A mom and her teenage daughter got threatened with ejection from State Farm Arena on Sunday night over a shirt that says “XX-XY,” and the arena’s “no political statements” policy bent exactly one way to make that happen.
Kasey Thomason and her 17-year-old daughter, Annie, were watching the Indiana Fever grind through overtime against the Atlanta Dream when a security guard walked up and gave them a choice, according to OutKick and Yahoo Sports: cover up with a free Atlanta Dream “Wellness & Health Night” shirt, or get walked out. Annie’s shirt said “XX” on the front, “For the Girls” on the back. Kasey’s was done up in stars and stripes: “XX-XY.”
“Biology and science is offensive?” Kasey asked afterward, per Yahoo.
They put the shirts on rather than miss the finish of an overtime game. Nobody wants to leave early, and that’s the real absurdity buried in the State Farm Arena shirt incident — a $1,000 ticket and a security guard with a shirt to hand you.
“We did nothing,” Kasey said. “We were just sitting there. I didn’t make signs; I wanted to make signs, but I didn’t. I did nothing. … I can’t believe that just happened.”
Call it what it actually is: a Fever-Dream fans shirt cover-up story, not a wardrobe complaint.
The part that turns it into a pattern happened before the Thomasons ever got approached. Earlier in the same game, a fan wearing a Protect Trans Rights shirt got shown across the whole building on the Jumbotron. The Protect Trans Rights shirt Jumbotron moment was free exposure, arena-sanctioned, no guard in sight.
https://x.com/adamfrancisco_/status/2089198477351813427
Per Yahoo Sports, she was reportedly also approached about covering up eventually, just after she’d already gotten a spotlight the Thomasons never got a whiff of. One message got promoted first and handled quietly, if at all, after the fact. The other got a guard and an ultimatum mid-overtime, in front of a family that paid roughly a grand a seat to be there.
Order matters here.
This is a Sophie Cunningham XX-XY shirt story now, whether anyone in the league office wants it to be. The brand, XX-XY Athletics, was started by former elite gymnast Jennifer Sey back in March 2024 and mostly stayed in its lane until Cunningham told ESPN in July that she wants to “protect young girls in a locker room, or young girls in sport who shouldn’t have to go against biological men.” Since then the shirts have trailed the Fever to Seattle, Portland, Minneapolis, and Chicago, with rallies and counter-protests waiting outside each stop.
Sales are up sixfold in two weeks. August is on pace to be the brand’s biggest month yet, and 85% of that is first-time buyers — which tells you this isn’t a niche anymore, it’s a whole side of the WNBA’s attention economy that showed up uninvited to a Fever-Dream game and got treated like the away team.
To be fair to the guard on the floor: he’s not running some ideology desk up in the rafters. He’s responding to whoever called security first, and Sunday, that happened to be the people annoyed by a mother and her kid.
Rules that only switch on once somebody’s mad enough to flag security aren’t rules. They’re mood rings. Kasey Thomason paid roughly a grand for a seat and got handed a shirt instead.
