Cunningham as hero, while much of the WNBA fandom reacted with outrage—sensing an assault on the culture of a league whose icons are often queer Black women who defy gender norms. “Being outside of a gender binary is so rarely celebrated with the vigor that a W game brings,” explains Austin, a nonbinary fan of the Phoenix Mercury and Atlanta Dream. “That’s what it is for me—seeing women who are not mainstream society’s idea of a woman, seeing 10,000 people cheer those women on.”
No trans women have ever played in the WNBA, now or at any point in its 30-season history. But MAGA trolls zeroed in on the league’s collective bargaining agreement, which states that “only players who are women are eligible” to compete and does not define “woman.” Clay Travis, the founder of the Fox-owned sports website Outkick, proclaimed he would field an all-trans franchise called the “Nashville Balls.” Then Enes Kanter Freedom and Royce White—former NBA players-turned right-wing personalities—tried to declare themselves eligible for the WNBA draft. “I identify as sometimes identifying as a woman for purposes of basketball, professional basketball,” smirked White, a few days before badly losing the Minnesota Republican Senate primary.
The league announced it would hold a meeting on trans athletes, and emerged with a statement decrying “bad-faith efforts to use these topics to demean or marginalize others.” Then, during a game in Chicago, Kanter Freedom nearly stepped onto the court in a confrontation with Sky point guard Natasha Cloud, and was subsequently kicked out by security. “To every trans kid/person, you are apart of MY community…you will always be protected by me,” Cloud posted on social media after the incident.
Who are the winners in this chaos? One answer is XX-XY Athletics. Jennifer Sey’s branded shirts have become a de facto uniform for the anti-trans activists who now stage rallies outside WNBA games. In a two-week period following the ESPN article, the company claimed its sales increased “sixfold,” including nearly 7,000 t-shirts. After a Lynx-Fever game in Minneapolis where she personally hosted a rally, Sey posted a photo of herself and Gaines standing courtside with a beaming Cunningham.
“She’s the brave pro athlete we’ve been waiting for,” Sey wrote on X, publicly pitching Cunningham on leaving her brand deal with Adidas and taking one with XX-XY. “It’s not just that she’s a fantastic athlete, and she’s a currently competing professional athlete,” she elaborated on Fox News. “She’s tough and she says what she thinks, and that’s what we’re all about.”
Decades ago, Jennifer Sey was speaking out for different reasons. In 1986, a year after breaking her femur at the gymnastics world championships, she won the all-around title at US nationals and was on track to head to the Olympics. Instead, she left the sport the following year and went to Stanford. Decades later, she wrote a memoir, Chalked Up, revealing the pain of her gymnastics experience, including abusive coaching and eating disorders. But in 2008, the book met with denials and backlash. Sey would eventually serve as a producer for Athlete A, a documentary about doctor Larry Nassar’s sexual abuse of young gymnasts.
Meanwhile, she pursued a marketing career at Levi Strauss, climbing the ranks to brand president by 2020. But the imposition of Covid public-health restrictions that year sent her on a “right-wing spiral,” says her son, Wyatt Warren, a 23-year-old college student. (Warren reached out to discuss his mother’s politics after Mother Jones co-published a story about Riley Gaines last year with the sports journalism podcast Pablo Torre Finds Out.) Sey started as a vocal critic of school closures in San Francisco, appearing on news shows and posting fiery tweets. Then she started “talking down on Black Lives Matter,” says Warren. “It was just one issue after another, and it became more about calling into question all of these so-called [liberal] orthodoxies,” he adds. “Her family and friends in San Francisco stopped talking to her.” (Sey did not respond to questions for this story.)
In February 2022, Sey resigned from Levi’s, claiming that that the company had pressured her to stop her commentary on pandemic restrictions. In an essay published on Bari Weiss’ Free Press, Sey wrote that she turned down $1 million in severance and declined to sign a nondisclosure agreement. “Today I’m trading in my job at Levi’s. In return I get to keep my voice,” she wrote. (Levi’s did not respond to a request for comment.)
Two years later, she launched XX-XY Athletics, which would sell leggings, sweatshirts, and graphic tees designed to send the message that “sex is binary, biological, and immutable.” “I am launching the first athletic brand to stand up for women’s sports,” Sey wrote in a blog post. “We hope to start a movement of truth-telling and bravery.”
But she didn’t build the company alone. As Foiaball first reported, business registration forms indicate that the company was first incorporated by Ryan O’Shaughnessy, the president of an oil and gas company president and a GOP donor, as well as his wife Griffen, the founder of a business consulting firm. The two were listed as its treasurer and secretary in SEC documents of last December. (Their role in the company remains unclear. The O’Shaughnessys and XX-XY Athletics did not respond to a request for comment.)
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. “XX-XY Athletics refers to them with masculine pronouns and terms, often using their given name, rather than their chosen names…These references are integral to the company’s message.”
An Inc. profile noted that the nine-person business generated $1 million in revenue within its first year, boosted by social media shares from the likes of J.K. Rowling, Bill Ackman, and Megyn Kelly. XX-XY put its earnings to use in amplifying other parts of the anti-trans movement. 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.
XX-XY sued the state of Colorado last year over its civil rights law, which among other things forbids businesses from discriminating on the basis of gender expression. The company took issue with an amendment clarifying that “gender expression” includes a person’s “chosen name” and “how the individual chooses to be addressed.”
“They want to silence anyone who disagrees,” Sey said in a statement to Fox News at the time. “We are filing this lawsuit to fight for our—and every Coloradan’s—right to free speech.”
A judge declined to block the Colorado law this spring, but the case is already on its way to higher courts. XX-XY Athletics, along with a slate of other organizations suing on similar grounds, are represented by Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF). Best known for its role in ending the right to abortion, ADF is a powerful religious-right legal group that since 2018 has won three Supreme Court cases challenging Colorado protections for the LGBTQ community.
Now, ADF has waded into the Sophie Cunningham controversy in support of XX-XY. In late August, it sent a threatening letter to WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert, writing that the league had “betrayed its commitment to equality, women, and open dialogue” and may be exposed to “legal liability.”
At issue were a string of incidents involving people wearing XX-XY shirts to games. First, in Seattle, in late July, a group of anti-trans activists held a small rally ahead of a Fever-Storm game to support Cunningham and promote a ballot initiative to ban trans girls from girls’ school sports. Sey had tried to send shirts to rally organizers, and after the gathering, two teenage rally attendees wearing the XX-XY logo sat courtside. One was Ahnaleigh Wilson, a high schooler with an XX-XY brand deal. Brandi Kruse, a right-wing podcaster who reportedly accompanied the girls to the game, later said on X that their tickets were purchased by a “generous donor” for $1,300. (In an X post, Sey said she did not buy the tickets, though she did host another XX-XY ambassador at a game and offered to give away free tickets to people who attended another pro-Cunningham rally.)
The girls’ presence on the floor led to a flurry of media coverage when Seattle Storm minority owner Celeste Keaton approached and reportedly cursed at them—earning her a five-game suspension. The Storm owner apologized for the incident, saying the team is “committed to creating an inclusive environment where every fan is treated with respect.”
Then, during a Fever game in Atlanta, security guards told a mother and daughter wearing XX-XY shirts to cover them. A post about the incident by an Outkick reporter went viral, leading the WNBA to issue a statement that “this should not have happened.” (At least one fan wearing a trans-rights shirt that night was reportedly also told to cover it, according to ESPN.)
A few days later, ahead of a Fever game in New York, Outkick reported that the Liberty’s sales department had proposed changing a message an XX-XY superfan had paid to have displayed on the scoreboard at halftime, from “Thank you Jennifer Sey! XX-XY Athletics will Save the Day!!” to “Thank you for all you do for XX-XY Athletics.”
“It’s just censorship after censorship,” Sey told an Outkick reporter on video that day, grinning outside the Barclays Center. “The commissioner needs to stand up and she needs to say, ‘We’re going to test for sex,’ put all of this chaos behind them, and focus on basketball.”
“I question whether people actually care about the league…I know my mom isn’t that invested. But, when it can be used for whatever your cause is, I guess the vultures will circle.”
Sey, of course, had spent a month helping gin up that chaos, hosting a rally in Minneapolis, while an XX-XY brand ambassador hosted another in Toronto. It’s not just XX-XY profiting from the surge of attention. Last month, the company launched a collaboration with Outkick founder Clay Travis, selling “Nashville Balls” merch. Three days after the ESPN article, Adidas released a Cunningham-branded basketball shoe colorway—coincidentally in pink, white, and light blue, the colors of the transgender pride flag—and it sold out immediately.
Nor is this controversy going away: On September 3, Kanter Freedom, represented by lawyers from the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute, sued the Chicago Sky for ejecting him from the game.
Sey’s son Warren, himself a WNBA fan, takes a cynical view of his mom’s political and business activities. “I think on a lot of issues, she’s a pretty middle of the road liberal,” he says. “I think she goes hard into trying to build a fan base that’s almost exclusively on the right-wing. This coincides with her promoting her products more and more.”
“At the end of all this, she does want notoriety, she does want to be a celebrity,” he added. “I question whether people actually care about the league, [who] are talking about these things. I know my mom isn’t that invested. But, when it can be used for whatever your cause is, I guess the vultures will circle.”
As the season approaches its end, for some trans WNBA fans, a space that had felt welcoming has been hijacked. Valerie, a fan in California, says WNBA games offered her a rare sanctuary from growing anti-trans pressure and hate in the news—“a nice, fun two hours, completely safe.”
“It doesn’t feel that way now,” Valerie says. “Some days I’m defiant and angry, and some days I’m scared and just really, really sad.” The last time her favorite team was playing nearby, she opted to skip the ticket.
