Sophie Cunningham, a WNBA player, said something radical on camera last week. She said she wanted women's basketball coverage to focus on basketball. "All we ever do is cover everything except basketball," Cunningham said. "We gotta keep the main thing the main thing. I want to get back to basketball."

For this, two New York Times hosts decided she needed to be destroyed.

Charlotte Wilder and Madeline Hill, co-hosts of the New York Times' Sports Gossip Show, used their platform to go after Cunningham — and former NCAA swimmer Riley Gaines — in a segment that's supposed to represent feminism in sports media. Wilder dismissed Gaines as a nobody riding a cause: "Riley Gaines was a swimmer, not a very good one, who is super anti-trans women in sports." She then accused Cunningham of running a con. "She's doing a right-wing grift," Wilder said.

Hill piled on. "She knows what she's doing," Hill said of Cunningham. "Ultimately her basketball career is only going to be so long. She's not the best player."

So the feminist position, according to the New York Times, is to belittle a woman's athletic career and call her mediocre because she wants to talk more about the sport she plays than social issues plaguing the country.

Here's Cunningham's entire statement

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Wilder went further, claiming that "trans women in women's sports is not the biggest threat to women's sports by any means; I would say it isn't a threat." Hill agreed, calling it "a human rights issue" — a phrase that conveniently only applies to one side of the debate.

Meanwhile, between 66 and 75 percent of U.S. adults believe transgender athletes should compete only on teams matching their sex assigned at birth. That's not a fringe position. That's a supermajority. The Times hosts aren't pushing back against some tiny reactionary minority — they're lecturing three-quarters of the country while claiming to speak for women.

The real tell is which women they chose to attack. Cunningham didn't even make a political statement. She made a basketball statement. She asked for the sport to be treated like a sport. And for that, she's been branded a grifter. Gaines, who had her first place title stolen from her because the person whom she tied with is transgender, gets reduced to a bad swimmer with an agenda.

Notice what Wilder and Hill never did: defend a single female athlete's competitive interest. Not one. The entire segment was about protecting transgender participation, and every woman who questioned it got her credentials shredded on air. That's what passes for feminism at the paper of record — trashing women by name so you don't have to answer their argument.

The segment drew immediate backlash, but that almost doesn't matter. The clip is the argument. Two women sat on a New York Times set and said a female basketball player isn't good enough to have an opinion, and a female swimmer wasn't talented enough to matter. That's the defense of women's sports we're getting from the institutional left.

The movement that once demanded women be taken seriously in athletics now requires them to shut up and make room. And if they won't, their talent gets questioned, their motives get smeared, and their careers get dismissed — by other women.

Feminism used to mean something specific. Now it means whatever doesn't offend the editorial board.