I watched the video from outside Barclays Center on Saturday more than once because I wanted to be sure I was seeing what I thought I was seeing.
A crowd showed up to support Sophie Cunningham and a pretty uncomplicated proposition: girls deserve locker rooms and sports of their own.
Another crowd showed up to oppose them.
And based on what I watched, some of the descriptions of the demonstration don’t look much like the video. I’ll trust my own eyes on this one. This wasn’t some overwhelming counter-protest drowning out a few lonely people carrying signs. The women’s-sports crowd had a substantial presence outside that arena.
But forget the head count for a moment.
Here’s what isn’t in dispute.
Inside Barclays Center, the New York Liberty ran three scoreboard messages welcoming transgender fans during halftime — one night after the team refunded paying customer Julie Potter for a scoreboard message thanking XX-XY Athletics founder Jennifer Sey because it didn’t meet the team’s standard of “positive, celebratory content.”
Potter had followed the rules she could find.
She still got refunded.
Then came Saturday’s approved messages.
You almost have to admire the clarity.
Outside the arena, a Fox News Digital reporter tried to interview the pro-trans counter-protesters. They declined. Fair enough. Nobody owes a reporter an interview.
What happened next wasn’t quite so defensible.
People surrounded him, waved flags and signs in his face, put a sticker on his back and chanted over him for nearly a minute. A photographer working with him had his glasses removed from his head and, according to Fox, they weren’t returned. NYPD eventually walked the reporter away from the crowd.
All because a reporter showed up with a microphone.
And that’s where Saturday’s spectacle became more revealing than I think the people participating in it intended.
If your argument is good, make it.
If you believe women’s sports should include transgender athletes, explain why. If you believe biological males should have access to women’s locker rooms under certain circumstances, make that case too.
I’ll disagree with you.
But make the argument.
Surrounding a reporter and preventing him from asking questions doesn’t advance anything. Neither does shouting loudly enough that nobody else can speak.
And none of it answers the question that brought everybody to Brooklyn in the first place.
Do girls get anything that’s theirs?
That’s really not complicated.
I have a daughter. Compassion for somebody else’s struggle does not obligate me to pretend her interests don’t count. Nor does treating another person with dignity require me to surrender every distinction between male and female.
Those things can coexist.
In fact, they have to.
Biological sex matters in athletics because male and female bodies are different. Those differences matter in competition. They can matter even more in contact sports. And privacy matters in changing rooms for reasons parents understood perfectly well long before any of this became a national political argument.
None of that requires cruelty.
It doesn’t require mocking anybody.
It requires the ability to say no.
No, every space cannot accommodate every demand.
No, acknowledging biological sex isn’t hatred.
And no, girls shouldn’t continually be asked to surrender their boundaries so that adults can congratulate themselves for being inclusive.
Somewhere in all the slogans, we’ve forgotten that inclusion can impose costs on somebody else. In this case, that somebody else is female athletes.
That’s why Sophie Cunningham has struck such a nerve. She isn’t delivering a dissertation. She’s saying something millions of parents already understand.
Girls deserve their own sports.
Girls deserve privacy.
Girls deserve a locker room.
If somebody wants to argue otherwise, this is America. Show up. Bring a sign. Grab a microphone. Make your case.
But don’t tell the rest of us that compassion requires pretending biological differences don’t exist. And don’t scream over somebody asking questions and then complain that nobody understands your position.
Reality doesn’t move because a crowd gets loud.
Neither should we.