Policing Gender and Sexuality in High School Sports: The Mediating Impact of Hearing Anti-Lgbtq + Language on High School Athletes’ Self-Esteem across Gender Identity, Sexual Orientation

Background: Participation in sport is often assumed to promote the healthy development of youth (Anderson-Butcher, 2019; Jones et al., 2017; Turgeon et al., 2019). However, research suggests that gender and sexuality policing in sports, especially the policing of masculinity, negatively impacts the self-esteem of LGBTQ + youth (Kosciw et al., 2020; Kulick et al., 2019; McDonald, 2018). In addition to insulting LGBTQ+ youth, Pascoe (2005) describes this language, as the worst insult for heterosexual, cisgender males. Interestingly, minority stress theory suggests that those who have experience coping with and navigating stigma of their sexual orientation are able to transfer this successful navigation to another marginalized identity, such as race (David & knight, 2008; Reyes et al, 2018). In this study, we examined what the impact playing sports has on the self-esteem (when mediated by the frequency of hearing anti-LGBTQ + language) of LGBTQ + youth compared to non-LGBTQ + youth, and the impact of hearing anti-LGBTQ+ language have on the self-esteem of sport participants with different sexualities, genders, and racial identities.

Methods: LGBTQ+ youth leaders and their allies designed and distributed a survey at five public high schools to assess issues related to school culture, social identities, and student well-being. These schools included one low-income, urban school that was nearly all Black and other students of color, two mixed income suburban schools from a liberal town racially representative of the state, and two majority white, mixed income, rural schools from conservative communities. Nearly three-quarters of respondents (71.0%) reported participating in sports or other athletic programming. The sample was mostly monoracial-white (65.8%) but also included multiracial (14.1%) and monoracial-Black students (12.4%). Nearly one in four respondents identified as LGBQ (21.6%) and almost one in ten respondents identified as trans or gender non-conforming (9.2%). To test our research questions examining the associations between playing sports and self-esteem we used OLS regressions with bootstrapping tests for mediation to assess the indirect effect of frequency of hearing anti-LGBTQ + language and moderated mediation effects of LGBTQ + identity, race and gender.

Results: Findings suggest that hyper-surveillance and policing of sexual and gender norms, specifically masculinity, through the use of anti-LGBTQ + language in sport not only marginalizes LGBTQ + individuals, but can harm all youth. While most youth experience an increase in self-esteem by playing sports, LGBTQ + youth are not, on average, experiencing this benefit. Among straight cisgender youth, the conditional direct effect of playing sports on self-esteem was positive for only girls, across race, indicating a positive moderated mediation for girls, but not straight cisgender boys. The positive effect of playing sports on self-esteem had a comparatively lower effect for white boys, when mediated by the frequency of hearing anti-LGBTQ + language.

Implications: As the self-esteem of cis white boys may be among those most impacted by anti-LGBTQ + language, further investigation is needed to capture how anti-LGBTQ + language intersects with the policing of hegemonic, toxic masculinity, and is reinforced in educational sport settings, often harming its most frequent users.