Record 193 LGBTQ athletes at Paris Summer Olympics - Outsports
www.outsports.com
The number of out LGBTQ Olympians at the Summer Games in Paris is a record, beating Tokyo. Women dominate the list.
    • Viking_Hippie@lemmy.worldOP
      13·
      5 months ago

      You can’t really know for sure since there’s a lot more stigma in some sports than others and often more for men than women.

      For example, the Women’s Super League (the top football league in England) has 56 out gay players active as of October last year. The men’s Premier League, on the other hand, has never had a single out gay player. Neither have any of the other top leagues.

      Does that mean that no male football players are gay? Of course not. It means that there’s still a big enough problem with homophobia both real and perceived that no top player has felt that they could come out without risking serious damage to their career or worse.

      Conversely, are women who play football necessarily more gay than all other woman athletes? Probably not. It’s much more likely that there’s just a better culture of LGBTQ+ acceptance than in some other sports.