"it feels kind of like a slap in the face"
"it feels kind of like a slap in the face"
trans fans respond to Stewie's Harry Potter shoes, & more!
Hi, friends!
I’ve spent the week working on a post documenting the best (and worst) sapphic/lesbian/wlw moments in the history of The Challenge. I will be sending that out tomorrow morning and I’m quite excited about it. It has been a lot more work than I anticipated and so while I had hoped to make it free, it is going to be for paid subscribers. If you’d like to have access to that, please consider upgrading your subscription!
It’s gonna be FUN.
I have two promotional things to share with you this week. The first is that for Them, I spoke to trans and queer New York Liberty fans about their reactions to Breanna Stewart’s new Harry Potter Pumas.
“I feel safe at WNBA games; I see trans people everywhere,” Grace McKenzie tells Them. “And then to see one of the greatest players of all time and one of my personal idols come out and partner with somebody who was directly harmful to my rights and my livelihood — it feels kind of like a slap in the face. And then it’s like, ‘Oh, is this space actually supportive for me?’”
You can read the full piece at Them.
Secondly, this weekend marks the 50th anniversary of the National Women’s Football League. I’ll have more content about that next week, but to get us started, Lyndsey and I were on Sarah Spain’s “Good Game” podcast to talk about our book, Hail Mary: The Rise and Fall of the National Women’s Football League.
You can listen to the full episode here, and a clip of Lyndsey talking about Rose Low, quarterback of the LA Dandelions, below:
Rose send Lyndsey care packages while she wrote, and after the book was published she sent each of us a gift. She also came to meet us at the LA Times Festival of Books, again bringing each of us a care package.
Rose also provided the photo that became our cover; she is the woman in the middle with the headphones on.
See you tomorrow!
Thanks for this story - in addition to being important and very much your unique value add to to the sports media ecosystem - it’s perhaps the *perfect* example for my Media Studies class as an example for students of how politics, sports, and identity are negotiated through culture (and the media).