On June 14, the players and coaching staff of Angel City Football Club, the women’s professional soccer team of Los Angeles, walked out of their locker room and onto the brilliant green pitch wearing black warmup shirts that read “Immigrant City FC” on the front and “Los Angeles is for everyone / Los Ángeles es para todos” on the back.
Ten thousand of those same shirts were draped over the stadium seat railings for their loyal fans, who slipped them on to create a sea of support—a unified protest that pushed back against Trump-issued ICE raids in their LA communities.
Just last week, during one of the most anticipated WNBA All-Star games in history—and on the heels of Thursday’s collective bargaining agreement negotiations—WNBA players warmed up for their game in identical black T-shirts that read, “Pay Us What You Owe Us.” The sold-out crowd of over 16,000 fans at Indianapolis’ Gainbridge Fieldhouse chanted, “Pay them!”
Women’s sports, especially these sorts of sports moments, don’t just entertain. They draw us into larger social movements. When 10,000 fans slip on “Immigrant City FC” shirts, and the rest of us begin searching for them, the pitch is transformed into a venue for solidarity, a season of collective resistance.
These women athletes’ recent actions join a powerful tradition. Since at least the late 1800s, women athletes have used their platforms for social change, and they’ve always had audiences eager to follow them.
The Popularity of Women’s Sports
Today, we are experiencing a surge in the popularity of women’s sports. Record numbers follow the WNBA, the PWHL, the NWSL, the WTA, and NCAA women’s sports. For the first time, women’s teams are making headlines on ESPN and The Athletic, while women-run sports sites such as The Gist and Just Women’s Sports are growing their fan base.
Such popularity is not new. In the 1870s and ’80s, competitive women walkers called pedestriennes drew crowds in the tens of thousands. Before 1900, women’s open water swimming competitions attracted thousands of fans along the shorelines. Women cyclists outdrew men’s events, leading the League of American Wheelmen to refuse to sanction women’s races out of apparent jealousy.
Women athletes built platforms through sports, and they used them.
The Suffrage Connection
Those early athletes leveraged fame for change.
During a 1911 athletic meet, two women wrestlers squared off as part of an event to raise money for a New York “Votes for Women” club. Lily Smith, attempting the English Channel swim, garnered nationwide coverage with the headline, “I’ll Swim to France to Win Votes for Women!”
In 1916, Lucy Diggs Slowe, who later became the first dean of women students at Howard University, founded the American Tennis Association in response to the U.S. Lawn Tennis Association’s exclusion of Black players. Her work for Black athlete’s rights intertwined with her work for women’s suffrage.
Our voting rights are an inheritance passed down, in part, from women athletes. The women who came after kept that momentum going.
Modern Warriors
Wyomia Tyus, two-time Olympic gold medalist, defied team protocol at the 1968 Mexico Games by wearing black shorts in the 4×100 relay as part of the Olympic Project for Human Rights protest. When asked about John Carlos and Tommie Smith’s raised fist protest, Tyus responded, “We all know that we’re fighting for human rights.”
In 1973, Billie Jean King and the “Original Nine” risked their careers to fight for equal pay, leaving the U.S. Lawn Tennis Association (now USTA) to start the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) for $1 each. That same year, they pressured the U.S. Open to offer equal prize money and they won. Other Grand Slam tournaments followed slowly: Australian Open in 2001, French Open in 2006-2007 after Venus Williams intervened and Wimbledon in 2007.
The 1976 Yale Women’s Crew gave real teeth to Title IX after being repeatedly ignored in their request for adequate facilities. Tired of sitting on cold buses while the men’s team showered, 19 rowers wrote “Title IX” on their chests and backs, went into the athletic director’s office, stripped off their tops, and read a statement: “These are the bodies Yale is exploiting. … We’re human and being treated as less than such.” The New York Times covered the story and from there, Yale made changes.
More recently, in 2020, the Washington Mystics wore T-shirts printed with seven bullet holes to protest Jacob Blake’s murder by police.
That same year, Naomi Osaka wore a different mask with a victim’s name to each U.S. Open match on her way to winning the championship. Seven matches. Seven masks. Seven names.
More recently, Maya Moore of the Minnesota Lynx, Olympic Gold Medalist and multiple-time WNBA champion and All-Star, used her platform for criminal justice reform before retiring to help secure the freedom of her now-husband Jonathan Irons. Together they continue fighting for human rights.
In 2019, a young Rosalie Fish ran in the Class 1B Washington State Track Meet with a red handprint across her mouth and MMIW inked on her leg to draw attention to Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women.
In June 2025, the NWSL and the WNBA players’ associations issued a joint statement on immigration: “We stand with all people seeking safety, dignity, and opportunity, no matter where they come from or where they hope to go.”
Get in the Game
Women’s sports is not a utopia. It has been a site of racism, prejudice, vulnerability and exploitation. But, in community—athletes, coaches, trainers and fans together—we find our agency.
When women athletes’ voices are desperately needed, when political power is being used openly to enact revenge on those who speak truth to power, athletes take the protest to the people. We, too, can get in the game: Buy the tickets, show up at bars like The Sports Bra and A Bar of Their Own, click on the articles, follow the box scores, counter the misogynists in comment sections, purchase that “Immigrant City FC” shirt.
Women’s sports is for everyone / es para todos.
Great Job Liz Wilkinson & the Team @ Ms. Magazine Source link for sharing this story.
