June is Pride Month. Pride celebrates the queer community and promotes 2SLGBTQ+ rights. In sport, acknowledging and celebrating Pride Month is an important step in creating an inclusive environment for participants who may have struggled to find a space where they feel welcome. This has become increasingly clear in professional sport, where Pride activities, celebrations and promotional events have been overshadowed by individuals declining to participate.
In 2022 and 2023, there were several instances in the NHL where players chose to not wear pieces of equipment with rainbows and other pro-2SLGBTQ+ symbols, citing various personal reasons for choosing not to participate. Eventually, the NHL decided that teams would no longer wear specialty jerseys, including Pride jerseys, on the ice.
In the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar, one of the most-watched sporting events in the world, fans and players were prohibited from wearing any clothing or other symbols promoting 2SLGBTQ+ rights.
Why does this type of visibility matter? A 2023 article by SDPN’s Robert Molloy explains the impact of a lack of visibility under the brightest lights of professional sports.
“The decision made by the National Hockey League to take away pride jerseys hurts that visibility. Young LGBTQ+ hockey fans will not see themselves represented. They deserved those moments of joy seeing rainbow jerseys in warmup and it is being stripped away from these communities. We are left with more questions than answers about what the future of specialty nights will look like, but the thing that is for sure is that LGBTQ+ hockey fans are not going anywhere. Our visibility in warmups is gone but we are not going to disappear quietly.”
At the community level, several organizations are working to provide a safe space for the 2SLGBTQ+ community to participate in sport. Pride Capital Volleyball, one of the 2023 Ottawa Sport Council Foundation Community Opportunity Grant recipients, and Ottawa Pride Hockey, an Ottawa Sport Council community sport hero, are two examples of leaders in this space.
The Ottawa Sport Council’s commitment to creating more inclusive sport environments includes helping create safe spaces for the 2SLGBTQ+ community. This spring, the Ottawa Sport Council launched The Belonging Playbook, which serves as a free library of resources and tools to help community sport leaders improve the inclusivity and accessibility of their organization. Among the many free, downloadable resources available in The Belonging Playbook is a section on resources for gender and sexuality inclusion in sport, which is available here.