I have a cute little piece over at Teen Vogue about some Gaylors who raised money to stick it to Matty Healy. Check it out!

“It was an opportunity to harness the Gaylor community's frustration [with Healy] into something positive,” Marki tells Teen Vogue. “I think both queer culture and internet culture love a bit of snark, and if you aim spite in the right direction you can make it productive instead of destructive—and get a giggle out of it along the way.”

The Phoenix Mercury hired a new head coach, after a few seasons of turmoil. Mercury ownership is really trying to stress their investment in the franchise, and are building the team a new dedicated practice facility. The hiring of Nate Tibbets as Head Coach is meant to be another sign of this investment. However, this hiring raises some really troubling questions.

Tibbets has spent several seasons as an assistant coach in the NBA but has no women's basketball coaching experience. With his hire, he becomes the highest paid coach in WNBA history—a position that had previously been held by Becky Hammon when she was hired to coach the Las Vegas Aces two seasons ago. Hammon played 16 seasons in the WNBA and spent seven seasons as an assistant coach of the NBA's San Antonio Spurs.

In recent years, the W has seen an influx of former players being given head coaching roles, including Teresa Weatherspoon being announced as the new Head Coach of the Chicago Sky for the 2024 season. At the end of the 2023 season, nine of the 12 coaches in the league were women, and three of them were Black.

As former Notre Dame WBB coach Muffet McGraw said on X/Twitter: “Breaking news: white man hires white man to coach WNBA team AND makes him the highest paid coach in the league. Gender bias is real,” she wrote.

Not only that, Tibbetts is set to make over four times as much money as the highest paid player in the W, which again, should be noted, is a woman. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad coaches are getting paid,” Minnesota Lynx forward Napheesa Collier wrote on social media. “But it’s kinda crazy they’re making 4 times more than the highest-paid players.”

To add insult to injury, the Mercury announced this hire by adding that Tibbetts is a "Girl Dad," as if that somehow qualifies him to coach women's basketball—a game that has real, fundamental differences from the way men play it.

As I've written before, the idea that men suddenly care about women's sports or women's rights once they have daughters is, frankly, a crock of shit. It should not take having daughters of your own to see the value in women or to see that they deserve respect that they are too often denied. Idk, imagine if "Boy Mom" were used as a qualifier for a head coaching position in the NBA.

The fact that Black women are still fighting for the same chances in a league where the majority of the workforce is made up of Black women is incredibly telling. As is the fact that Tibbetts is coming in as Head Coach after a season where Phoenix had Nikki Blue—a Black woman—in the interim position cleaning up the mess that Vanessa Nygaard left in her wake. The optics, they are bad!

How about some more bad optics? Crediting [checks notes] Tom Brady as somehow instrumental in securing the Las Vegas Aces second championship in as many years.

But sure, sure, let's definitely credit the man who slid in at the last minute, threw some money at objectively the best team in the league, and now gets to call himself an owner of a championship team.

And finally, we wouldn't be complete without some lesbian drama for your week.

The Krashlyn divorce, which I wrote about last week, is getting uglier. The entire internet, the entire USWNT, the entire CAN WNT, the entire NWSL is in the comments of Ali Krieger's most recent post making it very clear whose side they are on. Krieger's brother Kyle seems to confirm that the newly announced relationship between Ashlyn Harris and actress Sophia Bush was, in fact, an affair, as does Krieger's Instagram caption about entering her "Lemonade" era.

I do not know if Bush has ever dated women before, though her friend circle is full of lesbians and has been for a long time (including Krashlyn, yikes). What I do know is that she recently separated from her husband and has never publicly spoken about having relationships with women in the past. I also know that Harris is exactly the kind of fuckboi masc that I can see someone new to sapphic dating falling for before realizing she is a different kind of player from the men but a player nonetheless.

I do not envy the lesbian friend group that has been shaken to its core by this mess. Justice for Ali Krieger. And I point you, again, to the piece I once wrote comparing the world of women's sports to Alice's chart from The L Word.

Anyway, I can't stop thinking about the fact that this white woman (who took "mother" out of her bio when the divorce was announced) has two Black children.