Haterade: how Substack is contributing to violence against trans athletes
plus, this week's sports-related reading
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Why is Substack promoting TERF content in their sports recommendations?
Look, this is a rhetorical question because we know that Substack has been allowing transphobic content to be platformed and monetized basically since its inception. I am deeply ambivalent about still being on this platform and am frustrated that it feels like one of the only places that I can currently build the kind of community I am trying to create.
I wrote much more about that here, when the “Substackers Against Nazis” letter was circulating:
I have been watching the kind of sports content that Substack promotes because there is a current wave of media attention on women’s sports. Substack has positioned itself as a place where you can carve out a niche for yourself covering things that maybe the mainstream media is ignoring, and in that way, seems like the perfect place for women’s sports content to thrive. I participate in the
community and have noticed a real dearth of newsletters with a women’s sports focus, in general.Every day I get “Today in Sports” posts boosted into my feed. In the many weeks that I have been checking them, the only post I’d seen boosted into the top five reads that was specifically about women’s sports was a post from Lindsay Gibbs’s
newsletter—a newsletter that was one of the first recipients of a Substack grant.Last week, I finally saw a second post about women’s sports and my stomach dropped pretty much immediately.
Of all the women’s sports content that Substack could be boosting, the post they promoted was from a small newsletter with 300 subscribers dedicated exclusively to transphobic content advocating for trans women to be excluded from women’s sports. And it’s not even content that argues they should have their own category (not that that’s much better, really)—it’s content that misgenders trans women by calling them men. It’s so bad that I’m not even going to link to any of it here, nor am I going to repeat what is written in it.
To talk about why this matters, I’m going to write about an incident that I was planning to dedicate a separate newsletter to later this week: the threat of violence against Natalie Ryan on the Disc Golf Pro Tour. The kind of language that Sarah Barker uses in her posts lead directly to anti-trans violence against trans women athletes like Ryan (Barker is also the same person who flagged non-binary runner Cal Calamia to the U.S. Anti-Doping Association (USADA) to try and get him banned from running marathons while taking medically prescribed testosterone).
On Saturday, April 20th, the 2024 Music City Open tournament was halted as the result of a terrorist threat because Ryan, a trans woman, was participating in the women’s event. The threat “made no specific mention of harm to any other person,” the DGPT said in a press release. The call came in to tournament director Jeff Spring around 2:00 AM, Ryan told me, following the first of three days of competition. At 11:00 AM on the second day, play was able to resume after increased security on the course, including police protection for Ryan.
Prior to the 2023 season the Disc Golf Pro Tour—which is run by the Pro Disc Golf Association—banned trans women from competing in the women’s tournament. At the time, Ryan was the only trans woman competing at the elite level of the sport. Ryan sued and the PDGA reversed their policy, allowing her to return to the course for the current season. But the vitriol that Ryan faces, whether its in the comments section of any posts made about her, in conversations on social media about her sport, or from opponents, takes a toll on her as an athlete and a human.
The kind of support that Ryan needs after facing credible threats of violence simply for playing the sport in which she is a professional athlete has been largely absent, she says. “A couple of players said, ‘This isn’t ok, I’m sorry this is happening’ but [I got] nothing from the tour or anyone else,” Ryan says. “The tour had one person there Saturday to make sure that I wasn’t freaking out but after it seemed like I was ok, they drifted away.” A spokesperson for the DGPT told me that “the Tour has begun the process of consulting with a new event security firm” following the threat on Ryan’s life but declined to provide further detail.
The stress of the entire ordeal negatively impacted Ryan’s ability to perform. “It hit me hard,” she says. “I woke up and I couldn’t get in the headspace I usually try to get into, and I fell apart on the course.” Ryan finished 15th.
Ryan and Neptune Discs, Ryan’s sponsor, have been asking members of the disc golf community to speak up but that mostly hasn’t happened. “A few pros have spoken up condemning the threats, but not much from companies or manufacturers which is kind of a bummer,” Ryan says. One of the highest profile members of the disc golf world to come to Ryan’s defense is Jeremy Koling, a disc golf champion and broadcaster.
“I condemn those actions,” Koling said in a video posted to his Instagram, where he also explained the broadcast decision not to explain the reason for the delay of tournament. “What breaks down [the love of the disc golf community] is when something like a threat on human lives comes into play… If somebody is going through this incredible transition in their lives and they receive nothing but hatred from every single corner of the world and then on top of that you hate them so much that you want to kill them? That’s about as bad as it gets.”
The comments on this video by one of the most respected voices in the sport are horrific.
Meanwhile, just days after the threat that delayed the Music City Open, an athlete on the Men’s Pro Open (MPO) took to Twitter to complain about incurring a penalty stroke by implying that his rules violation (being 12 seconds late) was somehow comparable to Ryan being allowed to play in the FPO—while using the transphobic talking point that trans women are men.
Ryan pointed out on social media that way this kind of language—the same language being used by the posts by Barker that Substack is promoting—leads directly to the kinds of violence Ryan faced at the Music City Open. Those threats put not just Ryan, but all the other athletes and people attending the Tour, in danger. “Calling trans women anything other than women… invites people to take matters into their own hands and call in further threats of violence or worse,” she wrote.
“PDGA, if you’re serious about everyone’s safety, this needs to end now.” Thus far, the PDGA has not publicly addressed Hannum’s comments. Ryan says she heard that he is under disciplinary review but nothing has been announced as of now.
Which brings us back to Sarah Barker. Barker’s posts should violate Substack’s policies on hate speech. But even if the platform doesn’t remove her newsletter, it shouldn’t be promoting it. Why is the platform ignoring all of the quality women’s sports content from newsletters like mine or
by or or or or or or in order to boost the profile of a tiny little TERF blog? I could take a guess at the answer, and it’s because either Substack leadership agrees with these ideas, or they have no problem platform if harmful ideas in the name of “free speech” and “fair debate”—all things the founders have said in the past.But there are real consequences to platforming this rhetoric. Just ask Natalie Ryan.
“Regardless of what your stance is on whether transgender people should be able to play in [Women’s Pro Open] FPO division, it doesn’t really matter,” Koling said in his video. “That’s for the organization to decide.. that’s bigger than any of us. As far as I’m concerned, Natalie Ryan is pursing what her dreams are according to the laws and that’s it. If you don’t like it, kick rocks.”
Sports-related reading
An honorable mention for this week’s rant was going to be Bill Simmons and Ethan Strauss thinking that WNBA teams should be named the “W [NBA Team Name]” because trying to remember the names of the teams is too hard
From
, how Israel plans to foil Palestine's FIFA sanctions campaign: “From threats of imprisonment to WhatsApp brainstorming groups involving government and military officials, Israel is clearly concerned by the Palestinian campaign to impose FIFA sanctions.”The California Coastal Commission said that excluding Sasha Jane Lowerson, who is trans, from the women’s category in surfing, constitutes illegal discrimination.
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