It turns out that some people who say they want gender diversity aren’t as liberal-minded as they thought.
Cheerleader Louie Conn performed with junior cheerleaders at a preseason game between the Minnesota Vikings and the New England Patriots on Aug. 16 in Minneapolis.
Cheerleader Louie Conn performed with junior cheerleaders at a preseason game between the Minnesota Vikings and the New England Patriots on Aug. 16 in Minneapolis.Bruce Kluckhohn/Associated Press
Lisa Selin Davis is the author of “Tomboy” and the Substack newsletter BROADview, and is at work on a book about the youth gender culture war, where a version of this essay was first published.
In August, the National Football League’s Minnesota Vikings revealed their new lineup — not in the team but in the cheerleading squad. It now includes two male cheerleaders, Blaize Shiek and Louie Conn. Rather than performing as male cheerleaders often have — holding female cheerleaders aloft as the strong supporting players — these young men perform the same moves as the women, twerking and hip-shaking alongside them.
Many fans did not cheer. Reactions ranged from pronouncing the addition of the male cheerleaders “disgusting and nauseating” to lamenting the “sissification of the NFL” and threatening boycotts — even though there have been male cheerleaders (including several past US presidents) on the sports sidelines throughout the 20th century and they’ve been cheering the NFL since 2018.
The upset from swaths of the NFL-watching public is perhaps not surprising, even if the homophobic vitriol is disappointing. After all, few American cultural institutions embrace traditional gender roles more fervently than the NFL, whose broadcasts usually rank among the most-watched TV in America. Those traditions maintain that there is a “right way” to be a boy or girl, man or woman. A man gyrating “like a woman,” thus, is not right.
What surprised me about the uproar, though, was that it didn’t just come from those we might call gender traditionalists — conservative types who insist that sex is binary and gender roles are biologically determined. It also came from what I’ve come to think of as the “gender resistance” movement — which I both report on and to some extent have joined. Many of us were vocal in supporting Shiek and Conn, but others decried the situation as men taking women’s jobs; others as men becoming caricatures of women.
The gender resistance tends to believe in a feminist concept of gender, in which stereotypes and norms based on sex are used to limit or oppress people. This has ranged from, at one time, preventing women from voting to, currently, restricting abortion, unequally funding girls’ sports, or bullying boys for taking ballet.
But the resistance also believes that the sex binary is real, even as it tends to believe that gender roles are more culturally constructed than biologically determined and that there are many ways to be male and female. Two sexes, they often say, but infinite personalities. Or, as my friend the artist Nina Paley says: “Sex is real. People are weird.”
But the movement differs with progressives on several points. They “resist” gender identity — while progressives elevate the concept. The resistance doesn’t believe that people are “born in the wrong body” and need “gender-affirming care” to change the body to match the mind. The resistance rejects that a boy might have a “girl brain” because he likes mermaids and pink. Or that a girl is a boy on the inside because she gravitates toward the clothes in the boys’ section or wants short hair. As one advocacy group asked kids: “Where on a spectrum might your gender identity be?” with choices ranging from Barbie on one end to GI Joe on the other.
The gender resistance doesn’t want to identify with stereotypes; we want to dismantle them.
Among those resisting are Democrats, feminists, lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and even old-school transsexuals — who may be very happily transitioned but don’t subscribe to the idea that they were born with the brain of one sex and the body of another.
But perhaps fewer people believe in rejecting the stereotypes than I thought. For among the objectors to the Vikings’ new cheerleading lineup were members of the gender resistance, who described the male cheerleaders as trying to “shove queer down our throats” or complaining that men were taking women’s jobs or dancing “like women.”
Aren’t these the same people who insisted gender roles are a construction? That our sex should not determine how we can dance, or dress, or wear our hair?
Now, with fewer men enrolling in college and the fact that we essentially have a “feminized” economy — think customer service, education, and care work, more than, say, manufacturing — catapulting working-class men into crisis, we’re back to insisting that cheerleading is women’s work?
Some of their reasoning I understand. They have seen the fallout from institutionalizing gender identity in policy and law, which led to males competing against females in sports, to housing men in women’s prisons, and even to banning an elderly woman from the YMCA for objecting to a male-bodied person who identifies as a woman changing in the women’s locker room. They say that they’ve been forced to concede so much that they’re just plum out of tolerance. The gender identity was so in your face that now people who might have been accepting just don’t want to see gender nonconformity anymore.
And that’s the tragedy. The cheerleading debacle was the most visible moment possible to test the central thesis: that one can support gender diversity while rejecting the modern framing, and medicating, of gender identity.
But faced with a male cheerleader dancing “like a woman,” the movement reverted to the same ideas as conservatives: that cheerleading is for women and that there’s a right way to be a man. After all this time, after all this fighting, we are still having trouble embracing gender nonconformity, especially for men.
We’ve had several eras of uplifting tomboys in this society and rooting for women who break barriers in jobs or activities traditionally limited to men. That these cheerleading men feel comfortable wearing makeup or sashaying with pompoms without feeling the need to medically transition — that is what the gender resistance supposedly fought for.
We might have celebrated the addition of Shiek and Conn to the Vikings’ lineup as an example of the kind of world in which boys and girls really can look and act in all kinds of ways. Unfortunately, it turned out to be far harder to practice what we preach. We didn’t cheer. Instead, we fumbled.