#Red-Carded: How I Got Pushed Out of an LGBT Soccer League for Gender WrongThink
This sense of longing and regret helps explain why, a half-decade later, as a fresh college graduate living in Washington, D.C., I signed up with the local LGBT soccer club.
The high-school years can be a painful time. But for me, the normal adolescent angst was exacerbated by a slow-motion mental struggle over the fact that I was attracted only to other boys.
I came of age in the early 2010s, when the shame and stigma attached to homosexuality had started to fade in the United States. Barack Obama was president, the Supreme Court had ruled to legalize same-sex marriage, and gay rights were ascendant across the commanding heights of Western culture.
Yet my high school, situated in a largely rural Massachusetts exurb, hadnât yet caught up. There were few gay students and staff. And my knowledge of gay life emerged from media stereotypes, like the effeminate, high-voiced Kurt on Glee. I never saw myself in that archetype, and so my journey to self-discovery was complicated and protracted.
No, I never worried that Iâd get beaten up by jocks and stuffed in a locker. At 6â4â and 200 lbs, I was a jock. But I truly believed my soccer and basketball teammates wouldnât look at me the same way if they knew I was gay.
So I liedâto my family, to my closest friends, and, most vigorously, to myself. This was a common and understandable coping mechanism. But in hindsight, it fills me with sadness. I canât help thinking that my entire high-school experience, especially my career as a student athlete, would have been more joyful if Iâd felt free to be my authentic self.
This sense of longing and regret helps explain why, a half-decade later, as a fresh college graduate living in Washington, D.C., I signed up with the local LGBT soccer club. The teenaged me couldnât have imagined something like that existing in my community. Here was a chance to play a sport I love without concealing anything about my identity. How utterly naĂŻve I was.
By this time, Iâd already experienced shunning from the so-called LGBT community at my undergraduate universityânot due to my sexual identity, but, rather, my political views. As the only openly conservative columnist working for the school newspaper, penning columns against affirmative action, supporting pro-due-process reforms to campus sexual-assault proceedings, and, yes, even advocating for gun ownersâ Second-Amendment rights, I quickly became persona non grata within the local gay community.
That included the dating scene. In many cases, I either had to lie about what I believed or face rejection. Dating apps, which are supposed to facilitate romance and hook-ups, now became just another way for people to excommunicate me. (One gay fellow kindly took the time to tell me I was a âtraitorous faggotâ before blocking me on a dating app.) Some angry students posted my dating profiles to public Facebook groups as a way to mock me, despite the fact that I hadnât yet come out to my family. For all progressivesâ talk about social justice, it became clear that many campus LGBT activists were eager to use the most ruthless methods at their disposal to punish âtraitorous faggotsâ who dissented from their left-wing agenda.
Brad Polumbo
Campus life can be a social fishbowl. But Washington, D.C., with its big, vibrant LGBT scene, would be different, I hoped. Alas, no. By the time I joined my gay soccer club in May 2019, Iâd already built something of an online profile as a gay conservative writer. And as I learned, the Internet has the power to turn even a large city into a fishbowl.
At first, things went fine. I signed up for the club, paid my dues, and started attending scrimmages and pick-up games. Eventually, I was drafted to play on a few teams. While several members were standoffish and distant, I had no particular reason to think this had anything to do with my background.
As the weather got colder, I wrote on the clubâs widely subscribed Facebook group, asking about opportunities to join a winter league. Thatâs when things went downhill. Posting to an audience of hundreds, an employee of the D.C.-based anti-conservative group Media Matters publicly branded me a âtransphobeâ and exhorted other members of the club to ostracize meâa campaign subsequently cheered on by a Media Matters project director. Some of the other club members then piled on, including folks Iâd played with just the week before. One unhinged commenter even called me a âsegregationist.â
This person, Brennan Suen, is a project director at @MMFA.
Here he is cheering on his co-workers as they invade my personal life and try to see me ostracized from apolitical social venues â where I donât mention politics â for my WrongThink. pic.twitter.com/Ad2ITusiR3
â Brad Polum-skim-milk-lover-bo (@brad_polumbo) December 21, 2019
Letâs be clear that I never mentioned politics at a single club event. To the extent that any transgender people were actually involved with the club (its membership being comprised almost exclusively of gay men), I would never have dreamed of being anything but polite. This wasnât about my behavior. This was about my thoughtcrimes, which apparently could make (theoretical) transgender members feel âunsafe.â
As for those supposed thoughtcrimesâno one on the Facebook page could even point to anything legitimately transphobic that Iâd ever said or written. In fact, I have a lot of compassion for transgender individuals. I canât imagine how difficult their lives must be. But putting aside all of the inclusive sloganeering that goes along with LGBT+ acronym building, I simply donât think that I, as a gay man, actually have a ton in common with the trans community at large. As many gender activists themselves are quick to insist, sexuality and gender identity are distinct conceptsâwhich is why, as Iâve argued in Quillette, the LGBT umbrella concept is more usefully divided into two separate groups, one for sexual minorities and another for those with atypical gender identities. This apparently makes me an evil segregationist.
I also believe that transgender people should have the same (or analogous) rights as gay people under law, and have advocated as much in conservative publications. Ultimately, I do acknowledge that biological sex is real and determined in part by chromosomes, but I also think adults should live however they want. And if that means living as the opposite sex and transitioning, more power to them.
But I wonât ever cave in to progressive gaslighting by pretending there are no real differences between biological males and femalesâor, more specifically, that these differences donât manifest themselves in womenâs sports. Iâve also expressed deep discomfort with the idea of pre-adolescent children being fast-tracked into irreversible therapies and surgeries before theyâre old enough to truly understand complex concepts such as sex, gender and sexuality.
Thatâs it. Thatâs the extent of my wicked âanti-transâ views that supposedly make me unworthy of acceptance in the gay community.
Itâs important to note that I wasnât officially kicked out of the club. I chalk this up in part to the fact that many of the club leaders are older gay men. Though they might not be as vocal on social media, they have their own views on such matters, and sometimes are skeptical of the dogmas that now dominate young progressive activists within D.C.âs gay community. I believe there was also some appreciation of the fact that expelling me for ideological reasons could invite a legal challenge (though I didnât threaten any). Moreover, my critics knew they didnât have to actually expel me: All they needed to do was make club life sufficiently unpleasant and humiliating such that I would simply leave on my own. And thatâs what happened.
At the end of the day, this isnât a big deal for me. I can find another team to join. (Ironically, as a gay man, Iâm now far more likely to find acceptance among boring, straight, suburbanite soccer players than among the rainbow ideologues at Media Matters.) And, like many adults whoâve moved on from their teenage dramas, I no longer depend on the validation of this or that clique for my self-confidence.
But this little fishbowl fiasco is emblematic of previously disadvantaged, left-leaning communities that now kick people around in the same way they themselves were once treated. The fact that I can no longer play soccer with people who might disagree with me politically is just another sad reminder that âinclusivityâ advocates now have become a leading source of division and intoleranceâeven when it comes to enjoying the simple pleasure of sport.
