Idrottsledare och HBTQ : Perspektiv på diskriminering, medvetenhet och normer i ungdomsidrotten

Many athletes experience homophobia in sport environments and lgbtq is a rather invisibletopic in organized sport. The purpose with the study was to investigate coaches’ perspective ondiscrimination and heteronormativity in youth sport. Another purpose was to examine howcoaches perceived their own awareness about lgbtq. The result is based on seven semistructuredinterviews with coaches from four different sports and five different sport clubs. Firstof all, results showed that the role as a coach involved two main tasks. These were, education inthe specific sport and social education. The result also showed that discrimination based onsexual orientation, gender identity and gender expression was said to be unusual from thecoaches’ perspective. One coach experienced that discrimination had occurred to one of theplayers in his team. The coach from the opposing team argued that the player in the girls’ teamwas actually a boy, because of the person’s appearance and skills in floorball. Coachesexperienced that their own awareness about lgbtq could improve and those with sometheoretical knowledge about heteronormativity hadn’t implemented that in the role as a coach.Regarding lgbtq, the result from the interviews also showed that coaches’ awareness wasinadequate in some aspects, which affected how situations were handled. For example ifnegative language about lgbtq occurred it was many times seen as harmless and didn’t result inconsequences from coaches. Negative languages about lgbtq were more or less normalized in allof the boy’s teams. At the same time lgbtq was not a subject that had been brought up in thetraining groups, between coaches, in the sport clubs or in coaches’ education. One possibleconclusion to the ”invisibility” of lgbtq in the sport environments may be highly connected to alack of awareness. For instance, problems in this context were principally connected to anindividual who was discriminated against or treated badly