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Now, onto this week’s good, bad, and ugly from the world of queer(ish) sports.

Friday’s Minnesota Wild game had an Ojibwe-language broadcast. It was the first time a sports broadcast featured the language, spoken by the Anishinaabe people in the Great Lakes region of the U.S. and Canada. In 2018, it was estimated that there were fewer than 1,000 Native speakers of Ojibwe; massive restoration and preservation efforts have been underway to save and spread the language. You can watch a clip of the broadcast here!

Engaged couple Jess Carter and Ann-Katrin Berger just won an NWSL Championship together! Rings on rings. Their love story is a great one, and Logan Olivia breaks it down really well in this video, if you aren’t yet familiar with the pair.

Speaking of partner-teammates, PWHL season has started, providing us with plenty of moments already. Opening weekend featured a “wives penalty box,” with Laura Stacey and Marie-Philip Poulin both being in the box at the same time (is that the first time that’s ever happened?!).

In ever more PWHL happenings, we had drag icon Sasha Colby riding the zamboni at the Seattle Torrent game. I also enjoyed this feature from Megan Seling at The Stranger on how Seattle built a PWHL team in just 205 days.

Who’s watching Heated Rivalry on HBO Max? Even before it aired, it was already going viral on TikTok with fan edits. Sadly, Harlequin, the publisher of the novel the show is based on, seems to be fumbling the ball mightily when it comes to promotion. No new paperback printing with a tie-in cover, no stock sent to bookstores ahead of the premiere, the paperback seems to be unavailable for purchase at many bookstores.

Wondering who all’s gay in the new Women’s Professional Baseball League now that everyone’s been drafted? As usual, Autostraddle has you covered.

Baseball has become an important part of the rehabilitation effort for people who are incarcerated inside San Quentin. “We are here to prove to the outside world that we can play hard, and work together, and be teammates,” Richard Williams told the New York Times. “We are here to show them that people can change.”

A’ja Wilson went on Hot Ones and talked about how pettiness fuels her game. Obviously, I went and looked up her birth chart and she’s a Leo sun with a Cancer Venus and Cancer Mars, which made me laugh and laugh and laugh because yes, pettiness is likely a key part of her personality—especially in competition.

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Jammie Booker, the winner of this year's 'World's Strongest Woman' competition, has been stripped of her title after organizers have claimed she is “biologically male.” As Karleigh Webb writes at Outsports, Booker “has not made any public statement on her gender identity in any regard. Even the usual suspects in the anti-trans media that always raise cain about this are using the term ‘alleged transgender athlete’ in regards to her. The Official Strongman World Games event has no stated, detailed policy on transgender competitors.”

Today in “nobody asked for this:” The Gist reports that “Rival, the first sportsbook built exclusively for women's sports, will include bets across the NWSL, WNBA, NCAA women’s basketball, WSL, WTA, and more, differing from the existing platforms that center men’s sports.” We know that sports betting is associated with increased harassment and abuse for both athletes and officials. Girlbossing the platform it’s done on won’t change that.

Justine Lindsay, who cheered for the NFL’s Carolina Panthers for three seasons, says she was cut for being trans.

T-Boy Wrestling has found itself embroiled in controversy following an embezzlement scandal that has resulted in ticket sales suspension and a transfer of leadership. (I’m trying to do some in-depth reporting on the situation; if you’ve been directly impacted, please feel free to reach out.)

Sophie Cunningham continues to be, well, Sophie Cunningham. When asked about MPJ’s comments that he could have beat a WNBA team when he was in 8th grade, Cunningham said, “Well, it’s probably true. If you are a professional [athlete], if you're in that elite level group, yeah you should be able to beat the girls… Any NBA star or player can beat a female in high school.” When you have transphobe extraordinaire Jennifer Sey QTing you approvingly, you’re doing something very wrong.

(If you’re unfamiliar with Sey’s whole thing, I wrote about how her transphobia controls entire media cycles, Karleigh Webb wrote about how much she pays cis women to drop out of competitions against trans women, and she appears in this phenomenal Riley Gaines expose from Madison Pauly at Mother Jones, which is well worth your time.)

Speaking of people who continue to suck, here is Christine Brennan, who is apparently only capable of one thing—talking about how Caitlin Clark is the savior of the WNBA and women’s basketball as a whole. USA Basketball announced their December training camp roster alongside a graphic featuring Kelsey Plum, Jackie Young, and Kahleah Copper. Brennan took to X to express her displeasure.

“If USA Basketball really wanted to go all out promoting WBB, bring new fans in and get unprecedented attention for a team that dropped in TV viewership at the Paris Olympics, they would have added the photo of one other player to this graphic. But no,” she tweeted on the Nazi site. “I’ve covered the Olympics and US sports national governing bodies (NGBs) for 40+ yrs and plan to be covering them for many more. An NGB’s mission is to win medals but also grow its sport. USA Basketball utterly failed to grow WBB at the 2024 Olympics. This is a continuing story.” Get a hobby, Christine!

How about this instead: if USA Basketball really wanted to go all out promoting WBB, bring new fans in, and get unprecedented attention for a team, they would have made this very gay poster during one of the five Olympics that Sue Bird and Diana Taurasi played in together:

What started as good-natured fun and harmless flirting between Gabby Williams and Courtney Williams seems to have gotten quite messy.

For context, you’ll have to go back to the StudBudz’s (is that how you pluralize that word?) 72-hour livestream from WNBA All-Star Weekend. On the Orange Carpet, Courtney told Gabby she looked good and then reassured Marine Johannes, Gabby’s longtime partner, that she wasn’t trying to steal her girl. Gabby and Marine have been very quiet about their relationship and, until that point, had never publicly confirmed that they were together.

Afterwards, when asked about outing couples or players who weren’t yet public about their relationships or their queerness, Courtney and Natisha Hiedeman were fairly dismissive of any criticism: “If you don’t want to be seen, you don’t need to be outside with it,” Courtney told The Cut.

Cut to last week, when Gabby appeared on Azzi Fudd’s Fudd Around and Find Out podcast. Fans sent in questions for Gabby, and one of those questions came from Courtney Williams: “Gabby, why you so fine, girl?”

Gabby, who had been smiling and laughing through the podcast up until that point, seemingly sighs and says, completely deadpan, “Courtney, when are you going to leave me alone?” She looks at the camera and shakes her head, before continuing, “God, I’m so sick of it. Leave me alone.”

It’s played off as a joke, but Gabby doesn’t really seem like she’s joking. And even if she is, there’s an undertone here of not taking no for an answer that doesn’t sit completely comfortably. The StudBudz have taken some heat for their misogyny in the past, and this seems like another example of potentially taking things too far. But that’s not the ugly part. The ugly part is what happened next, when Hiedeman responded on Courtney’s behalf.

“My friend ain’t never been pressed over no female ever in her life,” Hiedeman said on her Twitch stream. “Don’t nobody want her,” Hiedeman continued, speaking about Gabby, before clapping and saying, “Dubs in the chat.”

This is just ugly for no reason. The flirting is only cute and funny if both parties are enjoying it, and Gabby has seemingly made it clear a few times now that she’s not into it. Or maybe she really was joking, and if that’s the case, then it definitely isn’t that serious. But if the response to a colleague of yours trying to set a boundary is to attack her, claim no one ever wanted her in the first place, and clapback in her metaphorical face, that’s a wildly toxic overreaction. It reeks of internalized misogyny and entitlement. And it just didn’t have to happen.