Looks like an unintended consequence of what I can only describe as alphabet bloat. It was gotten to the point where we have to name a gazillion labels for fear of offending or leaving anyone out. It's gotten to the point where some of us just don't care anymore. After lesbian and gay my ears pretty much tune out the rest.

For the most part gay is an all purpose gender non-specific word. Actually it is pretty everything non-specific. And lest I be misunderstood, I don't care who comes to the gay party. There is plenty of room in here. A while ago there was a nightclub in my town with the tag line, "you'll know if you belong." That describes gay. If you think you're gay or might be, you probably are. Some use queer that way. For me, queer still has too much painful baggage. I'd happily get over it and be queer, if we could only get rid of all the other labels that do nothing but divide us.

As a sportswoman, I share everybody's concern, about the definition of "gay" and how the Series applied it in these circumstances.

According to a blog item I read in Edge from someone who was at the hearing, the players being questioned had to toe the line and answer personally to a definition of "homosexual" that you have to be "PREDOMINANTLY having a sexual attraction for somoene of the same sex." If this is true, then the policy eliminates bisexuals, which strikes me as unfair, discriminatory and contrary to the spirit of inclusion that we're trying to promote in the "GLBT community." I'll betcha there were some bisexuals on other teams who were glad that they didn't get put in the investigatory hot seat.

It also eliminates transgender people, and people who identify other than "GLBT."

And it's discomfiting to see this tactic used to single out a team that had been winning. The Series rules may say that every player but two on every team has to be "gay," but I wonder if this specific definition of "homosexual" was applied uniformly to all the other teams in the Series, since it calls itself a "Gay Series" and many people understand "gay" to be a blanket term that applies to LBT as well.

From what I've read, these same players had played in the Series before and nobody said boo. It was not a situation where straight players were brought in at the last minute to stack a team.

I have a feeling that the fallout from this incident will compel the "Gay World Series" to rethink their positioning and their rules. No need to be excruciatingly PC...just find a way to be fair to all the players.

Some things never seem to change. Back in the mid 1990's I remember a spirited debate within the Indianapolis Men's Chorus, which for reasons after an older debat had decided not to style itself the my local gay "Indianapolis Gay Men's Chorus", like most other members of the gay/lesbian coral movement. The later debate dealt with whether or not staight men should be allowed to join us in song. Putting aside the winks and nods over why any "really" straight male would actually WANT to be in a "gay chorus" unless......well you know the rest......there was talk about "allowing" a certain number of straight men in so long as we didn't exceed some percentage (never hammered out), or they couldn't hold office, or some other kind of justification for just not declaring them sympatico human beings who had reasonably high quality vocal chords.

Then there was the question of a couple of pre-operative transgender singers who said they. felt more at home with us than with our sister Indianapolis Women's Chorus. To our credit we managed to be much, much closer to unanimous acceptance than in dealing with what most of us thought was a clean "straight vs. gay" line of demarcation. I suspect that today's enlightened discussions of sexual fluidity, bisexuality, and the like would have produced additional element of discord then,.....and I don't mean the musical variety.

My active choral singing days ended a number of years ago, and so I don't have my pulse on how those issue are playing out today. But certainly one can validly pose questions of how sexual orientation and gender identity are relevant to musical talent, in much the same way as such relevance applies to the ability to hit one out of the ballpark, steal second base, or pitch a no-hitter.

Now when it comes to synchronized swimming, well, that's a different story entirely (:

This reminds me a lot of the gender testing that goes on in the Olympics (or at least was proposed to happen, I don't know if it did in the end). I can understand the concerns with maintaining an identity based organization for a group that's been historically oppressed. It's where the margins come in that can often be the problem.

I think that Patricia's comment makes a lot of sense, and keeps with the spirit of the rules. Maybe calling it the "Gay League" is enough and people will respect it and not try to overrun the league.

I'm sure a lot of the players left other teams because of homophobia and want that safe space and camaraderie, and that's important too. Something tells me that calling it the Gay League and making it fancy enough will suffice - even if a heterosexual wants to join up, they'd have to be pretty gay to do it.

I don't know. I think it's pretty simple actually. Are you straight? No? Then climb on board. "Do you have sex with members of the same sex?" seems pretty "straightforward" to me. (I couldn't resist the joke there!)

Since it's a queer team, it doesn't seem unreasonable that the players should be, well, queer.

As for transgender folk, I don't think any of them were asked their orientation. I'm assuming the league realized that trans automatically falls under "queer" irregardless of sexual orientation - a point we've talked about often here on the blog.

Bil Browning said: Since it's a queer team, it doesn't seem unreasonable that the players should be, well, queer."

Um what happened to the "big tent" philosophy we all must pledge to sign before being granted honorary membership in the LGBT community?

The idea that a team cannot have straighties as allies on a gay team seems wholly hypocritical from the philosophies espoused here 90% of the time.

From my personal perspective, an all gay team is fine, as I believe in the right to free associations.

However the question remains, are only minority "people groups" allowed to be exclusionary or would the others advocating an all "gay" team also be kosher with a all pancake-battered-white-breeder team as well?

Ah the smell of hypocrisy in the morning.

Why do we have to have all these idiotic labels? If you like a person then that should be all that matters, not whether or not they are a male or female. It really doesn't matter. Who makes up all these labels anyway? I'm female and if I like this person one day and another person another day that just means I'm fickle. I just can't make up my mind or maybe I like the variety of the people on this earth. As far as a baseball team goes, just pick a team and have fun.