Time Out for Blogging - Going On Vacation

I will be on vacation for the next three weeks and will not be posting anything on my blog until Mid-July. The first week we are going on an eight day raft trip through the Grand Canyon. Woo Hoo! I hope all my readers have some fun plans for the summer too. I'll be back soon. Take care, Pat

What Do USA Swimming and the Catholic Church Have In Common?

Answer: A big disgusting sex scandal, that’s what.

For several months USA Swimming has been embroiled in lawsuits and accusations related to their lax oversight of and response to numerous instances of male coach sexual misconduct with young female swimmers, some as young as eleven. It has recently come to light that, over the last ten years, USA Swimming has banned 36 male swim coaches for sexual misconduct with female team members. Those are just the ones who have been identified. One of the men on the list is Everett Uchiyama, former director of the US National Team.

The abused swimmers who have come forward, their parents, and their lawyers believe that USA Swimming has failed to take seriously their responsibility to conduct thorough background checks on coaches affiliated with USA Swimming. This ABC 20/20 segment on this scandal includes an incredibly tone deaf interview with the executive director of USA Swimming, Chuck Wielgus, that illustrates the problem. Like the leaders of the Catholic Church, he doesn’t seem to understand the magnitude of the problem or want to take responsibility for his organization’s role in failing to protect young girls and women in USA Swimming sponsored programs from sexual predator coaches.

To be sure, USA Swimming is not solely to blame. Parents bear some responsibility as well as local swim clubs who hire these guys. However, it has taken public scrutiny and lawsuits to force USA Swimming to make public the list of banned coaches and begin to beef up their policies and procedures for education, protection, and investigation.

In one of his most insensitive moments, Chuck Wielgus chides the teenaged victims for not coming forward sooner. Right. You are 11, 12 or 13 years old. You have a dream. You want to make the Olympic team. Your coach is going to help you realize your dream. He knows what to do. You want to please him. He’s your coach, you do what he says. You work hard. He is an adult. He is a good coach. Everyone says so. He gets results. What are you to do when he starts doing things that don’t feel right? Do you tell your parents? What will they say? Will the coach stop helping you reach your dream? Is it your fault that he is acting this way? Maybe the special attention feels good in some ways…for awhile. You decide to keep a secret in hopes that things will get better or you can pretend it isn’t happening so that you can keep swimming toward your dream.

Listen to the women athletes who have been sexually abused by their coaches. Even after many years, now adults, they know they have had something stolen from them by men who they trusted to have their best interests at heart when all they really wanted was a secret grope in the equipment room or a blow job in their car on the ride home from practice. One coach directed certain female swimmers to use a “special” locker room where he had a hidden camera set up to secretly record them changing their clothes and showering. I feel like I need a shower just talking about it.

Celia Brackenridge wrote a terrific book, Spoilsports, that examines coach sexual exploitation of athletes. These sexual predators know how to “groom” their targets slowly, gaining their trust and gradually escalating their sexual abuse from simple thoughtfulness or affection to sexually exploitation. It should be required reading for all parents of young girls in sport and the leaders of sport associations like USA Swimming.

A big part of the problem, of course, is that coaches have too much power over their athletes. Athletes tolerate (and parents sometimes condone or ignore or are completely unaware of) all kinds of abusive treatment at the hands of coaches in hopes of reaching their athletic dreams. Athletes and parents often give coaches more trust than they deserve. Athletes spend long hours with a coach, often unsupervised by anyone else, which provides a sexual predator coach with the privacy he needs to get what he wants. The institutions that hire coaches and the organizations that sanction them spend too much time looking at a coach’s win/loss records or the number of Olympians he has tutored and not enough time investigating allegations or suspicions of sexual misconduct by the rotten apples who spoil sport for everyone.

Coach sexual abuse of athletes is a heinous act. It should be treated as the serious crime it is. Every athlete and her or his parents should be educated about what it is, how to recognize it, and what to do about it. Every sports organization should have a strong policy and procedure front and center for dealing with it. A good coach must know more than the best ways to train an athlete for competition. He or she must know what ethical standards are required of adults who have the privilege of coaching young people and must adhere to them.

Since this is an LGBT sports blog, I will say that coach sexual abuse of athletes is not a gender or sexual orientation issue. It is wrong no matter who the coach is. That said, can we also contemplate the possibility that there may be something about heterosexual male privilege, the sexual exploitation of women, and sexism in general that make this problem primarily one of male perpetrators and female victims? I am not saying that heterosexual women or lesbian coaches could not be sexual predators, but I think that our culture has a tendency to create, tolerate or excuse male sexual predators and blame their female victims for calling our attention to them. It is way past time to challenge this passivity in response to sex abuse by men whether we are talking about the Catholic Church or the local club swim team.

Ain’t I A Woman?

This is the title of a speech given by African-American abolitionist and former slave, Sojourner Truth, in 1851 at a Women’s Rights Conference in Ohio. Her speech was in reaction to the privileges that white women had and the comparative silence about the oppression of Black women within both the women’s suffrage movement and the abolitionist movement. Her words reminded the delegates that their definitions of “woman” excluded many women who were not white or middle class.

I am borrowing Sojourner Truth's speech title to raise the question of how sports governing organizations determine whether or not an athlete “qualifies” as a woman eligible to compete in women’s sports events. I attended a meeting this weekend in Baltimore co-sponsored by Women’s Sports International and the American College of Sports Medicine. The meeting was focused on sex verification testing in sport. The purpose was to discuss this controversial issue and, if possible, identify some recommendations for the International Olympic Committee and other sport governing organizations as they work to clarify their own thinking about sex verification testing in the wake of the monumental mishandling of the Caster Semenya case at the World Championships last summer.

The discussion was interesting and revealed a variety of perspectives on sex testing in sport. We are now working via email to come up with a statement that will represent the aspects of our discussion where we are able to reach some consensus. It seems to me it will be fairly easy for us to agree that the health, safety, and privacy of individual athletes should be a central concern. I think we also can agree that education and research about sex and gender identity in relationship to sport performance is sorely needed at all levels of all sports. I believe that we can all agree that it is a good thing that mandatory sex testing has been abolished.

Beyond that, I am not sure if we can agree on specific policy recommendations. From my perspective, participants around the table represented views that run the gamut. That would be from - Stop all sex verification testing and declare eligibility to participate in women’s sports based on an athlete’s gender identity. Based on this hypothetical policy, women athletes who are intersex (or as the medical doctors prefer – have disorders of sexual development -DSD) would compete in women’s events. Period.

At the other end of the opinion spectrum – Some people believe that case by case sex verification testing is warranted to assure that we maintain a “level playing field” in women’s sports by identifying competitors whose DSD could confer an “unfair” advantage because of higher than typical testosterone levels associated with that particular DSD. The other rationale for case by case sex verification testing is to prevent a man from pretending to be a woman in order to compete in women’s sports events (even though in the entire history of women’s sports only one possible and questionable instance of this kind of deception has ever been revealed).

I won’t try to recreate our conversations here. It’s just too complicated and incredibly smart and informed people come down in different places on this. At the same time, there is also an amazing about of misinformation and plain old ignorance surrounding this topic, not to mention some serious anxiety about challenging sex and gender binaries. Because we use “sex” as a way to divide competitors into competition categories – women’s and men’s sports – it becomes important to determine who gets to compete in which category. Unfortunately, this either/or binary we use in sport does not reflect the spectrum of sex and gender identities in the real world. So, we are in this situation of needing to draw a line somewhere on that spectrum to make decisions about who gets to compete where.

Most sports people would probably agree that dividing competitors by sex is the most practical and effective way to approach a level playing field for competition, at least at this point in the history of women’s sports. This division affords the most participation opportunities for the most girls and women. I agree with this perspective, but it can lead to an arbitrary and painful determination that a competitor who identifies and lives as a woman should be disqualified from competing in women’s sports – Caster Semenya is the perfect example of this - because of a belief that a genetic condition she may have affords her an “unfair” competitive advantage.

I think the whole “level playing field” argument is bogus myself. Why are our undies in such a bunch about women who are intersex and women who are transgender competing with other women when we don’t even think twice about many other kinds of competitive advantages that some athletes enjoy. Other genetic conditions confer advantage too, but we just accept them as part of the game. Our height, weight, cardio-vascular capacities, etc. are all largely determined by our genetics. Depending on the sport, our varying genetic characteristics create a decidedly unlevel playing field that we accept. Genetic disorders that confer advantage, like Marfans Syndrome in height sports like basketball or volleyball, are just part of the game. Non-intersex and non-transgender women have varying levels of natural testosterone production too, but we accept that. Why are disorders of sexual development the only conditions we get all hinky about?

The problem I have with case by case sex verification testing, in addition to my skepticism about the so-called “level playing field,” is that the criteria that are used to determine who needs a sex test are primarily based on gender expectations and sour grapes, not genes and science. “She looks too masculine. She plays like a man. She’s too strong, too fast. Her hair is too short” and most important of all, “she won and I didn’t”. I doubt this would even be an issue if Caster Semenya had finished last in the 800m.

Not only are the criteria for case by case sex testing based on social characteristics, but sex verification testing is too simplistic to fairly account for the incredibly complex spectrum of factors that determine our sex and our gender identity. Our physical bodies don’t always link up with our gender identities. Our physical bodies are incredibly diverse in genetic make-up, sexual and otherwise. Sex verification testing, at least as we know it, is inherently unfair and arbitrary.

What to do? We could eliminate sex as a sport category – do away with men’s and women’s sports. We could use some other criteria to determine where and with whom athletes compete. Testosterone levels, height, weight, ability to take up hemoglobin, whatever. There are advocates for this position. It would solve the problem of determining who gets to compete as a woman or man. Transgender women and men, athletes with disorders of sexual development compete according to other criteria just like everyone else. I am reluctant to support this approach because I think it would have a devastating effect on the opportunities for most girls and women to enjoy sport competition.

Or we could open up our minds, hearts and sex categories a little to include a broader and more realistic spectrum of who we acknowledge as women. I think that would enable the most girls and women the best opportunities to pursue their sporting dreams. Thus, I find myself on the far end of the continuum of perspectives advocating that we should let athletes who identify as women compete in women’s sports. I don’t want any more women to have to go through what Caster Semenya has and still is going through (we still don’t know if she will be able to compete again). I don’t want another woman to have to face a panel of “experts” and ask, “Ain’t I a woman?”

When Coaches Are Bullies…And Administrators Look the Other Way

The Oregon State women’s basketball program is in the midst of a crisis of epic proportions. Only four players have remained in the program. All the others have left. The coach, LaVonda Wagner, has been fired and the university is planning to eat 1.2 million dollars to get rid of her. How, you might ask, could things go so wrong? According to this article (which I first read at women’s hoops blog), 23 people including 15 players, four assistant coaches and four support staff have left the program over the last four seasons.

The article goes on to chronicle a long list of Wagner’s alleged outrageous behaviors that created a climate of fear and intimidation prompting the mass exodus. It isn’t as if the players and their parents suffered the coach’s alleged abuse in silence. They did not. They complained to the athletic director and the university president, numerous times. But nothing was done. In many cases, their phone calls, emails and letters were not even answered. As late as the end of this season the athletic director said he fully supported Wagner.

What kind of behavior were the players and their parents concerned about? Wagner is accused of:

• Bullying or ignoring injured athletes (including one with a concussion, pressuring them to practice and play anyway.
• Throwing a chair during a locker room tirade (it barely missed a player).
• Psychologically intimidating and belittling players’ skills and effort.
• On a trip with the team, being removed from an airplane because she refused to get off her cell phone when directed to by the flight attendant.
• Ordering players to attend Weight Watchers and pay for it themselves because she thought they were too fat.
• Demoralizing some players so much they needed to get counseling.
• On road trips refusing to allow players out of their rooms except to practice and play games (even on a trip to Hawaii).

I think we can probably agree that these behaviors are completely unacceptable in an educational institution. Can you imagine if a professor treated students in her class like this? What is it that makes this bullying acceptable in athletics, which is supposed to be an integral part of the larger institution’s mission?

The athletic director and the university president were aware of the players’ and parents’ allegations. They chose not to respond or even investigate, it seems. Their silence and inaction, even if they did not actively support her (which it seems they did), was all that was needed to, if the allegations are true to ruin or damage the basketball dreams of at least 15 young women. What could they have possibly been thinking? How is that leadership by anyone’s standards?

You might be wondering what this has to do with LGBT issues in sport. Well, here it is – This is exactly what happens to many young women who are or are perceived to be gay by a coach who has a problem with lesbians on her or his team. Think Rene Portland at Penn State. I have talked to several mothers with lesbian daughters who face similar bullying and intimidation by coaches who have the power to ruin young women’s basketball careers and make their lives miserable and they feel justified in doing just that. Their administrators back them up or ignore what is happening.

Unfortunately, when parents or players try to talk to the coach, it often backfires and the targeting gets worse. If they take it to the next level by talking to the athletic director, either nothing changes or they find themselves sitting on the bench more, having their commitment or desire challenged, or having their skills relentless under attack. The coach holds all the cards and the AD backs her or him. The player has no power. You would think the parents might have more influence, but not so in many cases.

Bully coaches use public humiliation and constant criticism of a player’s desire, skill, and commitment. They call players names and grab their shirts. They make private threats – loss of playing time, revoking scholarships, public exposure of sexual orientation. And many of them do all this with impunity, knowing that what they do in “their” gym or “their” locker room will not be challenged.

I’ve talked to young women who try to tough it out. They don’t want to transfer. They like the school and their academic major. They have friends. They try to keep their heads down and stay out of the coach’s way. They know that if they file a formal complaint, their sports careers are over. They still try to hold on to the love of the game they once had, but it is difficult. Some players decide to quit the team. They abandon their basketball dreams. For a few, the light in their eyes goes out and they take years to heal.

It is way past time for athletic administrators and university leaders to take some responsibility for bully coaches, whether they are bullying on a specific issue, like having lesbian players on their teams, or just general all around bullies, like LaVonda Wagner is accused of being. The AD and upper administration at Oregon State is as much to blame as the coach is for the trauma in that program. Yet over and over, I hear the same story: The coach is a bully and no one with any power to investigate the charges will do anything about it, at least until the player hires a lawyer.

It is the administration’s responsibility to make sure their coaches know what is acceptable and what is unacceptable behavior. Obviously, they cannot assume that the coaches know the difference when stories like Oregon State and Penn State and many others that do not become public keep happening. Somehow, along the way to the big-time in women’s sports, it seems that some coaches have lost their moral compasses. Having too much power can corrupt and often does. We only have to look at big-time men’s sports to see how it works. Is that where we are going? Or have we already arrived?

How do you think these athletic administrators and coaches feel about killing spirits and dreams? Do you think they care?

Bullying among middle school and high school students is a hot topic in education, but how can we stop peer bullying when students have bully role models among their coaches and teachers who supported or ignored by school administrators?

When Gay Coaches and Athletes Come Out

The New York Times published two articles in May, one on an openly gay male college lacrosse player and the other about an openly gay male college coach. The lacrosse player, Andrew McIntosh, and the softball coach, Kirk Walker, describe how they their openness has been a completely positive experience for them and for their teams.

The common thinking has always been that it is more difficult for gay men in sport than it is for lesbians in sport. Many people accept as a given that male athletes and coaches are more uncomfortable with the idea of a gay coach or teammate than women athletes are. Perhaps there is some truth to that, but the stories that Andrew and Kirk tell of their own experiences challenge these assumptions and suggest that the sport world, at least the college sports world is changing. Maybe not in every school or on every team, but the times are definitely changing.

So, what is the recipe for a positive coming out story in sport? I have always believed that, in the case of athletes coming out, the coach sets the tone. If the coach creates a hostile team climate, whether she or he does it intentionally or unintentionally, athletes are less likely to come out, even if teammates are accepting. And here’s an important factor to consider: Silence does not signal a positive climate. To intentionally send a message of openness, a coach must speak up to stop team members from using anti-gay slurs and the coach must use inclusive language. The coach must assume that there are lesbian, gay or bi members of the team or team members who have LGB family members. The coach must believe that creating a team climate of openness to difference is an integral part of developing a winning team on which every athlete can bring all of who they are to every game and every practice.

Andrew says that, even before he came out, his coach talked to the team about their use of anti-gay slurs. He was setting the tone. He was demanding that the team think about the effects of their casual bigotry. Andrew took notice and when he was ready, he knew his coach would be there for him and he was. It is so simple, really. Why is it so difficult for so many?

This is a message I always try to give to coaches. They are the leaders of their teams. They set the example – good or bad. At this moment in the long journey to equality in sport, coaches are playing catch up with their athletes on LGBT issues. This is another part of the recipe – Young heterosexual people, both male and female, know more LGBT people and are more comfortable with them in their lives than their coaches. Athletes of this generation are more likely to wonder what the big deal is about same-sex marriage, passing federal non-discrimination laws protecting sexual orientation and gender identity, or lesbian and gay people serving openly in the military. An important generational shift is underway and coaches need to get up to speed. Even if the team is open, if a coach is not, the coach sets the tone. They are the key to what the team climate will be.

Another part of the recipe for success is, of course, the athlete or coach who is coming out. Both Andrew and Kirk are leaders. They command respect because of who they are as members of their teams. They are both comfortable with themselves. In a culture where being gay, lesbian or bisexual is often equated with the worst kinds of sin, sickness and depravity, it is a testament to strength, resilience and the powerful drive to live one’s inner truth that LGBT people overcome social hostility and resistance to say, “This is me. I am worthy of respect. I will live my life according to what I know is my truth.”

Kirk and Andrew are role models for others too who have not quite gotten to this point of inner strength so that they are ready to come out publicly. One of the most important parts of each of their stories is their willingness to be a resource and role model. Kirk talks about the emails and phone calls he receives from other closeted coaches who want to talk to him. I am sure Andrew has received similar emails from closeted athletes. Every athlete and coach I know who has come out publicly serves as an example for others who are sick of the lies and the secrecy that restricts their experience in sport. Kirk and Andrew and Sherri Murrell, the openly lesbian basketball coach at Portland State, provide hope and possibility to many athletes and coaches who are still living in the shadow of fear and prejudice.

As more coaches and athletes come out, the stereotypes that kept Andrew from accepting himself will die: Gay men do play sport. Lesbians and gay men are parents. They are team captains and they win championships.

One of the things I see is that when lesbian, gay and bisexual athletes and coaches come out, they invite their teammates and colleagues to live up to their best selves. Their quest to live openly and honestly calls on everyone around them to live up to ideals of respect and understanding for people who are different from ourselves. That, my friends, is quite a gift. We should all have such people in our lives. Thank you, Andrew. Thank you, Kirk. Thank you, Sherri. College sport is a better place with you in it.

Softball Players to the Media: “We Are Not Lesbians, Damn It”

I don’t want to go back over the whole “Is Elena Kagan is a lesbian because she played softball 17 years ago” conversation, but I do want to note that the whole goofy discussion has, unfortunately as I feared, tapped in the homophobia that lurks just beneath the surface in women’s softball. All the media attention to the innuendoes about softball and lesbians has prompted some reporters to ask some women softball players and the president of the International Softball Federation to weigh in on the discussion. Here is what they said with my snarky commentary :

"We've come so far," said Jessica Mendoza, a two-time Olympian and president of the Women's Sports Foundation, "and to have even one person think that showing a photo would correlate with someone's orientation, I want to yell out and say, 'Where have you been? Look around.'"

We’ve come so far? What, from having everyone think softball players are dykes? And, oh the pain, the trauma of having even ONE PERSON think of someone’s “orientation” when they see a picture of a woman playing softball. C’mon, Jessica, can’t you even say the word “lesbian?” By the way, as President of the Women’s Sports Foundation, you should check out the resources for addressing homophobia in sport on your own organization’s web site.

Two-time Olympian Jennie Finch said, "It is shocking, that here we are in the 21st century and something like this is being brought up.”

“It’s shocking! Shocking, I say! To think that “this” (apparently Jennie can’t say the L-word either) is being brought up in the 21st Century! What, Jennie, that lesbians play softball? That the lesbian label is still being used to trivialize women’s accomplishments? That, despite your best efforts to heterosexualize softball with your soft porn photo shoots, hair ribbons and cute family photos with your husband and baby, people could still associate softball with lesbians? Oh, the tragedy! The heartbreak! Jennie, really, two of your Olympic teammates are out lesbian and bi –Lauren Lappin and Vicky Galindo. Please go talk to them. Get yourself together.

Former Olympic softball player, Stacey Nuveman says, “In the sporting community, having gay and lesbian players on teams is more accepted and a known entity than it once was," she said. "But it's still something that, in the general landscape of things, we have a long way to go."

Well, finally! A softball player who can say “lesbian!” I know she is trying by saying that “it is more accepted to have gay and lesbian on teams, but Stacey, Stacey Stacey, we were on the teams before you even thought of swinging a bat. I bet there were lesbian coaches and older players who helped teach you how to play softball. Accepted? Honey, you should celebrate the dykes who paved the way for you. And can’t you do better than calling them a “known entity?” For crying out loud, you make it sound like lesbians in softball are creepy weirdos and it is better to know who they are so you can protect yourself from them. I have no idea what you meant in your last sentence. Long way to go to what? I hope you don’t mean completely stifle any lesbian visibility in softball?

Finally, Don Porter, President of the International Softball Federation says, “"The media has chosen to try to put a label on athletes who play this sport. I've heard more about softball that way in one week than I did about our sport, period, in one year during the campaign to get softball back in the Olympics. While it's good to hear our sport mentioned in the major media during the past few days, it has been more in a negative sense than positive. "

Mr. Porter, with all due respect, the label has been on women athletes a long time and the more defensive we are about it, like your reaction, the more we buy into the homophobia that is behind the labeling. Mr. Porter, it would appear, is lesbian-challenged also. He has heard more about softball “THAT WAY” as in “Is she that way?” as opposed to the heterosexual way, of course. Why can’t people just say it – L-E-S-B-I-A-N. There, that’s not so difficult is it? Don is just so sad that all this major media attention is soooooo negative! You get the media to talk about your sport and it’s all about those damn lesbians.

Wow! Talk about being thrown under the team bus. With friends like these, the dyke softball mafia might need to rethink the decision to let straight girls and boys into women’s softball.

Seriously, though, at the very least, these folks need some serious media training on how to respond to media questions about homophobia and lesbians in sport without sounding like defensive, uncomfortable, homophobic twits. I long for the day when straight women athletes, male coaches of women’s teams and male leaders of women’s sports organizations can respond to these questions in a straight forward and open way that acknowledges that women softball players are straight, gay, bi and questioning. They come in all sizes and shapes and that all of them are valued members of the team.

Why can’t softball spokespeople talk intelligently about homophobia in softball (or any other women’s sport) and its negative effects on all women athletes instead of implying that it’s those lesbians and their stupid stereotypes who have the negative effect on softball? I guess what I am asking is, why can’t they talk about homophobia in sport instead of exemplifying it?

Supreme Court Nominees, Lesbians and Softball

When the Wall Street Journal (Rupert Murdoch’s right wing mouthpiece) published an article yesterday about Elena Kagan, President Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court, they printed a picture of Kagan playing softball with the article. She is at bat. She is a righty. (Does this mean bad things for progressive causes?) She has a pretty good stance (It’s good to know what her stance is on something). Her grip is a little choked up (Does that mean she is a conservative hitter?). She is smiling toward the pitching mound (Is this evidence of her ability to bridge political differences with opponents?). MLB.com actually asked some baseball players to analyze her stance.

We could ponder the symbolism of the softball picture in this way, but really, the question is, did the WSJ intend to imply that Kagan is a lesbian by showing her playing softball? I could believe that they might. After all, the WSJ is Rupert Murdoch’s paper. They might buy into the old lesbian softball stereotype. They’d probably like to try to smear President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee any way possible. If the nominee had been a man, they might have tried to dig up an old photo of him cheerleading or figure skating. Plus, there are plenty of more recent photos out there of Elena Kagan that are more professional, judicial, if you will. They had to really do an historical search to dig up that old softball photo.

Let’s review the clues. Kagan has short hair. She is “single” or at least not married to a man. She has no children. She is a powerful woman who has risen to the top of her profession. OMG, now that I think of it, Candolezza Rice must be a lesbian too! She fits this description AND she is a huge football fan.

I haven’t see Kagan’s shoes in other photos, so I am not sure if they are comfortable or not. No data there. She, as far as I know, hasn’t shown up for her meetings with Congress people today in a flannel shirt. No one seems to know what her musical tastes are. Melissa Etheridge? kd lang? Who knows? And who cares, really? As long as we know she played softball one time at some point in the past, that pretty much nails it, don’t you think? She must be a card carrying member of Lesbian Nation. Now, isn’t this whole conversation ridiculous?

Whether or not the WSJ intentionally tried to imply that Kagan is a lesbian by associating her with softball, the BIGGER questions are: Why is this photo getting so much attention from all sides of the political spectrum including LGBT activists? Why does the lesbian softball player stereotype live on despite the best feminizing efforts of Jennie Finch and hundreds of other young softball players playing in make-up and brightly colored ribbons decorating their long blond ponytails? What’s the problem if we do have a lesbian softball player Supreme Court nominee? And most of all, what’s Elena’s Kagan’s love life got to do with it, as Tina Turner asked several years ago.

That said, would I be happy to have a lesbian Supreme Court Justice? Sure, but I’d rather have someone who could help stand up to the right-wing ideologues whose judicial activism have pushed the Court so far to the right that anyone left of Attila the Hun is viewed as a drooling crazy ass radical anarchist tool of Satan.

But, enough of that. Let’s get back to the lesbian softball question. I will be curious to see whether or not USA Softball seizes the opportunity to capitalize on the photo. “Look, Supreme Court nominees play softball. That’s great for our sport. Let’s get her to throw out the first pitch at our next exhibition game.” The problem, of course, might be that the possible lesbian insinuation that has been raised about the photo might trigger the latent homophobia of USA Softball. They prefer to promote the heterosexy players with make-up and ribbons, not the girls with short hair, no ribbons and naked faces.

Unfortunately, the lesbian label is still a powerful tool, in and out of women’s sports, wielded by anyone who wants to make a strong woman back down. Calling a woman a lesbian is like saying she isn’t a “real” woman (which, of course means heterosexual and attractive to men). Calling a woman a lesbian is an attempt to discount and trivialize everything else about her: her professional or athletic accomplishments, her personal character, her womanhood.

As for me, I like the idea of a woman with an athletic past becoming a Supreme Court justice whether she is a lesbian or not. When you look at that photo of Elena Kagan in the batter’s box ready to take a cut , her stance is pretty good. She looks solid. She looks like she is having fun. She looks like she could knock it out of the park. But does it mean she plays for my team (wink, wink), only if you buy those tired old stereotypes that strong women, women who play softball, women with social or political power just must be big old dykes… I wish.