Megan Rapinoe is a captain on the US Women's National Football Team, an Olympic gold medalist, and two-time World Cup winner. She plays professionally in the National Women's Football League for the OL Reign in Tacoma, WA.
Rapinoe identifies as gay and has been out publicly since 2012, telling Out at the time, "I feel like sports in general are still homophobic, in the sense that not a lot of people are out. I feel everyone is really craving [for] people to come out. People want — they need — to see that there are people like me playing football for the good ol' U.S. of A." Since then, she's been an outspoken advocate for LGBTQ+ rights as well as racial and gender equality, taking a leading role in the USWNT's fight for equal pay.
Female athletes, she told NBC News in 2019, are often at the forefront of movements for change. "We're gay, we're women, we're women of colour," she said, underscoring the diversity across women's sports. "We're unfortunately constantly being oppressed in some sort of way. So I feel like us just being athletes, us just being at the pinnacle of our game is kind of a protest in a way and is sort of defiant in and of itself."