Swansea and Bournemouth will be the first top-flight football clubs to offer the non-binary prefix ‘Mx’, they announced to fans as UK sports gear up for an unprecedented LGBT campaign.
Both teams said that supporters who “[do] not wish to be identified by traditional gender categories” can opt for the transgender-friendly ‘Mx’, in a statement ahead of a “designated LGBT fixture” between the clubs at the Liberty Stadium this weekend.
“As a club, we’re continually looking at ways to make our services more inclusive,” said Swansea equality and diversity manager Lucy Norman of the trans-friendly title, which will be rolled out across major points of service at the club.
She added: “Language plays a really important part in delivering this and ensuring that everyone feels welcome — regardless of age, gender or gender identity, sexuality, or ethnicity.”
On fansnetwork.co.uk, the news was greeted with a mixed response from Swansea fans, with the club’s show of support for “non-binary” people branded “Marxist Communist nonsense” by one user, while another quipped that the team “will be playing in skirts soon”.
“Thank god I won’t be there tomorrow, the club prefers us to educate our kids in gender fluidity instead of good football,” wrote ‘sammylee3’ in a post calling the club “a complete and utter joke.”
However, there were also messages of support, including, “Excellent. Well done the club for a change”, from some forums posters, who attacked those who disparaged the club’s wholehearted embrace of LGBT activism as “Daily Mail readers”.
The announcement came ahead of LGBT pressure group Stonewall’s “Rainbow Laces” campaign, which runs between November 24 and December 3, in which sporting bodies across the UK “come out for equality” by promoting LGBT lifestyles.
Over this weekend, every fixture for the English Football League, Premier League, Aviva Premiership Rugby and the Scottish Professional Football League will be championing Rainbow Laces.
All 92 football league clubs are supporting the campaign and will carry Stonewall adverts in matchday programmes, while players don actual rainbow laces in their shoes at games taking place over the ten days, with team captains wearing rainbow armbands.
In addition, matches will feature rainbow-coloured pitch flags, a rainbow ball plinth, and timing boards will similarly be decorated with pro-LGBT branding.
British Basketball players will be training with rainbow-coloured balls over the course of the initiative, while in the world of UK hockey, Cardiff Devils will play in an entire kit designed to celebrate gay pride.
“LGBT Sport Cymru are striving for a society where sexuality or gender identity is irrelevant to a person’s engagement in sport of physical activity,” said the Welsh sports body chair Michelle Daltry, hailing the hockey team’s rainbow-emblazoned new kit.
But UKIP Education Spokesman David Kurten warned the campaign is symptomatic of a worrying trend in Britain, telling Breitbart London that: “No area of society seems to be immune to the push by militant transgender activists and the equality and diversity industry to deconstruct and dissolve the scientific fact that there are two biological sexes: male and female.
“Most people are asking: ‘where will this end?’ The truth is that ‘progressivism’ will never end until cultural Marxism has swept away family, nation, Christianity, male, female, and everything which gives people identity.”
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