Is there a real photo of WNBA players Sophie Cunningham and Caitlin Clark wearing T-shirts with the words "XX-XY Athletics" printed on them? No, that's not true: The image was created with AI, as a verification tool showed. There are no credible news reports of the image being real.
The claim appeared in a post made on X by user @JonCovering published on July 31, 2026. It's now unavailable but an archive of it can be seen here. The post included an image of what appeared to be Cunningham (archived here) and Clark (archived here), who both play for the Indiana Fever (archived here), standing side by side and wearing shirts that read "XX-XY Athletics." The caption of the post on X read:
Do you support Sophie Cunningham advocating to protect young girls in sports?
This is what the image included in the post looked like:
(Image source: post by @JonCovering on X.)
The brand XX-XY Athletics is an apparel brand that promotes "single-sex spaces" in sports. Cunningham has publicly disagreed with allowing transgender athletes to compete in girls' and women's sports (archived here). She has received support for her comments from the founder of XX-XY Athletics, Jennifer Sey (archived here). Clark has not responded directly to Cunningham's comments, and instead said that "it's for leagues and the governing bodies to work with their athletes to find solutions" (archived here).
OpenAI's Verify tool, which detects whether OpenAI products were used to create content, concluded that the image was "generated with OpenAI tools" and contains a SynthID watermark (archived here). The screenshot below shows the detector's result:
(Image source: screenshot of OpenAI Verify tool.)
Reverse image searches on Google Images (archived here), TinEye (archived here) and Yandex (archived here) did not show instances of the image from credible sources. Additionally, there is no reporting that suggests that this image is real. A search on Google News for "Sophie Cunningham AND Caitlin Clark AND XX-XY" did not generate results about the image (archived here).
