an overdue reckoning with this queer body: part 1
or how watching women's college basketball is helping me heal
It’s 1981. I’m in first grade, standing on the dusty baseball diamond awaiting a kickball game. I’m wearing a coral romper with eyelet trim, bleached-white Keds, and a pair of matching coral and white barrettes with ribbons cascading into my blonde hair. My classmate, Ann Aglan, has changed out of her powder-blue, smock-necked dress into shorts and a t-shirt just for P.E. class, which is something we didn’t typically do in first grade. (Yes, I have an uncanny knack for remembering what people wore and when. Ask my friends.) Ann proceeds to dominate the kickball game. After the game, a boy teases her “boyish” P.E. outfit and adds an F to the front of her last name, transforming it into a clumsy-but-spiteful slur that Ann and I had to learn the meaning of from an older kid on the bus ride home that day. When I got home, I traded my lacy romper for my own shorts, t-shirt, and “Little Slugger” baseball cap to play alone in the yard.
It’s 1989. I’m in ninth grade. I’ve sworn off competitive sports. Being one of two girls on a boys’ recreational soccer league in third grade was enough to suck any confidence out of me around ball-handling, running, and the pressure of scoring. So, now I’m a cheerleader. A cluster of uniformed girls from my squad are crowding our faces into a small mirror in the locker room to put on make-up before cheering for our school’s boys’ basketball team. Our coach reminds us to put our hair into ponytails, as is regulation for the squad since we’re tumbling, jumping, and climbing on each others’ backs to build pyramids. I groan about putting my hair up because I feel self-conscious and unattractive when my ears show. I avoid cartwheeling when I’m having my period because, before I started wearing tampons (tampons are a whole other story you can read in my book), I’m afraid the pad will be an apparent bulge through the cheerleading uniform bloomers. I don’t like to run or jump because I’m wearing a really pretty bra (for the first boyfriend who ever saw my bra) that doesn’t support my breasts very well when I’m being active. I don’t try out for cheerleading again after that year.
It’s the chunk of time spanning 1990 through 2018. My life has ZERO to do with sports. It’s about getting a few educational degrees, enjoying the arts, exploring spirituality, becoming/being a therapist, becoming/being a man’s wife, and a whole lotta parenting. In a 20-year stint during this era, I endure chronic, cyclical, mystery-illness pain in my knees, and I am physically unable to run or walk for about a third of each month. I’m self-conscious about this, so I power through the pain, hoping people won’t notice. I definitely can’t play sports, and I don’t enjoy watching others play sports because competition seems completely absurd to me.
During this era, I concoct a theory that people who yell or cry at the TV during sports games are using it as a socially sanctioned outlet to express emotions they can’t safely express elsewhere. (Sublimation is real and fair and even healthy.) When I see grown adults rooting for their college teams, I feel like they are trying to relive some sort of glory days gone by. I am judgmental about people who are major aficionados of any sport and who rep teams in their attire because to me it seems like it’s giving these fans a false and empty sense of belonging to a thing that doesn’t have much to do with them, distracting them away from truer, more meaningful connections. I feel beyond annoyed about the money behind the sports industry and think of a zillion ways it could be better spent, so I don’t want to support that noise in any way. Over these many years, I’m clearly angry about a lot of shit that I’m self-aware enough to know is far deeper than being bothered by sports and sports fans.
It’s 2019. I find myself dating a woman who is an athlete — a woman who was a rugby fly-half for 20 friggin’ years, and who has also played basketball, softball, tennis, and eventually pickleball. A woman who loves watching the Cubs and the Nuggets and Carolina men’s basketball and Iowa women’s basketball. A woman who taught me what March Madness is (I’d never even heard of it) and invited me to enter pools where no one swims and make brackets that aren’t punctuation. A woman who inhabits her body in a way that I’ve never had the audacity to inhabit my own. A woman who gets lost in the physicality of play and is not self-conscious about how she looks while doing so. This is SO curious to me — and I’m curious about the fact it’s so attractive to me. From a front row seat, I observe how she moves through the world. My knee inflammation ends completely the month we begin dating, just as mysteriously as it began. A couple years into our relationship, something in me cracks further open, I begin to feel a somatic freedom inside myself that I’ve never known. I don’t know where to put it or how to dress it or how to express it.
It’s April 2, 2023. I’m in a sports bar where my girlfriend and I have convinced the staff to turn the TV in their back room on *with sound* to watch the NCAA women’s basketball final where Iowa faces off against LSU. For other readers who may have also avoided loud sports bars your whole life, sports bars generally only play men’s games on their large TVs. (Fun evolution: Denver is opening its first sports bar for women’s sports this summer!) So, I’m here at this sports bar at the end of March Madness, wearing one of my girlfriend’s Iowa sweatshirts (Iowa is her alma mater), and I’m legit yelling at the TV. I cry when Iowa loses to LSU. I cry actual tears. I order my own Iowa cap 🧢 the very next day.
It’s the 2023-2024 college basketball season. I watch nearly every Iowa women’s game that’s televised. And I care. I am well aware I’m spoiled by watching Iowa’s star guard Caitlin Clark (who broke about every record in the books this year), as she is extraordinary, but I’m transfixed when I see her and her teammates trying their best, wanting something so much, out loud, in front of millions. How vulnerable! And how beautiful to see a team… teaming. What is a team? I’ve never been part of one, and it’s a huge missing experience for me.
You’ll see what I mean if you click the image below to watch this quick video of the Iowa women’s basketball team. Even if (and maybe especially if?) you’re not a women’s basketball fan, it’s worth it:
Typically, those of us socialized as girls (and those susceptible to “feminine beauty standards” as kids) got discouraged out of losing ourselves and our self-consciousness in the flow of sport and play. Clearly, I’m generalizing here, because my girlfriend and many of her sporty, queer friends had a different sort of formative experience. (As an aside, I wonder what role, if any, their queerness plays in this, and I long to understand the sociology behind it all.) The majority of girls in my generation began to feel self-conscious about how we appeared to others early on. This is especially true for those of us who bought into cisnormativity and heteronormativity so we’d belong, be loved, survive — even if a lot of us femmes later realized we’re also queer. We fielded objectifying comments about our bodies at every turn. We absorbed what we noticed the women before us doing and by what the media told us to be. As soon as my parents allowed, I subscribed to Seventeen and YM magazines, which taught me about shaving my legs and applying eye shadow and kissing boys. The girls I knew cared about whether we were looking attractive to boys and belonging with the other girls, which turned us away from taking the bold, effortful, and sometimes awkward physical risks many sports require. We began to learn that, in a patriarchal culture, our value is connected to how our bodies are being perceived.
Today, I am watching women use their bodies to perform rather than to posture. They’re valuing their bodies for what they do rather than what they look like, an idea I wrote about here. They are embodied in a way that I hadn’t seen modeled until I tuned into women’s college basketball. These women are strategic, strong, sweaty, and skilled. They don’t move like they’re trying to be pretty or pander to the male gaze. They’re playing and enjoying and doing it for themselves and for their team. Witnessing this impacts me deeply and touches that part of me who did not have these experiences of my own body and of a team.
For the first few years of our relationship, when my girlfriend turned on a men’s college basketball game or we’d go to a local baseball game, my eyes would glaze over, and I’d fuzz out. Something in me would shut off in a way that feels very much like a trauma response. I’d reach for a snack or my phone to do almost anything else. After women’s basketball cracked me open, I haven’t gotten reflexively numb or angry around men’s sports in the same way I used to. I do see the men’s strength and skill and the team aspect, but for me, watching men’s sports is just more of what society has always force-fed to me about displays of men’s power. I’ve had enough of the old school masculinity narrative, so I’m still not personally in a place of fully embracing men’s sports. They don’t soothe that sore spot inside me that needs the balm of watching women being confidently embodied, without any sort of sexual pretense. [While we’re on the topic of gender, it’s worth mentioning that I also have a huge heartache for my non-binary/genderfluid teenager who would have to essentially pick one (of only two?!!?) genders in order to participate in school sports, so they don’t play anymore.]
Yesterday, the Iowa women’s basketball team, basically only five players deep, played a hell of a game in the championship against the (quite deep, big, tall, skilled, undefeated) South Carolina women — and ultimately, Iowa didn’t win the title. Regardless, I am so proud of this team and for the attention they and Caitlin have drawn toward women’s sports in general. Hopefully others like me are watching and healing, too.
Having been born in the mid-70s and socialized as a girl in this culture, I have a whole lotta layers of conditioning to shed to get down to what is truly me. My own midlife emergence has been a remembering, a reclamation, and a reinvention of sorts. I’m still trying to calibrate how my self-expression serves to show on the outside what is true for me on the inside. My relationship to sports is simply one piece of my own healing that I’m only just beginning to name and explore. I want to examine the idea of congruent and true beauty (an April theme) from more angles… next time.
watching: Between women’s college basketball games, I am binging a pretty niche, creative, reality competition show called Blown Away on Netflix… because I’ve always been a bit obsessed with glass blowing.
podcasting: If you have 26 free minutes, you can click here to hear me chat with Kerri and
, two other “late in life lesbians”, on the episode of Beyond the Closet that aired last week.looking forward to: So many great summer shows at our local, gorgeous concert venue of Red Rocks Amphitheater! From Maggie Rogers to Sarah McLachlan to Brandi Carlile to the Indigo Girls!
celebrating: the first birthday 🥳 of my book, Midlife Emergence: Free Your Inner Fire, is this Thursday, April 11th! (Of course she’s an Aries 🔥!)
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