I have a story in the new sports issue of CULTURED x ART ARENA. I spoke to nine content creators who are shaping the narrative of women’s sports. You can read it online here and purchase a copy of the mag here.

I was on the Wine and Dime podcast talking about the Connecticut Sun’s final season. You can listen here.

I was incredibly moved to see reality star and model Sarah Jane Nader ask to dance with another woman as her partner, in order to provide representation that she didn’t have when she was younger (JoJo Siwa was the first to do this a few years ago). Nader is one in a long line of reality TV women who came up as beautiful ideals of a very cis, straight version of femininity and who have since come out as queer or lesbian: Selling Sunset’s Chrishelle Strauss, The Bachelorette’s Gabby Windey, The Bachelor’s Becca Tilley, Layla Taylor from Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, several of the Housewives, and many more.

I was upset that she was the first woman to go home, and it was exclusively because they split the premiere into a men’s night and women’s night. I think two of the men should have gone home, as not only were they worse than her, but it doesn’t sit right with me for the only two-woman couple to be eliminated the first night and I feel like there was some potentially unconscious bias that went into that.

I have also been moved to watch straight men who have never danced fully embrace the art, be vulnerable with their bodies in front of millions of people, and talk about how much they’ve fallen in love with it. I can’t think of many other settings that provide this opportunity for high-profile straight men to explore the kind of dance that is considered more feminine.

Digging into the history and relationships that the pros have with each other is wild (very incestuous, very Mormon), but even more wild to me is the fact that Ezra Sosa is the first openly gay pro on the show. For a sport that is so full of gay men, it’s wild that in 35 seasons he’s the only one. I think that speaks to an underlying conservativism of the show (and the outcomes for the Black pros seem to indicate the same).

I’ve been incredibly frustrated by the judging. We are giving Amber Glenn and Jenna Dewan’s incredibly advanced routines the same scores as men who can’t count the music or do any of the steps. And while I get that there is a bit of grading on a curve here when it comes to the starting level of these dancers, it’s very clear that the men are judged more leniently overall than the women are (this is an issue throughout the world of dance, and they’re known as “penis points”).

The nostalgia of watching Julia Stiles recreate her routine from Save the Last Dance was obviously Millennial nostalgia, but that wasn’t what made me emotional about it. In her opening package from the first episode, she tells her partner, Ezra, that she had a double for that final dance and he jokes that he knew. Well, watching her do most of those moves with her own body made me so proud for her. She can do it! Look at her!

In very “water is wet” news, a new study from a data startup analyzed the social media activity around the WNBA’s trans hysteria and found that it was almost entirely generated as clickbait on the hellhole that is X—as in 99% of posts on this issue, across platforms, originated on the site. It continues to be true that anti-trans sentiment is really just a small number of very vocal people who have figured out how to monopolize news cycles and discourse. We need to stop letting them.