This Woman Is Growing Her Trans-Exclusive Business Thanks to the WNBA’s Transgender Debate
Jennifer Sey is behind the company XX-XY, which has seen supporters and ambassadors show up to WNBA games.
A new report from investigative nonprofit news outlet Mother Jones is shedding light on a woman who has profited from the recent anti-trans conversation surrounding the WNBA.
Jennifer Sey is the founder of XX-XY Athletics, the company that has called being transgender a “lie,” the outlet reports. Prior to making anti-trans clothing, Sey worked as a marketing executive at Levi’s before she resigned after they told her to stop speaking out in support of far-right topics.
Sey has been running the start-up since 2024.
The company made video ads depicting cis girl athletes asking audiences to protect them from trans athletes. It gave money to athletes to refused to play against trans athletes. It also gave endorsement deals to those who would speak out against trans fellow players — on the same team or not.
It’s also the same company whose t-shirts have been worn at WNBA games as a protest of the league’s position on trans players.
Mother Jones reports that XX-XY didn’t make much of a wave until recently with Sophie Cunningham. It notes that previously its most famous athlete was Riley Gaines, the cis woman who tied with a trans woman at a swimming competition and has gone on to be a MAGA darling.
Cunningham made headlines in July after she said, “I want to protect young girls in a locker room, or young girls in sport who shouldn’t have to go against biological men.”
Seemingly overnight, Cunningham became an anti-trans hero.
And with Cunningham’s rise, so too did Sey, according to the outlet.
“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,” Mother Jones reports.
Her son, Wyatt Warren, told the outlet that Sey began a “right-wing spiral” during the COVID-19 pandemic. She spoke out against school closings but things escalated to targeting Black Lives Matter.
“It was just one issue after another, and it became more about calling into question all of these so-called [liberal] orthodoxies,” Warren, said. “Her family and friends in San Francisco stopped talking to her.”
“I am launching the first athletic brand to stand up for women’s sports,” Sey wrote in a blog post two years ago, Mother Jones reports. “We hope to start a movement of truth-telling and bravery.”
The company has taken its transphobia outside just the basketball courts and into courtrooms, having sued Colorado last year over its anti-discrimination laws. The case is making its way through the court system after a judge decided against XX-XY Athletics.
The far-right organization the Alliance Defending Freedom is supporting the legal challenges the company is bringing. That’s the same organization behind the end of Roe v. Wade and many other far-right court cases.
“I think on a lot of issues, she’s a pretty middle of the road liberal,” Warren told Mother Jones. “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 said. “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.”
