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Today I’m bringing you an interview with sports writer Frankie de la Cretaz. Their newsletter, Out of Your League, covers sports and how it interacts with culture, gender, and queerness. In addition to the newsletter, Frankie’s work has appeared in publications such as Sports Illustrated, The Washington Post, and Cosmopolitan. Their book, HAIL MARY: The Rise and Fall of the National Women’s Football League, details the story of the first professional women’s football league in the U.S.

I rarely cover sports in this newsletter, so I was excited to get the chance to talk to Frankie about a topic that is hugely important to lesbian and queer culture. We discussed how women’s sports are covered vs men’s, why women’s sports fandom is unique, and why transphobia is so prevalent in the sports world right now. If you want to know more about sports culture but don’t have the time to closely follow any leagues (or if you do!), check out Frankie’s work. Enjoy our discussion below.

How did you get into sports writing? Has that always been your biggest area of interest?

I used to be a social worker! My master's degree is in mental health counseling but I got pushed out of my job while on maternity leave after having my first child in 2014. I had a baby at home and was trying to figure out how I could make money from home, since childcare was so expensive. I'd also been a blogger and a friend of mine who worked in media suggested that I could maybe write for a living. I thought that was laughable but also was willing to try. I started out writing personal essays because that was all I knew how to do. It was the height of the first person industrial complex so there was plenty of opportunity to sell my deepest traumas for $50. Eventually, I pivoted to reported essays, which allowed me to learn the basics of reporting, and then to straight reported work. It was very much a "fake it til you make it" kind of thing.

I wasn't initially writing about sports, I was a generalist with a social justice/feminist thread through a lot of my work but I began to notice that I couldn't find the kinds of sports writing that I wanted to read. I got very into baseball while home with my newborn, a long-dormant hobby that had begun when I would watch games with my dad as a kid. But I really longed for something that felt like it was written for people who watched sports the way that I did—I cared about the culture around the game, I cared about catchers' butts, I cared about why the women's nights at the ballpark felt so cliche and kind of sexist. So I just kind of elbowed my way into an industry that really didn't want me there. After a couple of years mostly in the baseball and baseball-adjacent space—writing mostly about women and girls in and around that space—I got really turned off by men's sports. It was the first Trump administration and as a queer (at the time) woman, I felt like most of the athletes I was watching had probably voted against my interests and wouldn't have seen my humanity. I wanted to cover athletes who felt like people I could root for, like, as people. And so I pivoted to the WNBA and any sports not played by cis men and I haven't looked back.

What do you think journalism – or the “public” write large – gets wrong about women’s sports? Are there any narratives you are looking to correct or shift with your work?

My biggest pet peeve around how women's sports are covered—especially now that they're getting attention and investment that they haven't before—is that people often think that "equality" means treating women's sports like men's sports. But they're not like men's sports and they shouldn't be covered as if they are. What that means is that I don't think we should be uncritically championing any and all monetary investment as "good." Many of these women's leagues built themselves on presumably having certain progressive and feminist values, and many of the long-time fans were drawn to the leagues because of those values. So when the Koch family buys a WNBA team or Kim Kardashian's underwear brand partners with the league, that isn't necessarily a good thing. Not all investment is good investment and the unabashed celebration of capitalism at all costs could be really bad for the leagues and athletes in these leagues.

But it's more than that, too. When we take a system that was built by and for men and apply it to women, we are creating more opportunities for abuse and oppression to fester. And the solution to that isn't just to hire women, because when women are succeeding in the systems built by and for men, they are usually doing so by upholding the patriarchal nature of those systems. It's why we keep seeing workplace harassment and sexual abuse scandals in the NWSL, it's why there are multiple WNBA players alleging pregnancy discrimination, etc. I also worry that the popularity of these leagues going mainstream in the way it has risks straightwashing leagues that were built by and for queer athletes and fans. I don't want the visible queerness to be erased for the sake of mainstream audiences; that visibility has been too hard-won by the athletes who fought to be able to be openly themselves.

I’ve done a lot of writing about fandom, and I’d love to talk to you about that re: women’s sports. Do you think fandom for women’s sports fundamentally looks or functions differently than men’s sports fandom? Or is such a comparison ultimately reductive?

I think fandom for women's sports absolutely looks different than for men's sports, and I think to pretend it doesn't would be doing a disservice to both fans of the leagues and to the athletes themselves. Every single athlete who plays women's sports is marginalized in some way, and the fact that they have found success in sports—a realm that is still thought of as masculine, and women's sports is still seen as being second-tier—means they've put up with a lifetime of sexism and having their talents dismissed simply because they are not men. Long-time fans of women's sports are often drawn to these games explicitly because they're not being played by men. They watch to root for people who look like them, or to become invested in a sport that has potentially less of a toxic culture surrounding it than men's sports do (that "potentially" is doing a lot of work there, we know that everything is problematic and nothing is perfect).

Many women's sports fans, and I include myself in this, began watching women's sports because they became disillusioned with the domestic violence arrests and rampant homophobia from their favorite male athletes. Queer fans built women's sports leagues and these leagues are palpably queer, in both who is watching them and who is playing them. I also think fans of women's sports hold the athletes and the leagues to higher standards than they hold male athletes—whether or not that's fair is a different discussion.

The rise in popularity of women’s sports seems to have emerged alongside a ton of transphobic rhetoric in and about sports. Do you see these two developments as connected?

I do, yes. It's not lost on me that most of the people who are railing against trans women playing women's sports have never actually cared about women's sports a day in their lives (there is research that supports this, as well). They likely couldn't name five women athletes, nor have they watched any games. These are people who, if they truly cared about "protecting" women's sports, would be advocating for investment in resources, coaching, facilities, research, etc. But they're not. Lifting up cis women athletes during a time of cultural backlash against trans people, and trans women in particular, is not feminism, but it sure is a convenient way to distract from the cultural assault on trans people that's happening in this country.

Not only that, but I think the fact that hyperfeminine athletes are being celebrated by women's media and given major beauty brand deals, while the more masculine-presenting athletes do not, is directly tied to the current gender panic and ongoing "transvestigations" in sports. Continuing to exclusively uplift women who prove that femininity is not a threat to their athletic performance only serves to play into centuries-long anxieties about gender, and to reassure the public that women's sports and the people who play them are not a threat to established gender norms and hierarchies.

You wrote in a post that “trans people are always the canaries in the coal mine.” In terms of transphobia in sports, how do you think these anti- trans bans will affect (or have affected) the sports world writ large? (Transphobia is horrible enough on its own, but I’m wondering what you think is the underlying shift/impulse here.)

Women's sports have always been a place where womanhood and femininity has been highly policed, but they have also managed to serve as a place for athletes to break away from gender norms, too. As transphobia continues to build, and with sports being the proving ground for it, athletes will actually be pushed out of sports. Even if they're not trans, highly restrictive norms around gender and policies that police what womanhood looks like only serve to exclude anyone who doesn't fit those norms, and cis women and intersex athletes will be included in that. I think the transphobia and anti-trans sports legislation was largely ignored until it was too late, because sports are seen as what Jules Gill-Peterson calls "the only reasonable form of anti-trans discrimination." But these bills were what I refer to as "gateway legislation," because making trans women a threat in one area (sports) has made it easier to paint them as a threat in others (bathrooms, healthcare, etc).

Many fans and players of women’s sports are queer women and/or non-binary folks. Do you think these queer associations have affected the popularity of and respect afforded to these leagues? How do you think the increase of openly queer players in women’s sports has helped these leagues flourish? (Or not!)

I do think that athletes who play women's sports have always fought against stereotypes that they are all lesbians. At the same time, there is some truth to the fact that sports have been a space where lesbians have found acceptance and community. I think dismissing women's sports as "a bunch of lesbians" was just another way for these leagues and these to be dismissed, another form of sexism disguised as homophobia. But because these have always been such queer spaces, and because queer fans were the first to embrace these leagues, it gave the athletes the ability to insist on being themselves too, pushing back against the institutionalized homophobia and straightwashing that many of the front offices attempted. But I definitely think the visible queerness of these leagues likely alienated (cishet male) audiences—though I'm not sure that's actually a bad thing. Everything else is for them, it's okay if women's sports isn't. I'm pretty sick of the idea that catering to men is the only way for these leagues to be successful, and I think (maybe) front offices are just starting to really understand that.

Check out Frankie’s newsletter, Out of Your League, here!

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