@detroitpwhl - Tumblr Blog

Okay I’m coming back - check out puckhate.com in the future for ways to donate and support various organizations in Detroit this upcoming season! The Ruth Ellis Center is a great option for any and all donations you should make in the 2026-2027. email the PWHL to demand they release their gender inclusion policy!!!!

#literally I’m gonna block if you’re gonna be mean #not the fans fault!!!! go yell at the league! do something with this!#I love this sport too much #and I just want a place to talk about this team!#not tagging this for now since a lot of eyes are on the tags with the draft

triquortri

most organized professional sports league.

werewolfbneimitzvah

since I've seen people posting about missing women's hockey, i want to remind everyone of the good news that the SDHL season starts in only 1 month, on September 9th! and if you can't watch it live (as many of us with jobs/school/etc who live in the north america time zones can't), some of us do delayed liveblogs that start at specific times so that people can watch and liveblog together if they want.

the SDHL is a top league with a lot of players who have played and will play in the PWHL, so you can see some old PWHL faves, see some future PWHL faves (did you like watching Swiss goalie Andrea Brändli in the olympics? did you miss Akane Shiga when she was gone? did you not know initially why the Sirens picked Elisa Holopainen that high in the draft? are you wondering about the new hot masc Viivi Vainikka and the 2026 championship she won? they were all in the SDHL last season!), and find some women to fall in love with who might never even want to go to the p-dub!

don't despair! the women will play hockey sooner than you think!

degrommunism

They thing about women’s sports is that I think most of us who watch them want a future of all gender sports leagues but unless you have a way to make misogyny go away in the next week and cis men to actually, meaningfully allow other genders to compete with them and share resources without harassment, women’s leagues going away would just mean women do not play sports anymore (or, play it in secret unsanctioned events like it used to be.) And the biggest thing you can do is 1) fight against the idea that these spaces should only be for certain kinds of women (cis women, white women, upper class women, etc) and refocus / realign these spaces to be for anyone experiencing gender marginalization who is denied access to traditional sporting spaces 2) invest enough resources into these athletes until they’re just too good to deny the most predominant spaces in sports that men occupy

degrommunism

The thing that annoys me is way too many people, including other people on the left, is acting as if women’s sports came about because some women went up to their college admin like “we want to play basketball but we’re too scared to play with the boys :(“ instead of it mainly being clubs and teams of women who suffered nonstop harassment playing on boys clubs and were refused playin time or resources or were literally barred from competing and had to do it in secret / after hours / etc and were mainly asking for a place to just safely play and work on their craft and saying if you won’t let us in, we’ll create our own. There are obviously some women athletes right now pushing bullshit narratives and getting in on the grift of “well we need this because we’re weaker we know we’re not as good as the boys~” but there’s a lot more that understand these places exist because begging cis men for scraps in their spaces wasn’t working so they created their own

minnesotafightcaps

hi okay sorry I'm actually reblogging a second time because I have more thoughts. I feel like a lot of (especially new) women's sports fans rn are going in the "sports should all be gender integrated" because that /feels/ more liberatory, but I think underlying that is (like you're saying) a misunderstanding of history and structure, and it ends up accomplishing the opposite of what I think most of these folks actually want.

To put it simply: I think a lot of fans think of the existence of women's leagues as being like segregation, when really it's a lot more like affirmative action.

In slightly more detail: a lot of people seem to think that men wanted to keep women out of existing sports leagues/orgs, so they created separate leagues to contain women and keep them separate from men. That didn't happen! Keeping women out of men's sports doesn't require providing any alternatives, and men certainly didn't start women's leagues. Women fought for and built their own sports institutions, and the purpose those institutions serve is to create a space where misogyny--not biology, misogyny--doesn't create inequity between athletes. (Though there's still PLENTY of inequity around race, class, nationality, transness, etc.) That's the affirmative action part: a women's league is an organization where it's guaranteed that every roster spot is protected for people experiencing gender-based discrimination. If you've ever interviewed for a job you're qualified for and then found out afterward that they hired some unqualified dude who's going to get that money instead? Women's sports leagues are built to make that material impact of misogyny impossible.

The second layer of this that I really wish more people understood is that when you see "women's" sports leagues not as single-gender segregation but instead as affirmative action meant to combat gender-based discrimination, you also get *the strongest possible argument for including trans people--especially trans women--in women's sports.* That's something I think (I hope!) we are all fighting for, and I think a lot people saying "we should just integrate sports!" are really doing that out of an anxiety or uncertainty about how to reconcile their enjoyment of "women's" sports with their desire to include trans people. But if you frame what we currently call "women's" sports as "sports spaces set aside for people experiencing gender discrimination" then nobody who's even a little bit worth talking to can tell you that trans people (again, especially women) don't 100% belong there.

degrommunism

100%, also like not a 1:1 on any sense as the social context and systems of oppression were very different but in a philosophical sense / understanding how these sporting spaces can be born as a response to oppression without endorsing said oppression, another historical example would be the existence of the Negro Leagues in baseball. They existed because of the color line in baseball, Jim Crow laws, and segregation meant they could not participate in the existent major leagues, but the Negro Leagues themselves were not created by white people or pro-segregation, they were spaces in which Black people could continue their athletic careers / crafts with less harassment, a better chance at controlling the resources within the playing field even if there were less resources than their white counterparts, and the ability to keep making money from the sport. It also meant that once integration did happen, there were players ready to compete right away in terms of skill level because the leagues got better with time and players got better. It was not perfect and they were still given less pay, resources, and respect than white teams and faced intense harassment, but it was an improvement from either playing on the majority white teams in the indie leagues where they got treated horribly or not playing at all, and Black baseball players were able to form their own communities and make their own history in that time