In considering how sports can be a space of comfort as opposed to surveillance, I would start with the question: What is the inherent point of sport?

Sports as they exist are heavily commoditized. You have the advertisement space, the marketing space, the "traditions" and stuff.

With traditions, you have the cultural cachet of: "You play football because you're a boy.”

Any other form of football, has to be specially marketed as ‘ladies football’ or ‘lingerie football.’

No disrespect to those women. I've seen Lingerie Football and they're crazy. No disrespect.

But look at the way that the WNBA is talked about – women who play basketball can go all around the world and make money as basketball players, but in America, they're a punch line.

As far as wrestling or anything being a space for gender affirmations, we need to address the Super Culture that is homophobic and transphobic.

There's very strict gender roles for, "If you do this, you are this. You can't do this and be this."

Michael Sam, the first publicly gay player to be drafted in the NFL, was a Southeastern Conference Defensive Player of the Year and they started talking about how he shouldn't even have been drafted, and he got cut almost immediately. Was that because he was a bad football player or because he was bringing "unwanted attention" for being gay?

Darren Young is an openly gay wrestler in WWE. He didn't really make much noise, he just won the Tag Team title and then got fired. Now he's in New Japan.

It’s all a very old school way of thinking – these archaic ideas for gender roles, which are very hard to break, with a performance that is the reality for a lot of people.

If you are not performing the role that you’re assigned to an adequate level, then you will be either replaced or forced to conform. If you somehow manage to not be replaced or forced to conform, you will still just be maligned.

[As told to @Ragi Gupta — continued tomorrow]