Inclusion and Attitudes Towards LGBTQ in Professional Sports

Sports has always been considered “weird” whenever they are being classified into traditional norms of business culture or that of leisure activities. It encompasses a wide range of aspects that give birth to a multitude of activities that can be classified as “sport”. What this paper intends to examine specifically is the inclusion, lack thereof, and attitudes towards those who identify as LGBTQ within a philosophical context across sports at the professional level. Participation of this group should be allowed on all levels of sport within gender contexts (keeping male and female sports separate) to better integrate and promote inclusion and strive towards excellence in human performance. The only distinction is not integrating gendered sports

This exclusion has even pushed for athletes to develop their own leagues as Marvin Washington emphasizes in his 2011 article The Controversy over Montréal: The creation of the Outgames in the field of gay and lesbian sports in which states “The once-small GLBT sports community has seen such tremendous growth that is now able to garner enough support to host back-to-back Olympic-size sporting and cultural events.” The fact that competitive levels must be made and on their own separated terms in Canada is tantamount to reason why athletes of all backgrounds should be allowed to play garnering over “…12,000 participants from more than 70 countries to compete in 30 sports, participate in cultural events, and attend a conference on gay issues in sport…” Professional sports harbors an ethical “right” way of appealing to mass audiences like it has done so in previous years, catering to the heteronormative display of concepts of masculinity and feminine persuasion aren’t aesthetically pleasing as they are a disruption to the way things have been. One can

To describe the feminine culture of professional sports is one that is interestingly two-fold. While women are praised for their ability to push themselves to pursue human excellence, the praise comes from the commercialization of professional women such as Serena Williams and Sanya Richards-Ross who are highly sexualized in popular culture. Approaching this from the perspective of a woman who was born as such we see an interesting ideology of what qualifies women to play. Jennifer Waldron (2015) notes in her article It’s Complicated: Negotiations and Complexities of Being a Lesbian in Sport, two important (yet still prevalent) myths that are still held true to an extent. “The first false belief is a woman playing sport, must be a lesbian” (pg. 337). As opposed to men in dominating the masculine playing field and exerting performance to prove the overt amount of testosterone they have, women are viewed often as only being lesbian or trying to achieve the masculine level of performance in a way, and cannot achieve that without being of LGBTQ persuasion. The second myth Waldron describes is one that: “conflates sex, gender and sexuality by re/creating a singular lesbian identity…” (pg. 337). This identity is one that has long perpetuated women in sports and characterizes them as all striving towards masculinity in behavior