Isn’t it just assumed that most female athletes in team sports are gay?
I’d assume it. Never heard of this woman before but from the looks of her I’d say this story is about as shocking as learning that a Professional Bull Rider is straight.
I have no idea where I heard this, but PGA stands for:
“Professional Gay Association”.
Are there many in the PGA gay?
I take it you don't have any daughters who play competitive sports:).
What little I know about women's sports is based on watching my daugher and her friends grow up playing soccer and basketball. They're still too young (now entering high school) to be good indicators, but through the middle school/early high school years, I don't see any gay vector at work in women's athletics. They are pretty normal girls, apart from moderately superior athletic skills. (This is a reasonably competitive travel soccer team; good athletes, but several rungs below elite status.) Nicest group of girls you would ever want to meet as well, but that's another story. As far as gayness is concerned, I don't see any early indicators -- though again, they're still young. For a start, I assume a normal distribution -- so with 18 girls on a roster, the probability is that every third or fourth team will have a girl who eventually turns out to prefer the ladies.
That's a rather far cry from assuming that most female athletes in team sports are gay.
So ... if women athletes at elite levels are disproportionately gay, a selection process must start to operate somewhere along the line. The mechanism is not hard to imagine. Assuming that hormonal differences are a key factor in homosexuality, masculinized girls would tend to develop an edge in body mass, strength, speed, aggressiveness, competitiveness, etc., all of which would translate into athletic advantage. But when and where does this become significant?
I have no idea what percentage of elite women athletes are thought to be gay. This is the kind of thing where a few examples probably get blown all out of proportion, but for the sake of argument, let's say that at the national/Olympic team or professional level, the percentage is -- what?: 10%; 15%; 25%; pick your number -- as compared to 2-3% in the general population.
So again, how do you get from a fairly random distribution at the front end to a skewed distribution at elite levels? It is of course true that small edges in performance can have big impacts. There are plenty of white sprinters in this country in high schook, and a few in college, but by the time you reach the U.S. national or Olympic team level, they're all black. The same is true in every other country around the world which has acquired a significant black population; if the African diaspora ever reaches China, the Chinese sprinters will be black as well. The same kind of thing may operate with regard to female athletes and homosexuality (or to take another sensitive example, Ashkenazi Jews and elite intellectual achievement); the higher in the competitive hierarchy you climb, the more the selection is skewed.
That said, I certainly wouldn't make any careless assumptions about female athletes being gay. Most aren't, and until you get to really elite levels, the percentage probably remains close to the baseline.