"So many people think you have to look like a man, play like a man to get respect. I was the opposite."

"I was proud to a be a woman, and it didn’t fit well in that culture," said Candice Wiggins, speaking about the culture within the Women's National Basketball Association. She's abandoning her stellar career 2 years early, because of her "mental state." She says she was bullied for her femininity and heterosexuality.

"I didn’t like the culture inside the WNBA, and without revealing too much, it was toxic for me. … My spirit was being broken.... Me being heterosexual and straight, and being vocal in my identity as a straight woman was huge,” Wiggins said. “I would say 98 percent of the women in the WNBA are gay women. It was a conformist type of place. There was a whole different set of rules they (the other players) could apply..... People were deliberately trying to hurt me all of the time. I had never been called the B-word so many times in my life than I was in my rookie season. I’d never been thrown to the ground so much. The message was: ‘We want you to know we don’t like you.’... It comes to a point where you get compared so much to the men, you come to mirror the men,’ she said. “So many people think you have to look like a man, play like a man to get respect. I was the opposite.... There were horrible things happening to me every day...."

I don't know how much of that to believe. I don't understand the nature of the razzing that goes on behind the scenes in sports, whether Wiggins was unusually sensitive or arrogant, and what sexual orientation had to do with it. The other women are not telling there side of the story, so I feel compelled to imagine it.

If you read the story at the link, you'll see that Wiggins is writing a book, so she has a motive to stir up interest in her story. I'm interested in seeing how well this angle plays — this notion that she had more femininity than those other ladies and that there's something especially brutal about lesbians.

There's also the problem that the WNBA is just not popular, and that's what's really bothering Wiggins, who said: "Nobody cares about the WNBA. Viewership is minimal. Ticket sales are very low. They give away tickets and people don’t come to the game." And she's switching over to beach volleyball —where she sees a "celebration of women and the female body as feminine" — which people do seem to like to watch (perhaps because we only watch it every 4 years when the Summer Olympics come around).