The 2012 London Summer Olympics begin July 27th.
While we all know that homophobia in sports is the other "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," 21 openly LGBTQ athletes, two coaches and two gay paralympians will compete for the gold. Three LGBTQ olympians will represent the US - Seimone Augustus (basketball), Megan Rapinoe (soccer), and Lisa Raymond (doubles tennis).
The 2012 London Summer Olympics begin July 27th.
While we all know that homophobia in sports is the other "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," 21 openly LGBTQ athletes, two coaches and two gay paralympians will compete for the gold. Three LGBTQ olympians will represent the US - Seimone Augustus (basketball), Megan Rapinoe (soccer), and Lisa Raymond (doubles tennis).
Lesbian U.S. wrestler Stephany Lee qualified for London but was kicked off the team after testing positive for marijuana. And with women's softball no longer an Olympic sport (remember those hotties!), the number of out lesbians is lower.
Of the 12,602 Olympians in this year's games, less than 10% (126) are openly lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ). But London's numbers are twice those of Beijing’s in 2008.
Being an LGBTQ Olympian doesn’t elicit as much homophobic shock and awe as it did when four times American Olympic gold medalist Greg Louganis competed in the 80s. But homophobia finds a way to surface, and now a days its not so much about an athlete's sexual orientation as it is now more about suspecting that a LGBTQ athlete is perpetrating "gender fraud."
Will these London games have their "gender fraud" squad trolling the stadium looking for impostors?
The Beijing Olympics did.
In 2008, Time Magazine listed 100 Olympic athletes to watch out for. Dara Torres, nine-time Olympic medalist, was one of them. At 41, Torres was swimming faster than in her 20s, revealing a more muscular and tone physique. While the question of steroid use could be asked, questions concerning her gender and sexual orientation should not.
The organizers of the Beijing Olympics devised a “gender-determination laboratory” for “suspected” athletes like Torres, to catch “gender frauds” - men masquerading as women.
Their experts at Peking Union Medical College Hospital evaluated each ”suspected” female for “gender verification” based on blood samples to test their genes, hormones, chromosomes and, first and foremost, their external appearance. According to these experts, Torres, with her washboard abs, on appearance alone, should fail.
And while we know reducing female athletes to their sex chromosomes is absurd, America has a different test to verify the authenticity of its “gender frauds” - culture markers of beauty and femininity. And Torres, on appearance alone, failed.
The question of women’s physiques has always suggested a norm of beauty and femininity that “supposedly” many female athletes don’t meet. And their image as strong women has always created fear about a deluge of lesbians, intersexuals and transwomen titling the level playing field in our favor from “real” women.
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