I want to talk about queer kids in sports, because apparently we are still having this conversation in 2026. And I have questions.

Sports culture can find an astonishing amount of patience for grown men behaving terribly, but let one male athlete be openly gay and suddenly everybody becomes deeply concerned about locker-room chemistry. Fascinating.

My oldest played football. He was an offensive lineman, and he was serious about it through middle school and high school. This was not a kid wandering onto the field because we needed something to occupy a Saturday. He could play. At one point, Outsports even described him as a “prodigy of the game.” You would think being publicly recognized for being very good at your sport would be one of the easier parts of being an athlete. Not necessarily.

Because when you’re a queer kid in a traditionally masculine sport, sometimes people start putting an asterisk next to things they would simply call talent in somebody else. His own teammates would say he only got to play because his dad was an assistant coach. There were locker-room conversations he was excluded from. And one quarterback refused to take snaps from him as a center because he did not want the ball from a … f-slur.

I’d love to use the actual word here because I want adults to understand what some queer kids actually hear while they are supposedly learning teamwork and character. But I’d probably get a strike on all my socials.

Anyway, then the Outsports article came out. It celebrated my kid. But his head coach did not experience it that way. The attention from the article became another problem, and by that point the player/head coach relationship was already strained enough that the article felt like the last nail in the coffin.

I have had years to think about that experience, and I keep coming back to something that makes me angry in a very useful way: How much abuse do we expect kids to tolerate before we stop calling it “team culture”? Because sports has a whole vocabulary for making shitty behavior sound developmental. Toughen up. Don’t be sensitive. That’s just the locker room. Boys give each other shit. Keep your head down. Prove yourself.

Okay. So at what point are we teaching resilience, and at what point are we simply training a child to accept humiliation from people who are supposed to be their teammates? Or worse, the people who are supposed to be PROTECTING THE PLAYERS? Teaching resilience and encouraging humiliation are not the same thing.

Queer kids join sports for the same reasons other kids do. They want to compete. They want friends. They want to get stronger. They want to be part of a team. Some of them are extremely talented. Some of them are mediocre as hell and just really love the sport they want to play. Both get to belong.

Your kid should not have to be exceptional enough to earn protection. That is one of the things I wish more adults in youth sports understood. A queer athlete does not need to become the best player on the field before somebody deals with the slur. They do not need to prove they are “worth the trouble.”

And parents should not have to calculate whether speaking up about mistreatment will somehow make things worse for their kid. The adults running the program are supposed to be adults. That means locker rooms and changing spaces get supervised appropriately. Slurs get dealt with WHEN they happen and humiliation does not get renamed to “bonding.” Coaches need to be paying attention when one kid is being isolated. And when a parent says, “Something is happening to my child,” the first concern should be the child instead of whether addressing it will be inconvenient for the program. These types of kids are not PR problems.

I also want parents to understand that advocacy may make you uncomfortable. You may worry that the coach thinks you are difficult. You may worry your kid will lose playing time. You may wonder whether you are making too much of something. I’ve been there.

But there are moments when keeping the peace starts costing your kid more than speaking up would. That’s the calculation that matters.

And this is where I want to bring us back to the cheerleading conversation we just had, because there is an interesting contrast inside my own family. My youngest entered a sport adults might have expected to be uncomfortable for a little boy, and the cheer coaches basically said, “Look at that energy. Get this kid on the team.”

My oldest entered one of the most traditionally masculine sports in America, was good at it, and still had people questioning whether he belonged because he was gay. Sometimes the place that looks unconventional from the outside is the safer room. Sometimes the place everybody praises for “building character” is really teaching kids how much mistreatment they are expected to absorb without complaining.

I don’t think sports need to become delicate places where nobody ever experiences discomfort. Competition is uncomfortable. Losing sucks. Conditioning sucks. Getting hit by somebody twice your size definitely sucks. Your kid can learn hard things there.

Being called a slur by a teammate is not one of the hard things they need for personal growth. Being isolated because they are queer is not character building. Learning that adults will look away because dealing with it might be awkward does not make them stronger. It teaches them something about whether adults can be trusted.

So when your queer kid plays sports, watch more than the scoreboard. Ask how the locker room feels. Ask who they sit with on the bus. Pay attention when their enthusiasm changes. Know who the adults are and whether those adults actually intervene when something goes wrong. And if your kid tells you something is happening, believe that information before you start explaining why the coach probably did not mean it that way.

Sports can give kids some extraordinary things. My family knows that too. But no trophy, scholarship, starting position, team tradition, or winning season is worth teaching a kid that abuse is simply the admission price for belonging. If a program only works when queer kids learn to shut up and take it, there is something wrong with that program. Your child is not the problem that needs fixing.

That’s all for now. For more, please visit rainbowrootsmedia.com. And don’t forget to take good care of yourself today.