Pride in sports: Why more needs to be done to support Canada's LGBTQ athletes
Toronto’s Pride parade, one of the biggest of its kind in North America, welcomed more than 200 groups on Sunday’s march across the city’s downtown core.
Among them were floats for Canadian athletes, including a rare but growing number of out LGBTQ athletes, and the Toronto Maple Leafs represented by team GM Kyle Dubas.
There are still so few openly gay athletes in professional team sports, and while strides have been made, more needs to be done.
Harrison Browne, the first — and so far only — transgender athlete in professional hockey, remembers his NWHL teammates “really had my back” when he came out just before the start of his second season in the sport.
“I was really pleasantly surprised with the amount of positivity I had, from people that I played with (and) from complete strangers,” Browne told Yahoo Canada.
“There was no more hiding.”
Browne would love to see more support and initiative in minor leagues and even extra-curriculars for queer kids and teens, many of whom give up a sport they might be good at because of pressure or fear of being their true selves, or the first and only gay kids on a team.
“A lot of LGBTQ kids quit their sport because they have dealt with harassment,” Brown said. “We need to do a better job in supporting our LGBTQ youth and making sure everybody has a place to play.”
Eric Radford is no stranger to firsts. The pairs skater became the first openly gay man to win gold at an Olympic Winter Games when he and partner Meagan Duhamel won their event in Pyongchang in 2018.
He decided to come out publicly shortly after he won silver at the Olympics in Sochi in 2014, all too aware that he is in a unique position of travelling to countries with spotty records on LGBTQ rights.
Radford would love to see more across-the-board support of queer people which would help alleviate some of the stress that comes with deciding to come out publicly.
“When athletes start having more success and opportunities are rolling in … (coming out) risks changing that,” he said. “It’s going to make any athlete hesitate to come out.”
Radford’s sport at least appears to have made progress in visibility, with gay Americans Johnny Weir and Adam Rippon recently becoming popular figure skaters.
For transgender cyclist Kristen Worley, the journey was more difficult.
“I was the first athlete in the sport of cycling, who had been through transition,” more than 20 years ago, she said.
“It was very harmful to me. I was getting written about in the media about people I'd ever actually never met … discussing the various aspects of my body, my physiology, right down to my genitals.”
Yahoo Canada caught up with three Canadian LGBTQ trailblazers in sport to get their take on inclusivity, the progress made and the road ahead.
