Queering Sports in Nyandara

In Nyandara, a pseudonymized Sub-Saharan African country, women’s football and men’s/mixed gender netball are safe(r) spaces for gender and sexual diverse (GSD) persons. In 2024-2025 GSD persons were the majorities of players on such teams. This is surprising in a society where GSD persons are denounced loudly from church pulpits, and passersby shout out to them in public that they are “satanic”, “demonic” and an “abomination”. Christian churches are a major social force in Nyandara, whose conservatism is supported by colonial-era laws against intimate acts interpreted to be against the order of nature. Using 73 interviews (2024–2025) and the conceptual lenses of knowing, legibility, safety and the stop, we answer the following questions: why and how have Nyandarans devised grassroots ways to not know GSD footballers and netballers? How does this shape football and netball as spaces? Under what circumstances does this unknowing break down? Common attitudes reconstrue players as less queer while queering these sports to the extent that crossdressing and androgyny have become tolerated aspects of them. We examine how this has occurred and its broader implications for the collective avoidance of stigma.