LGBT+ history month has been a moment of reflection to me around the barriers the LGBTQ+ community face to accessing sport.
As a gay woman at times my rugby team were like a family to me it was my passion and part of my identity. My closest friends have one thing in common: they are rugby players. Sport is supposed to be freeing and liberating but for a lot of children, young adults and even adults it can be a shackle.
I remember when I first started Rugby, I was told it was a 'slippery slope to becoming a lesbian.' I was already a lesbian, I was just not out then. It took me 2 years playing the sport to come out to my friends and family and even longer before I could even say I am Proud of my sexuality.
I didn’t have any out and proud role models in the sport and the team were divided at times based on sexuality which made it a lot harder to be me. Homophobia may be a reason why there are so few openly gay, bisexual and lesbian role models within elite sport; in fact, there are just 104 in the whole of England.
My own personal journey to being out and proud has not been linear. I’ve lost friends because I could never truly be myself, and when the truth did come out I left people hurt and upset as to why I couldn’t open up. The damaged caused to those friendships were irreparable. Homophobia is a societal problem that causes an insidious shame on something that a person can’t choose. At times, for some people, internalized homophobia grows like an unwanted weed to the point it affects their mental health. The European Journal of Public Health study suggests that LGBT people face a unique exposure to stress, which is compounded by prejudice, discrimination, sexual orientation concealment, expectations of rejection, and internalised stigma.
Ten years on I’m still hearing, seeing and reading about the same barriers that I experienced in my youth.
Until we change the norms in sport for all communities who are vulnerable to stigma, and move to create acceptance without exception, participation will continue to be limited.
Research suggests that little has changed, girls already avoid sport because of the lesbian stigma and gay boys take up team sports at half the rate of their heterosexual peers. This has a damaging effect on the uptake of sport and highlights the health inequalities that exist within the sport community.
Evidence suggests lower levels of physical activity amongst LGBTQ+ communities in comparison to the general population, 55% of GBT men were not active enough to maintain good health, compared to 33% of men in the general population, and 56% of LGBT women were not active enough to maintain good health, compared to 45% of women in the general population.
For many of the LGBTQ+ community we often at times hide our most authentic selves in the shadows. This could be at work, at home with our friends and also in sport. Professor Brené Brown suggests:
“True belonging only happens when we present our authentic, imperfect selves to the world, our sense of belonging can never be greater than our level of self-acceptance.”
For the gay community, sadly it is not easy to be out.
The Out on the Fields report suggests that a strong indicator of how accepting sport is to the LGBT community is the number of participants who are openly 'out' about their sexuality/gender identity. This means those of the LGBTQ+ community often feel excluded, or uncomfortable because of worries about homophobia, transphobia, biphobia or a lack of uninclusive sporting culture or facilities. In the study the majority of participants reported being out to ‘no one’ on their sport team with just 20% reporting being out to everyone. Males where 2.1 times more likely to experience homophobic behaviour and 58% of those who had come out were the target of homophobic behaviour (40% of these incidents being unreported).
This shows there is a lot more that needs to be done to make LGBTQ+ participation the norm in sport. As Operations Manager at the National Centre for Sport & Exercise Medicine in Sheffield, I will use my out and proud status to shape physical activity plans for Sheffield. Embedding the principles of equality, diversity and inclusion in all our work is the cornerstone of addressing health inequalities and I will be working hard to create change for the LGBTQ+ community.
Chloe Atkinson
Operations Manager, National Centre for Sport & Exercise Medicine-Sheffield
@chloe_tweets