Sports competitions will be a constant this summer. The Euro Cup and the Copa America are currently being played and in less than a month the Olympic Games will begin in Paris. And today, Pride Day, we have to ask ourselves one thing: How many elite athletes have declared themselves LGTBI? And how many have done so without being showered with insults? “Sport is one of the areas in which we perceive the most LGBTIphobia, especially in the sport that has the most global reach.” That is, football.
Speaks David Lechon, of the Cierzo Sports Association LGBTI, an entity that fights for the integration of lesbian, gay, transsexual, bisexual and intersexual people in sport. “We carry out several annual activities and have several volleyball, women’s indoor soccer and basketball teams. We defend equality by creating inclusive spaces,” she explains.
People who generally start practicing sports at an older age come to the association and prefer to be surrounded by their peers because they perceive it as a safe environment, he says. A space that, in the case of some sports, does not exist. “In basketball there is less. And in volleyball I have never perceived any LGBTIphobia. But The problem is present in football, and especially in men’s football. Both in clubs and in the stands.explains Lechón.
The list of male footballers who have declared themselves LGTBI is short and none of them play in a top-level league. The first player to come out of the closet in history was the Englishman Justin Fashanu, who declared himself openly gay in an interview in 1990. He committed suicide eight years later after a campaign of social, media and judicial harassment. Since then, examples of gay footballers can be counted on the fingers of the hands. “The problem is that the world of football has never made an effort to eradicate LGTBIphobic insults.”“There are people who, if they could speak, would tell you that the contract they signed with their club stated that they could not express their sexual orientation,” says Lechón.
But this problem is not only experienced by LGTBI people, but also by all those who can be “read as such.” In everyone’s mind there will be Guti, Guti, Guti faggot. And the list of insults and verbal violence against athletes for this issue is long: recently, the world champion with the Spanish team Jenni Beautiful received a barrage of homophobia for uploading a photo to her networks with another soccer player, Misa Rodriguez. And beyond the king of sports, recent is the case of Dennis Gonzalez, European champion of artistic swimming, who was told everything for practicing his discipline. “I don’t care,” he declared after the insults, “but I know that a child who is starting to do artistic swimming and who receives comments like that is going to affect him and I don’t want that.”
Too many insults
And this somewhat bleak panorama not only represents an attack on people who suffer from LGTBIphobia first hand. It also It hinders the integration of an entire group in an environment, such as sports, which everyone should be able to enjoy.
“It is very important that there are role models in all areas. Feeling represented, in this case in the world of sport, allows LGBT people to identify with different ways of being and to form their identity freely,” explains psychologist Eva Serós, who offers free counselling for people in the group. “There must be LGBT representatives represented in all areas, not just in the purest activism,” she adds. And in the case of sport too: “Being a pioneer is something that is very scary, but finding a person who has already done it before you fills us with courage and opens many doors.”
However, if it is sad that someone does not play sports for fear of being insulted for being LGBT, there are more extreme cases outside this field. «I treated a racialized trans woman and sex worker who told me that she learned as a child that she was not going to grow up. That she was going to die young like many other women like her. He did not have any positive reference and it is very important to be able to locate these people in the future so that they can live free and without fear. Whether to become a little old lady or to do artistic swimming,” says Serós.
From the association We are LGTBI the diagnosis is the same. «We need references in all areas: sports, politics and also in education. We give talks in schools and, for example, It is very important that a boy, a girl or a child Listen to a trans person speak, because if they are also trans, they will be a reference point.. That is why it is so important that we defend the ban on the parental pin this year. If we do not explain to our young people what they will later encounter in the real world, LGTBIphobia will continue to increase,” says the spokesperson for this entity, Leticia Ojeda.
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2024-06-28 10:29:47
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