What We Should Learn from “Cheergate”

The fury over the NFL's new male cheerleaders

This week, my X feed has been dominated less by unlikely animal best friends—my favorite thing on the internet—and more by videos of male cheerleaders for the Minnesota Vikings, waving their pom-poms alongside their female compatriots. Or, more accurately: by unhinged reactions to those videos.

The upset comes from all sides. Feminists aghast that the lead cheerleader is male; that men are taking jobs from women; and that a man has stolen the spotlight. Conservatives grossed out by men “gyrating,” or dancing “like women,” and thus upending 1950s-style gender roles. And then some old fashioned homophobic responses, which one commenter summed up as “these 2025 men are too F-ing gay!” Some NFL fans have threatened boycotts. And I’ve heard that some gay men themselves object, worried these cheerleaders reflect badly on them for all the reasons above.

Even if there’s a long history of men in cheerleading, including several past U.S. presidents—and even if male cheerleaders have rah-rah-ed on the sidelines of the NFL since 2018—they weren’t these kind of men. Meaning: they weren’t stereotypically feminine.

We’ve been combatting sex stereotypes since the 1970s, and waging a gender culture war for the last decade. We don’t seem to have made much progress.

Generational gender culture swings are normal. If the 1970s were, at least in some American segments, a relative tomboy heyday, they were followed by the Girl Power 1990s: Spice Girls as commercially viable feminist icons. Soon, we hyper-gendered just about every material good in children’s worlds. Pink and blue Amazon Fire tablets asked you to click which sex category you belonged to, then arranged an entire electronic world accordingly. (Amazon has since discontinued the practice.)

The hyper-gendering era overlapped with the current era, of gender identity, in which we learned that each person has a sense of themselves as male, female, both or neither, and that it may or may not match one’s body. The greatest emissary of this new understanding was Jazz Jennings, whose book, I Am Jazz, and eponymous TV show, helped normalize transgender children in America.

The conundrum for liberals and feminists was that Jazz’s understanding of herself as trans rested in the very stereotypes we spent decades trying to implode. Jazz loved pink and mermaids; thus she had a “girl brain” in a “boy body.” For those who tirelessly advocated for women’s rights, including entering male-dominated fields, this equation smacked of sexism—even if there are average differences in adult male and female brains, wrought both by genes and environments.

For a generation, gender identity and sex stereotypes have been inextricably linked. One advocacy group asked kids: “Where on a spectrum might your gender identity be?” with choices ranging from Barbie on one end to GI Joe on the other. We had learned to interpret tomboys as trans boys, feminine boys as trans girls.

Eventually, this idea—of a fixed-sexed brain but a malleably-sexed body—led us to battle over how to divide bathrooms and sports teams; how to define male and female; and how to treat children who assert a gender identity distinct from sex. Some feminists insist that, a decade ago, they would have been fine with these pom-pom waving fellas, but the excesses of the gender identity movement, placing male-bodied people alongside women in bathrooms, locker rooms, and prisons, has eradicated their ability to be welcoming.

The same might be said of conservatives, who came to overwhelmingly support gay marriage, but may now be reconsidering after so many policies and laws that placed gender identity above sex.

It has been a deeply confusing time for many of us who support gender diversity but push back against stereotypes, and who want to make room for gender nonconforming people in a world that doesn’t seem to understand them any better now than it did in ages past.

It has also been a frightening time. As we saw the unveiling of school policies that withheld information about kids’ gender identities from their parents, or allowed children to self-identify their sex, we feared the backlash—not just potentially curtailing youth gender medicine. Maybe revoking gay marriage. Maybe even attempting to instill “traditional” gender roles—though, as historian Stephanie Coontz wrote, the housewife mom and breadwinner dad in the suburban nuclear family was “the most atypical family system in American history.”

Yet some feminists have accused these male cheerleaders of caricaturing women, or taking slots they are not as qualified for, because instead of playing the men’s role—providing the muscle—they slither and shake like the women. Even we’re starting to sound like we believe in traditional gender roles, as a bulwark against the institutionalization of gender identity. So much for “there’s no one right way to be a boy or girl,” or “two sexes, infinite personalities.”

We are all battling to establish what’s normal, what’s natural, and what’s right. And when it comes to sex and gender, there are few clear answers. Men and boys are in a crisis of their own—mostly due to the changing economy, which offers them fewer opportunities, but also because of the relentless drumbeat against toxic masculinity, the shaming of traditional men.

It’s understandable, then, that some might resist the in-your-face placement of male cheerleaders in the NFL, which is not only among America’s most popular television viewing, but, aside from the addition of some attractive female commentators, has remained a safe space for traditional masculinity.

One thing I do know: if we’ve had times of celebrating tomboys, making them stars of screens big and small, we’ve never much tolerated feminine men, let alone celebrated them.

Here we are at a milestone: twelve NFL teams now have male cheerleaders—not trans women competing against women, which has come to be such a contentious issue, nor men who feel the need to transition because of their femininity. Rather, their stereotypically feminine mannerisms are fully on display. I wish this were unworthy of commentary, rather than generating such an enormous and outraged reaction. My own take on gender nonconformity is that it should be unremarkable. Maybe we don’t need to cheer the cheerleaders on, but I wish those so offended by them were shrugging, not shouting.