“Team LGBTQ” did remarkably well in the 2022 Winter Olympics, SBNation Outsports reports. Did you even know there was a “Team LGBTQ?” Well, it exists only in the imaginative minds of Outsports, the blog dedicated to celebrating homosexuality and gender confusion. It’s a mythical team of alphabet soup athletes that won enough medals to allegedly have finished 12th in the final medal count.
Cyd Zeigler, the homosexual founder of Outsports, envisioned the “Team LGBTQ” concept and asked, “what if these athletes were a country themselves, flying the rainbow flag and blaring Diana Ross’ ‘I’m Coming Out’ for their national anthem?” With 36 athletes from 14 countries celebrating a myriad of gender identities in Beijing, the recent Winter Olympics were the most “out” Winter Games ever.
To get his fake team to 12th place, Zeigler had to fudge the numbers. He counted medal-winning teams that had at least one LGBTQ member, such as Canada’s women’s hockey team with its seven lesbians. The number of rainbow individuals winning medals drops his dream team all the way down to a tie with Slovakia for 16th place.
Outsports also awarded the equivalent of participation ribbons. Gus Kenworthy, who won silver for Team USA in the 2014 Sochi Olympics in the halfpipe, competed for the United Kingdom this time, finished eighth and left China empty-handed.
There are much greater things than medals though. Jim Buzinski, of Outsports, said “Kenworthy kissing his boyfriend live on national TV prior to his Olympic competition in 2018 is still one of the great LGBTQ sports moments ever.”
Despite all the good news coming out of these Olympics, Outsports reported there is one troubling aspect that must be addressed.
With all the alphabet letters swirling around the 2022 Winter Olympics, it was hard for figure skating television broadcaster Tara Lipinski (seen in above photo with Johnny Weir) to keep track of them. Because of insensitive types like her and broadcast colleague Weir, the letters “NB” may soon be working their way into the LGBTQ lexicon. She made the dreadful mistake of repeatedly misgendering American pairs figure skater Timothy LeDuc as “he.”
Outsports slapped her around good in a 754-word beat-down written by pronoun cop Zeigler. He said it’s not like she hadn’t been warned in advance.
“NBC again misgendered a nonbinary athlete at the Olympics,” Zeigler raged. “This time it was Tara Lipinski referring to pairs figure skater Timothy LeDuc several times as ‘he,’ when LeDuc uses ‘they’ pronouns.” This egregious mistake happened after “weeks of conversation in the media specifically about LeDuc’s pronouns.” She should have known better.
“Everyone knew what to do and they wanted to do the right thing,” Zeigler lectured. “And still a nonbinary athlete was accidentally misgendered multiple times.” Lipinski’s broadcast partner Weir was also called out for ignoring gender norms on national TV for years.
My bad, Lipinski admitted. “I realize that I used the wrong pronouns for Tim,” Lipinski said after her serious offense. “I will do better. Tim you deserve that.” Zeigler credited her for “genuine apology,” before his anger flared up again: “Yet, the mistake was made. Several times,” Zeigler said while struggling to forgive and forget.
This whole crisis just speaks to the harsh realities nonbinary people face in and out of sports today, Zeigler whined. Even though LeDuc is a man, looks like a man and has a man’s name and chromosomes.
Outsports’ own nonbinary contributing writer Brian Bell called it a simmering frustration when people like Lipinski misgender nonbinary folks. For Outsports, misgendering is a huge issue, but China’s human rights violations were not even on the rainbow blog’s radar.
