The 2020 Summer Olympic Games are already historic, and not just because they’re taking place a year later than scheduled.
Of the 160-plus LGBTQ athletes, some are well-known stars like FIFA Women’s World Cup champ Megan Rapinoe, WNBA great Brittney Griner and diver Tom Daley, all of whom came out publicly in the last decade.
The improvement in LGBTQ representation at the Olympics is cause for celebration, but it should also give athletes and audiences pause, said Erik Denison, a behavioral scientist at Monash University in Australia.
There may also be LGBTQ athletes competing in the Olympics who don’t feel comfortable coming out, the researchers said, due to a culture within sports that still relies on stereotypes of gender and sexuality.
This way, they said, young LGBTQ athletes should feel accepted by their teammates and coaches, and they may even stick with the sport all the way to the professional level.
Sometimes the Games have taken place in countries where homosexuality is not widely accepted or where legislation impacts LGBTQ residents.
The Olympics also has a ways to go when it comes to the inclusion of athletes who are intersex, meaning they were born with differences in sex development that don’t align with the binary definitions of female or male.
In 2018, World Athletics, the international governing body for track and field and cross country running whose athletes compete in the Olympics, started requiring women with high testosterone levels to take medication to reduce their testosterone.
While it’s meaningful to have role models in Rapinoe and Griner, stars of their respective sports, to improve the number of LGBTQ competitors in sports as a whole, the focus should instead be on LGBTQ kids in amateur sports, Denison said.
Griner said in 2014 that she was told not to be more public about her sexuality by her coach at Baylor University – that if the school “condoned” her sexuality, it may deter recruits from the school’s athletics program.
Homophobic slurs continue to be prevalent in sports – a 2020 study from Out on the Fields, which studies LGBTQ inclusion in sports, found that more than 80% of gay participants had heard them used while playing.
The same Out on the Fields study reported that over 81% of gay men under 22 hid their sexuality to avoid rejection by teammates or discrimination by coaches or officials, among other reasons.
“Boys and young men are taught to avoid anything associated with femininity, most notably weakness, emotion, and homosexuality,” said Schweighofer, whose work on LGBTQ inclusion in sports has appeared in the publication of the National Park Foundation.
Women and girls in sports are confronted by gendered expectations, too, Schweighofer and Denison said.
While men were encouraged to participate in sports to flex their aggression and male dominance, women were advised against participating in sports, he said.
The International Olympic Committee has strengthened its stance on LGBTQ inclusion in the Olympics in recent years.
“Ignorance, denial and resistance among sports leaders – and even athletes themselves – is often a challenge to risk mitigation and prevention,” the IOC’s 2016 statement read.
Standing up for LGBTQ athletes signals to those athletes that the IOC sees them, hears their complaints and is working to better address them within pro sports, Denison said.
“Mostly, I feel aware of the realities,” Quinn wrote on Instagram.
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Seeing LGBTQ Olympians compete assuredly, win or lose, may inspire young people to follow them.