The NHL’s Surprising Alliance: How Inclusion Meets Controversy with Donald Trump

A few weeks later, the NHL again had the opportunity to stand for its diversity values when a handful of players refused to wear their team’s Pride-themed warmup jerseys. Instead, the NHL retreated meekly, encouraging “voices and perspectives on social and cultural issues.” That June – Pride month, no less – Bettman cancelled the Pride jerseys altogether, calling the furor around them “a distraction” from the intended message.

One wonders what he will call his own foray directly into the culture wars or, for that matter, how the NHL may characterize this particular moment of self-expression from the commissioner. It’s likely that Bettman’s participation in Trump’s sports council will fall into the “voices and perspectives on social and cultural issues” category the league talked about during the Pride jerseys fiasco. But seeing as Trump seems fixated on getting trans women out of college sports – even though there are fewer than 10 transgender athletes in college sports, according to the president of the NCAA – this feels like a very specific kind of perspective on a cultural issue, doesn’t it?

What’s so aggravating about repeated allowances for anti-LGBTQ+ perspectives from the NHL under the guise of simply letting all opinions flourish equally, is how it pretends that these views are all morally equivalent when they’re not. Sure, the players who refused to wear a Pride-themed jersey can’t be forced to wear them, but it’s not like it was simply a fashion choice. Fundamentally, those players made that decision based on a worldview that refuses to accept LGBTQ+ people, including their fellow hockey players, as being equal to them and everyone else. It’s not the jerseys that were the problem – but they did a great job highlighting it.

Earlier this spring, Harrison Browne, the first transgender player in professional hockey, wrote that while in the NCAA, he was offered the option to have his own locker room and change his pronouns on the roster. “Looking back, I realize how important it is for trans and non-binary student athletes to have those options, whether or not they take them,” Browne wrote in The Walrus. “These choices provide a baseline of institutional acceptance and acknowledgment for gender-diverse athletes at all levels.” On Monday, Browne told the Guardian via email that “to see [Bettman, Gretzky, and Tkachuk] get behind an administration that is targeting marginalized communities, especially trans people in sports, is deeply disturbing and a huge step backwards in making hockey a more inclusive sport.”