Who is brittney griner

These monumental steps forward coincide with this interview from Griner, whose comments are simple yet courageous. Griner, arguably the most dominant player in women's college basketball history, is a role model to young girls all over the country.

Everything she does is magnified and seen by millions. Griner's message is refreshing, and her comments stand to provide men and women around the world—and across the sports world—with the courage to be themselves. Enjoy our content? To some, her disclosure was no big deal — confirmation of what they had expected. To those denied the gift of acceptance from their family, friends, community or employer, however, it was huge.

It takes courage to proactively come out as gay in a social climate rife with homophobia, uncertainty and the potential for personal or professional backlash. On Sept. Forgot Password? Kevin Durant. PTS REB 5. AST 3. Jayson Tatum. REB 3. Damian Lillard. REB 2. Featured Articles. Retired General Martin E.

A'ja Wilson. REB 7. FG PCT. Sue Bird. PTS 5. AST 5. Tina Charles. PTS 4. Jewell Loyd Is Eyeing the Olympics. Allisha Gray. REB 4. Stefanie Dolson. Wearing her purple-and-orange Mercury uniform, with matching star tattoos visible on each shoulder, Griner speaks into the camera: "I got teased: the big hands, little bit deep voice, the big feet—just, you know, I got teased.

The worst times were in seventh grade, Griner says. Confiding in neither friends nor family—she grew up outside of Houston, the youngest of four children of a police officer and a homemaker—she'd retreat to her room to cry, she recalls, "Just thinking, like, Why am I even here?

Why am I even alive? Griner came out to her parents, and while her mother greeted the news with mellow aplomb—she'd always love her girl, she said—her father, Ray, declared that he wasn't "raising any lesbian.

So contentious was her household that Brittney moved out during her senior year to live with an assistant coach for her high school team. Fortunately, her father has since come around, and the two now stay in regular contact. These days, Griner is open and easy about her lesbianism, in tune with her generation's relative agnosticism about sexual preference. The evening prior, during dinner of, guess what, chicken fingers and fries, Griner was scrolling through texts when she mumbled, like any harried spouse, "My girlfriend's a lotta work, like my puppy.

That the WNBA isn't trying to muzzle Griner—and in fact is putting her front and center in its marketing campaign, to "tell her story," as league president Laurel Richie puts it—also fits into this era of dramatic progress for gay rights.

The league has been on a quest to increase its modest attendance and the size of its TV audience for the entire 17 years of its existence. From the beginning, a substantial chunk of its fans have been gay women, but despite the stereotype of WNBA games as dens of licentiousness where everyone's waving her freak flag, only a handful of players are out.

When I reported a story about the league 10 years ago, its new, much ballyhooed TV ad campaign basically ignored gay players, not to mention the game of basketball.

Here was star and sometime model Lisa Leslie in a gold-beaded gown, doing her runway walk next to a swank hotel pool; there, Sue Bird gazing sultrily into the camera, before lounging in a hammock, cradling a basketball; or Ticha Penicheiro, a leading point guard, wearing a black leather vest and stroking her yellow sports car.

Words and phrases scrolled over the images— fearless, I am powerful, warrior, daughter, journey, glamorous, I am confident, strength, revolution. The result was a mash-up: girl power meets Playboy. One of the campaign's creators told me at the time that the ads were designed to take into account marketing research in which female fans said they were drawn to the league more for the opportunities it afforded women than for the actual on-court action; another consideration was the fact that the ESPN audience was predominately male.

Flash forward a decade, and WNBA spots—for TV and the Web—are a fast-paced pastiche of game highlights, the voice-over done in a bellicosely dramatic, WWF tone: " of the world's best ready to go at it. It's 40 minutes of fire every…single…game.

Richie says the league's promotion has been influenced by current data indicating that the competition itself is the top draw for fans, as well as by a small but growing body of academic research suggesting that sex does not sell, at least insofar as athletes are used as endorsers to try to sell tickets to sports events as opposed to hawk products from watches to razors.

What has been found to work, says University of Massachusetts Amherst sport management professor Janet Fink, is highlighting a player's "expertise. Back in the corporate offices of the WNBA, league research also shows that fans "share a goal of living in a world where gender equality exists in all its forms," as Richie puts it. The difference between showcasing that and 's "opportunities for women" is subtle, but the new approach can be read as specifically embracing lesbians, she acknowledges.

When I read the avalanche of "she's a dude" abuse directed at Griner on social media, I wasn't surprised. A former basketball player myself, I recognized it as the usual ranting of men threatened by women's athletic excellence, guys who suffer from something I like to call masculine-anxiety disorder, or MAD for short. ESPN tracking data showed the ads tanked. What surprised me, what with my familiarity with jocky women, was, off court, as I trailed Griner from appointment to appointment, how much she felt like a guy to me.

Not because of the style of her clothes and the lack of makeup, and not because I thought she was "really" a man, whatever that means: Is it genitals, is it learned behaviors, it is hormones in utero and beyond?

It's all three, biologists and psychologists who study gender formation say. But some combination of sensory stimuli screamed boy to me. So much so that I did a cognitive double take each time I heard someone refer to her as she : Yes, yes, Brittney is a girl, I'd think. She is a girl.