Team sports are generally regarded to have positive benefits for kids, from gaining a new skill to socialization. However, there are some negatives associated with sports teams, particularly boys’ sports teams, when a culture of toxic masculinity and anti-LGBTQ+ language is present.
A study by Fordham University has shown that when youth are exposed to anti-LGBTQ+ language, it greatly harms them, unsurprisingly. However, the data also showed that it was not young queer children who are the most impacted by anti-LGBTQ+ language in athletic environments. It was young, straight white boys.
Related:
Locker room talk with homophobic undertones, phrases like “man up” or “don’t be a sissy,” pressure boys not to act feminine, with deeply harmful results, even if the phrases are used jokingly. Researchers write that language like that is often used in boys’ sports environments, allegedly to motivate. But it often simply ends up “policing,” as the researchers write, the right and wrong way to be a man.
Never Miss a Beat
Subscribe to our newsletter to stay ahead of the latest LGBTQ+ political news and insights.
Using language and phrases like that “harms the well-being of everyone,” said Laura Wernick, one of the study’s lead authors and an associate professor of social service at Fordham’s Graduate School of Social Service.
Youth exposed to higher levels of such language did not benefit as much from the positives that youth sports offer compared to their peers who were not exposed to hurtful language. Self-esteem was one of the primary benefits lost when sports environments were inundated with harmful language.
Wernick said that the decrease in self-esteem was significantly greater among straight white cisgender boys than any other subgroup, calling it “the irony of policing masculinity.”
It’s not that LGBTQ+ youth are unaffected by this type of language in youth sports environments. However, researchers suggest that the impact on them and other marginalized groups may be less severe, as their past experiences have often helped them develop coping strategies.
The study was published in the Journal of Sport and Social Issues. Data was collected in 2014 as part of a project started by high school students in Michigan who were a part of Neutral Zone, an organization in Ann Arbor. The LGBTQ+ students who started the project bonded over shared experiences being bullied and were mentored by Wernick, a doctoral student at the time.
About the experience, Wernick said, “This was before a lot of media were starting to pay attention to the experiences of queer and trans youth.Their experiences weren’t being heard or believed.”
The study surveyed students in five urban, rural, and suburban schools about their experiences of harmful language in different environments, such as youth sports.
“I don’t think coaches think about the actual impact it has on boys,” Derek Tice-Brown, an assistant professor of social service at Fordham and the study’s co-lead author, said. “They grew up playing sports the exact same way, and that’s how they were taught to compete, to live up to a certain idea of what manhood is.”
