For “Pride” month, The Washington Post published an article which said the quiet part out loud:

Behind the visible queerness in women’s sports — and why it matters

Perspective by Frankie de la Cretaz | Friday, June 10, 2022 | 10:47 AM EDT

Alyssa is dating DeWanna who used to be married to Candice; Jasmine and Natisha are engaged, and Natisha and Courtney used to date. Allie and a different Courtney are married, while Diana married her former teammate, Penny. No, this isn’t an episode about Alice’s chart on “The L Word”: It’s the WNBA, where romances among teammates and league rivals are as expected as a lethal three-point shot.

And it’s not just the WNBA that sees intracommunity romance: NWSL stars and teammates Ashlyn Harris and Ali Krieger are married, while Australia-U.S. national soccer team rivals Sam Kerr and Kristie Mewis are dating (made famous by the “They’re lesbians, Stacey” meme). In women’s hockey, three different pairs of former Team USA and Team Canada players are married — Meghan Duggan and Gillian Apps; Julie Chu and Caroline Ouellette; and Kathleen Kauth and Jayna Hefford.

It’s a dynamic that is exclusive to women’s sports culture, sometimes making team dynamics complicated. But it’s not just gossip that makes these romances of interest — this kind of insular, interconnected relationship web is very common in lesbian and lesbian-adjacent culture at large.

There’s a lot more at the original, but the article is so positive toward homosexual relationships that it fails to ask a very obvious question: if women’s team sports are so heavily dominated by lesbians, does this suppress the participation of heterosexual girls who might otherwise want to try out, but are uncomfortable with the idea of a lesbian locker room?

There are a few possibilities, which are not mutually exclusive, and are very politically incorrect:

• lesbians are simply more athletic than heterosexual women;
• athletics is about domination of and beating an opponent, a trait which is perceived as more masculine than feminine, and lesbians are more masculine than normal women; or
• lesbians have dominated women’s sports because they have pushed heterosexual women out.

It’s just another way that women’s sports spaces are reflective of queerness: They center certain aspects of queer culture, making them safer places to be out, and making them unique among an often homophobic and heteronormative men’s sports culture — even as the media and culture at large wants to heterosexualize women’s sports. For many years, women’s sports has struggled against the stereotype that all women athletes are lesbians, while also facing the reality that many of them are.

It was a great tragedy to learn that 6’5″ center Elena Della-Donne for the Washington Mystics, is homosexual, because she’s downright gorgeous. But if we want to “heterosexualize” women’s sports, isn’t that because we want to see these women as normal?

The Williams Institute, which has an internal bias which would like to see the percentage of the population who are homosexual as being higher, claims that 3.5% of the population are homosexual or bisexual, and another 0.3% are transgender. The Centers for Disease Control conducted the National Health Institute Survey in 2013, and found that only 1.6% of the population are homosexual, with another 0.7% bisexual, and another 1.1% either stating that they were ‘something else’ or declining to respond. In either case, heterosexuals are about 96.7% of the population. Male sports fans can live vicariously through male athletes, but with such a high percentage of the male population being heterosexual, they will want to live vicariously through male athletes that they see as attracted to women. Female sports fans who might want to emulate female athletes just might balk at the thoughts that such includes homosexuality.^[1]While the Phoenix Mercury averaged 5,849 fans in attendance in the 2021 season, only one other team broke 3,000. In America’s largest city, the New York Liberty averaged just 1,757 fans, while … Continue reading

There is another point missed in this article: with its heavy concentration on team sports, it ignores the obvious question, are the non-contact, non-team sports such as figure skating, gymnastics, swimming and diving, and skiing, as heavily dominated by lesbians?

But the benefits of queer existence should not just serve as teaching moments for straight fans; these relationships are, first and foremost, a beacon to queer fans. Sports — particularly men’s sports — is often a place where queer folks don’t feel safe. But when you know there are large numbers of athletes on the field who are gay, it signals to queer fans that the space is for them.

The author, Frankie de la Cretaz, does not like the fact that some female athletes choose to ‘glam’ up for men in Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit issue, even if they are lesbian, ostensibly for money:

But while in theory their inclusion could be seen as progress, the glam shot aesthetics of the photos – and the WNBA’s language promoting the pictures – feels like a step backwards for the league’s image and branding.

The WNBA promoted the shoot last week in a tweet which read “we can do both [fire emoji].”

What was meant by “both” wasn’t clear, but it’s not hard to conclude that they meant that players can be both “athletic” and “feminine” – two things that often are wrongly assumed to be at odds.

The photo seems jarring: All five players in the picture have been glammed up in a way that seems inconsistent with their usual off-the-court self-presentation. That’s particularly true for the out queer players in the group, Bird (typically femme-leaning, but unfussy) and Stewart (who favors more of a soft butch aesthetic).

I get it: Miss de la Cretaz, who tells us that her pronouns are “They/them” in her Twitter biography, doesn’t like women trying to appear sexy and feminine to men, but at a certain point, she needs to recognize that her (apparent) worldview is very constricted and twisted into something which really does not understand the real world. Men are (almost) half of the world, and the vast, vast majority of them are heterosexual, men who like women, yet Miss de la Cretaz doesn’t like it when women try to be attractive to men. The constricted worldview she has is one in which lesbians predominate and need only be attractive to other women, yet only a small percent of women are attracted to other women.

The world is heterosexual, and homosexuals who try to isolate themselves from that have shrunk themselves into a world of only isolated spots. In a bit that she will find rather horrible, normal people can ignore homosexuals, but homosexuals cannot ignore normal people. Homosexuals have an absolute right to do whatever they want, as long as it’s legal for everyone else, but that does not mean that everyone else must accept or subscribe to their worldview, at least not as Miss de la Cretaz describes her worldview. Promoting the players’ sexuality over the game itself marginalizes the game, and hardly expands the league.

Miss del la Cretaz said, in her headline, that the “visible queerness in women’s sports” “matters”, but if it matters, it might not be in a very good way for her position.