What's Happening - LGBTQ+ Athletics
For LGBTQ+ Athletics, what current events are top of mind for you?
Recent events have reminded me that athletic environments for youth, collegiate, and adult athletes across the country remain microcosms for how queer identities intersect with other arenas of life. As is the case with progress for LGBTQIA+ -identified individuals more broadly, queer people in athletics are holding a mixed bag full of hope and challenges. Here are a few of the events that come to mind:
Thirty-five out LGBTQ+ athletes represented 10 countries at the 2022 Winter Olympic Games in Beijing, China. This tally includes the world’s first non-binary Olympian competing for Team U.S.A. figure skating. In a record-breaking turnout, another 180 LGBTQIA+ -identified athletes competed at the 2021 Summer Olympic Games in Tokyo, Japan.
Debate over whether transgender women pose a threat to the integrity of women’s athletics competitions has gained heightened attention recently. The National Collegiate Athletics Association (NCAA) has recently come under fire for delegating decisions about trans athlete participation to the governing bodies of each sport.
University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas, who is male-to-female, has been the focal point of the above controversy. A recent letter addressed to UPenn’s athletics department, written by women’s sports “advocate” Nancy Hogsheads-Makar and signed by 16 of Thomas’s Penn teammates, sadly urged the University not to advocate on Thomas’s behalf. Those advocacy efforts would likely take the form of athletic administrators challenging the NCAA’s decision to allow a sport-by-sport approach to transgender athletes’ participation.
North Dakota has become the tenth state to enact a ban on the participation of transgender women and girls in K-12 sports, arguing that such a move safeguards gender equality in sports enshrined by Title IX.
Last June, Las Vegas Raiders Defensive End Carl Nassib became the first current NFL player to come out as gay.
On Nassib: For his status as a first-team professional football player in the U.S., Nassib’s personal disclosure was shockingly humble. He fused his revelation with a statement recognizing the unique battles LGBTQIA+ identified youth confront and an inspiring commitment of $100,000 to the Trevor Project—a leading LGBTQIA+ non-profit and collaborator with Worthy Mentoring. You can view more about what Nassib’s story meant to the athletics world in this video. (If you cry, you’re in good company.)
On Thomas: Two things strike me about the letter: The first is that letter-signing teammates have allowed the importance of rankings—in amateur athletic competitions, no less—to supersede that of recognizing their teammate’s humanity. The second is that letter-signing teammates’ decision to remain anonymous presumes that students are entitled to privacy, regardless of whether the public agrees with their speech-acts. I agree with that sense of entitlement, in this instance. Yet, such privacy is a courtesy that many LGBTQIA+ -identified people, and especially trans athletes like Thomas, have not been afforded by teams/coaches, institutions’ athletics departments, athletic conferences, or college sports governing organizations as they attempt to compete as themselves. This controversy is not about who’s first to the wall; it’s about whether we require personhood to be acknowledged or allow it to be erased.
When discussed next to one another, Nassib’s and Thomas’s stories encapsulate some of the wins and setbacks LGBTQIA+ people experience across the Community. The competitive dynamics in each case—namely, in individual versus team sports—have obscured widely held anxieties about how queerness intersects with performance and the social values we assign to athletics. What I hope to carry beyond February, however, is the renewed sense of courage that Thomas, Nassib, and other athletes competing as themselves have (re-)inspired within me.