Reflections on male cheerleaders
Why people pretend not to know what it means to dance like a girl
I’ve been back-and-forthing for a few days on what I want to say about the latest semi-concocted, semi-genuine X-storm, this time about male cheerleaders. In one way I hate the headspace these things take – I just want to say “who cares?” – but that is a big part of why we have got where we are: it’s so easy to write off the latest thing as trivial, and only ages later do you realise that it was more meaningful than you understood in the moment, or that it was part of a larger movement and when you wrote it off those who said so as conspiracist you were wrong.
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So, to recap. The Minnesota Vikings American football team shared a video of its cheerleaders, most of them the usual perky, fit, athletic young women, but now with the addition of two men, Blaize Shiek and Louie Conn.
I’m sure that there’s a whole discourse among NFL fans that I’m not alert to. But the first I saw of it was Billboard Chris, a Canadian man who for some years now has travelled the world wearing sandwich boards with slogans such as “no child can consent to puberty blockers”, and engaged in conversations with all and sundry, many of them filmed and put on social media. Chris is a social conservative who blames most or all of transgenderism on “feminists”. For him, the problem with these young men is that they are dancing “like girls” and that’s not OK.
Yes, he’s obviously a man. A man filling the role of and dancing like a female cheerleader, and a man I don’t want to see on my TV during a football game.
If you all think this is new from me you haven’t been paying much attention.— Billboard Chris 🌎 (@BillboardChris) August 15, 2025
This is “dancing like a girl.” pic.twitter.com/5WgWnjs8x7
— Billboard Chris 🌎 (@BillboardChris) August 14, 2025
Contrast this with JK Rowling’s famous position statement of gender-critical feminism:
Dress however you please.
Call yourself whatever you like.
Sleep with any consenting adult who’ll have you.
Live your best life in peace and security.
But force women out of their jobs for stating that sex is real? #IStandWithMaya #ThisIsNotADrill— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) December 19, 2019
It doesn’t mention dancing, but the spirit is obvious: when it comes to matters related to male and female, be yourself and do as you please as long as you’re not imposing on or hurting others.
By one analysis, Billboard Chris is a “gender conservative”– he thinks that only women (female people) should be permitted to do “feminine” things, in this case to bounce and wiggle and shake pompoms. Transactivists are “gender essentialists” – they think that if you bounce and wiggle and shake pompoms then whatever you were “assigned at birth”, you’re a girl. The path of wisdom, therefore, is to eschew “gender” entirely and accept that both female and male people should be permitted to move like this without it meaning anything about them, about the two sexes or about anything else.
Here’s one post expressing this viewpoint.
The explanation is that 'gender critical' was a term that developed out of the feminist critique of trans ideology.
That critique has two fundamental dimensions:
1. The critique of the essentialisation of gender norms as innate gender identity, and
2. The critique of sex… https://t.co/4q4RDmJCqg— Dr. Jane Clare Jones (@janeclarejones) August 16, 2025
Here’s another:
Time for the split to be explicit, announced and permanent. Those who say boys can’t do ‘girl things’ and girls can’t do ‘boy things’, move off to one side and keep moving, further, further - off you pop!
I have had an elegant sufficiency of this bullshit. You can’t change sex.… https://t.co/8Wq7qgZZ9G— Sarah Phillimore (@SVPhillimore) August 15, 2025
Some women – and honestly, this is where I instinctively started off – say they simply don’t care:
I well and truly don’t care https://t.co/q9aNAnlvG1
— Amy Eileen Hamm (@preta_6) August 17, 2025
Others pointed out how the opposition of people like Billboard Chris shows how deeply uncomfortable many people still are with gender non-conformity.
To answer my own question: the uproar over feminine male cheerleaders reveals how deeply uncomfortable Americans are with gender nonconformity, and particularly male femininity. The gender identity movement did not move us closer to accepting those who defy gender roles. https://t.co/5rRVRjwTbo
— Lisa Selin Davis (@LisaSelinDavis) August 13, 2025
Some people emerge organically gender nonconforming, even if *some* of the gendered behaviors are culturally constructed, even if what we call boys' or girls' clothes or haircuts change with time and place. Let's make room for them.
I salute you, fellas, pompoms and all!— Lisa Selin Davis (@LisaSelinDavis) August 13, 2025
Yet others mentioned their relief that these two young men don’t think they’re women. It’s mostly gay teens and men who are drawn to typically feminine displays like this, and disapproving of it is often motivated by homophobia – feminine (or “cissy”) boys are still looked down on a lot by men, both gay and straight. By making it less stigmatised, perhaps we can save some of those gay boys and men from transitioning.
I don't actually see a problem with male cheerleaders. They'll never make up a sizable proportion of any squad (still 99% women for the "male gaze"), and maybe giving effeminate men an outlet like this would prevent some from feeling the need to transition to be accepted. https://t.co/IDra2wDZsm
— Colin Wright (@SwipeWright) August 14, 2025
I don’t disagree with what Colin or Lisa say here, and it’s certainly true that many people are deeply uncomfortable with gender non-conformity, especially in men, and that is linked to homophobia. But the whole thing has been nagging at me for days, and I’ve concluded it’s because there’s more here than apparent at first glance.
The first point is that we don’t get to just perform in front of others according to what suits us, independent of the wishes and tastes of those watching. The NFL audience is mostly heterosexual people, mostly men and some women. I asked my focus group of one (my husband, despite being English, has loved American football since being introduced to it as an undergraduate decades ago by an American roommate), and he said the cheerleaders are simply irrelevant.
That wasn’t much help! So I’ll simply have to speculate that the people watching them specifically like watching attractive, fit women performing athletic routines in traditionally feminine ways – both the heterosexual men for whom those women are sexually attractive, and the heterosexual women who enjoy identifying with and observing with attractive members of their own sex – as heterosexual women are prone to do. Even if a significant share of all young gay men like performing like this, the market for watching them is minuscule, and audiences have the right to their own tastes.
So why put these young men in front of an audience that is likely to find them intrusive? I don’t think you have to be bigoted to object. As I was mulling over this article, it suddenly occurred to me how irritating I would find it if I went to a performance of Swan Lake – my favourite classical ballet – and there were a couple of male swans in the corps. It’s just not the right place for them, and I’d find it distracting and irritating.
I specifically picked the example of Swan Lake because there is a very famous, and very brilliant, version by choreographer Matthew Bourne in which all the swans are men. I love it. It’s completely different to popping a couple of men into a performance that was designed around female bodies and that is, if I can use the word non-ironically, expressly heternormative. Bourne entirely reworked the choreography to take advantage of men’s different physique, and the different meaning of the prince falling for a male swan and then being seduced by a dangerously dark imposter who is also ma
As well as being original and beautiful, it’s a profound meditation on sex and sexuality differences. It’s art, and art is all about exploration, reinterpretation, seeing things afresh. It’s of course fine not to want to watch Bourne’s Swan Lake, or to watch it and not like it. I’m just saying it’s anything but a superficial nod to “diversity”, done to be edgy or as part of an agenda to deny the significance of the two sexes. Bourne’s choreography is something completely different: it’s an exploration of that significance.
The second is what seems to me to be a studied obtuseness in responding to Billboard Chris by denying there is any such thing as “dancing like girls”. I just don’t believe people who say they can’t see what Chris means here – these two young men are absolutely not dancing in a way that is typical of men. It’s not precisely typical of women, either – because they’re not women – but it absolutely is closer to the way the typical woman moves than the way the typical man moves.
What it is, to be precise, is typical of gay men. Unlike Billboard Chris, I have no problem with gay men presenting themselves differently, on average, from straight men. It’s not doing anyone any harm, but more fundamentally, I accept the research that suggests most if not all same-sex orientation is innate, and very often first manifests in early gender non-conformity. Many gay men stand, move and talk differently to the average straight man in extremely obvious and easily recognisable ways, and did so as small boys long before they had any idea they were gay. I’d bet a large sum of money that both these young men are gay. And I highly doubt I’d find anyone willing to be on the other side of that bet. Everyone knows this, even if they are pretending not to know what is being expressed by saying that these young men dance “like girls”.
I think people who deny this are motivated by a fear that if you acknowledge group differences, you are opening the door for bigotry. They are switching off their pattern-recognition abilities, motivated by an unwillingness to admit that there is anything distinctive about the sexes beyond the bare facts of reproductive biology and related anatomical differences. They are afraid that if you admit that gay men move different from straight men – or more fundamentally, that women in general move differently from men in general – you are giving comfort to homophobes and sexists. I think the opposite: that in the long run it is strategically wise as well as inherently more ethical to acknowledge the facts.
I can’t think of any specifical reason this refusal to recognise patterns matters for cheerleading – but I never think it’s a good idea to switch off observational or cognitive abilities for ideological reasons. In particular, the same deliberate boneheadedness leads people to say that everyone can wear whatever they want, and it means nothing – that clothes are just clothes, and that a man in so-called “women’s clothes” is just a man who likes skirts (and halter tops and bras and fishnets). To quote Eddie Izzard before he started pretending to be a woman and calling himself Suzy, she/her: “They’re not women’s clothes. They’re my clothes. I bought them.”
Only it turned out that wasn’t quite true, didn’t it? It wasn’t just a meaningless preference, like mine for florals or my husband’s for Mountain Warehouse walking boots. Izzard’s women’s clothes meant something all along, and now that longstanding preference has turned into what someone less naive could have predicted: he’s saying he is a woman. Those of us who fell for the “not women’s clothes”, as I once did, were missing what was going on because we had switched off our psychological pattern recognition.
Generalising beyond Izzard, then: a pretty consistent reason men wear women’s clothes is that it turns them on. They’re autogynephiles – men who find the idea of themselves as a woman profoundly sexually exciting. That’s different from what inspires these male cheerleaders – the gender non-conformity that is typically found in gay men. And autogynephilia is societally disruptive and harmful to women’s rights in a way that gay men being gay are not.
A man dancing “like a girl” while not pretending he’s actually a girl isn’t inherently an issue for anyone else; a man forcing his way into all-female spaces where women are vulnerable on the basis that he really is a woman certainly is a problem for the rest of us. The parallel I’m drawing is between the two instances of strategic naivety: that they’re “not women’s clothes” and it’s not “dancing like a girl”. Both are based on pretending that you can’t see what you absolutely can see, and motivated by a determination to deny sex differences that are less obvious and straightforward than different genitals, or differences in size and strength.
I doubt the Minnesota Vikings will experience much in the way of market pushback, as Bud Lite did over Dylan Mulvaney and Bud Lite – changing beer brand is a lot easier than deciding to support a different team, and the performance of the cheerleading squad is very far down the reasons someone picks a team to support. I think they’re just trying to be edgy, and ultimately that’s their lookout. I just don’t want us to be naive about it.
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In other news, I was on a BBC Three Counties phone-in on the subject of whether trans people should be banned from single-sex spaces. Obviously a stupid question – which I told the researcher who phoned to ask if I would come on – but she/her didn’t care. It was painful. There is no other group the BBC – which has a statutory duty of impartiality – would treat with such blatant contem