Thank you, Sophie Cunningham | Blaze Media

Too many people scare themselves into silence by making courage more complicated than it is.

For years, women such as Jennifer Sey and Riley Gaines have carried the hopes, safety, and opportunities of girls on their shoulders. We applaud them, share their interviews, and call them brave. Then we tell ourselves that we could never do what they do.

The next voice does not have to be famous. It may have to be yours.

That’s easy. Speaking when the consequences belong to us is much harder.

Only four years ago, Gaines was a college swimmer preparing to graduate and attend dental school. She had no national platform, political résumé, or plan to become one of the country’s most recognizable advocates for women’s sports.

Hundreds of female swimmers were forced to compete against and share a locker room with Lia Thomas. Gaines became the name people remember because she decided that what happened required more than private disapproval.

Now we see the television appearances, speeches, photo shoots, merchandise, and crowds. We see a confident and articulate woman who has become exceptionally good at public advocacy.

What we forget is that she had to begin before she felt ready.

I know that temptation.

Nearly five years ago, at 18, I helped pass Iowa’s Save Girls Sports law, which bars male athletes from competing in women’s sports. I wrote articles, gave interviews, posted information online, and spoke at the state Capitol.

I also felt overwhelmed and badly underqualified. I was called a bigot and a transphobe. I received harassment and death threats. Being compared to a Nazi was not how I expected to spend my senior year of high school.

Over time, I learned to make peace with the insults. If someone cannot acknowledge the difference between a man and a woman, that person’s condemnation says more about his relationship to truth than it does about me.

But my 18-year-old self had not learned that yet.

During one of my first interviews, on BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey’s “Relatable” podcast, I admitted that something had to be done but insisted that plenty of people were better equipped to do it.

Stuckey answered with a sentence I have carried ever since: “God doesn’t call the equipped. He equips the called.”

That is what I love about Sophie Cunningham. The WNBA guard did not deliver a complicated manifesto when she defended women’s spaces. She stated a basic truth plainly.

“I think that I am here to extend love,” Cunningham said. “But I also think with that love is truth, being honest. And I want to protect young girls in a locker room, or young girls in sport who shouldn’t have to go against biological men.”

When reporters pressed her, she did not retreat into qualifications or issue the ritual apology expected of public figures who violate progressive etiquette.

“I think I said what I said.”

That’s it. It’s that simple. And the answer resonated because it stripped away the excuses people use to stay silent.

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Michael Hickey/Getty Images

Men and women are different. Girls deserve privacy, safety, and fair competition. Saying so may provoke anger, but the argument itself is not difficult.

Cunningham’s example is more than a headline or slogan. It reminds ordinary people that public courage does not begin with a perfect résumé, a media strategy, or complete confidence.

It begins when someone decides that fear of criticism cannot carry more authority than the truth.

Games will end. Records will fall. Statistics will be forgotten. Cunningham’s willingness to speak when silence would have been safer may outlast all of them.

She was not obligated to speak because she is famous or because her platform is large. She was obligated because girls were being asked to surrender their rights to a lie.

The same obligation does not belong only to athletes, activists, or people with television audiences.

You do not have to be Riley Gaines, Jennifer Sey, or Sophie Cunningham. You do not have to consider yourself the smartest, bravest, or most articulate person in the room. You do not have to feel qualified.

You do have to stop using those doubts as permission to do nothing.

God does not ask for perfection. He asks for obedience. Again and again, He accomplishes more through willing people than they imagined themselves capable of doing.

Thank you, Sophie Cunningham, for showing how simple the first act of courage can be: Tell the truth, withstand the reaction, and refuse to take it back.

The next voice does not have to be famous. It may have to be yours.