Fan Appreciation Night: Women's Soccer Team Show Women’s Sports Supporters the Door
Professional teams keep kicking out the fans who support them the most.
In the final game of the regular season on Friday, Oct. 23, the Portland Thorns—the very popular women's professional soccer team—held Fan Appreciation Night at Providence Park. The Thorns, it turns out, appreciated some fans more than others.
At Friday’s game, a scarf reading “F*** Trump” got a pass, while a T-shirt saying women’s sports should be for biological females only got you marched to the exit. Stadium security forcibly removed roughly 20 supporters of women’s sports, most wearing XX-XY Athletics shirts, from the match against the North Carolina Courage.
The fans who hit them, shoved them, and doused them in beer stayed to watch the rest of the game.
Organized to Protect Girls
Amy Sousa, an activist who campaigns to keep men out of women’s spaces, organized the group, and Seattle journalist and commentator Brandi Kruse joined them. In September, Thorns security had ejected a smaller group wearing the same shirts, so this time the women entered with them covered and kept them that way through the first half. At the start of the second half, they revealed the shirts and unfurled a banner reading “Save Women’s Sports.”
The timing was deliberate: soccer has no stoppages in play, and Sousa hoped that would keep security from interrupting. The Thorns’ supporters were ready for them anyway, possibly because someone in the Rose City Riveters, the team’s supporters group, recognized a member of the group. Just before the second half began, someone handed out transgender pride flags to fans, apparently to block the banner from view.
Then the crowd let loose. Videos posted from the stands capture fans chanting “Shame!” “F*** you!” “F*** Trump!” One man across the aisle repeatedly screamed “F*** you, scum!” at the women. As security led them out, the section waved them off with a chorus of “Bye!”
It turned physical fast. Thorns fans tore the “Save Women’s Sports” banner out of the women’s hands, Sousa said, and the flagpoles became weapons. Ari Laureano, a gay man who has detransitioned, said someone smashed him in the face with one, moments after he revealed his shirt, and that attackers used the flags as cover to hide who was hitting the women around him. A male fan shoved a 57-year-old woman down over two rows of seats; she has since filed a police report.
“We were attacked by fans. We were hit with flags,” Sousa said afterward, standing behind police outside the stadium because she didn’t feel safe. Someone forcibly pushed a woman using a walker out the door, she said, and someone punched another woman in the face, “all because we wanted to stand there in our shirts to protect girls sports.”
Mob Mentality
Kruse alleges that the leader of the Thorns’ fan section “sicced the mob” on the group. “It was sanctioned,” Kruse wrote. According to her, the same woman wore a shirt threatening violence and leads fans in chants about burning opposing teams alive. The menacing started before the banner even came out. According to reports, about half a dozen people in the group left early, because spectators wearing “Protect Trans Kids” shirts printed with knives frightened them.
When security finally waded into the section, the guards walked right past the fans swinging flagpoles and went for the women in the T-shirts. Kruse asked a guard why security was forcing her group out while the people attacking them stayed in their seats. She told staff they had no right to put their hands on her and that she would not leave on her own. If they wanted her gone, they could call the police, and if officers asked her to leave, she would go. Security never made that call. Instead, Kruse said, a large male guard twisted her arm behind her back and forced her up the stairs and out of the stadium. By her account, the only aggressor security removed all night was one man who poured beer on someone.
When Portland police did show up, it was outside the gates, where officers formed a barrier between the women and the hostile fans, then stayed to take their reports. Kruse called the officers “consummate professionals.” They may have been the only people at Providence Park that night who treated these women like citizens. She is now demanding apologies from the Thorns, from stadium operator Peregrine Sports, and from Allied Universal, the security contractor.
The hostility didn’t end there. After security ejected them, part of the group called a Lyft. One of them uses a walker. According to a member of the group who posted the account on X, the driver started the ride, then asked whether they were “the ones in the news” from the game. When one said yes, he stopped the car and ordered them out onto a dark street. While she was on the phone with Lyft support, she said, the driver called 911 twice and claimed they were drunk. None of them had been drinking. Lyft told her it would discipline the driver. The next morning, when she got up for her 5 a.m. ride to the airport, she found that Lyft had deactivated her account. Lyft gave an anodyne response to a request for comment, saying they are "reviewing" the incident.
In Portland, wearing the wrong shirt to a soccer game can cost you your seat, your ride home, and your access to a rideshare app.
Matt Calkins, an OutKick columnist who spent 11 years as a sports columnist at the Seattle Times, was at the match with press credentials, filming the confrontation. Fans flipped him off, called him a Nazi, knocked the phone from his hand, and poured beer on him. Outside the stadium, in the middle of his interview with Sousa, one of the heads of security ripped the press pass off his chest, Kruse said, tearing the cord that secured it. The guard handed it back seconds later and refused to explain himself. Portland has a word for journalists who document things it would rather you didn’t see. The word is apparently “target.”
Upside Down Response
The women Portland treated as dangerous agitators were, as Kruse pointed out, mostly lesbians, Democrats, or both. I witnessed similar reactions outside the Moda Center in July, when Sophie Cunningham and the Indiana Fever visited for a WNBA game against the Portland Fire: the coalition for women’s sports is wider than its opponents will admit. Kruse made the larger point: you don’t have to agree with these women about girls’ sports to see the danger in attacking and ejecting people for what their shirts say. She called it “a hallmark of authoritarianism.” As a conservative living in Seattle, she noted, she lives every day among signs and beliefs she disagrees with, and has never once thought about hurting anyone over them.
The Thorns can’t seem to settle on why security removed the women. After the first ejection in September, the club blamed “distributing unapproved materials,” which the women denied. This time, on video, stadium staff told the group the shirts weren’t the problem. Fine. Then what was? If the answer is the banner, explain how it differs from the trans flags in the same section, flags someone passed out minutes before the second half to hide that banner, flags fans then used to block spectators’ views and swung as weapons. The organized counter-demonstration apparently broke no rules. If the answer is disruption, explain why security watched fans pour beer on people and shove a woman so hard she fell down two rows of seats, then let those fans stay.
The Justice Department is now reviewing the ejections, Fox News’s Jackson Thompson reported, and the stadium’s ownership matters here: the City of Portland has owned Providence Park since 1966. “Based on what is known so far, the conduct described appears to raise viewpoint discrimination and First Amendment questions rather than sex discrimination,” a DOJ spokesperson told Thompson.
Hours after the game, the Thorns thanked their fans for “the best atmosphere, support and energy tonight.” Director of security Jim McCausland told OutKick he didn’t have time to talk. The Thorns’ communications director didn’t respond when OutKick asked why security threw the women out and let their attackers stay.
On November 3, voters in Washington and Colorado will decide whether to reserve girls’ sports for girls. In Oregon, women and girls don’t even get a hearing, much less a vote. A bill to protect girls’ sports was dead on arrival in Salem last year, and when Republicans tried to force a floor vote, Democrats killed it on a straight party line vote. When the Supreme Court ruled this summer that states may keep girls’ sports for girls, Oregon’s school sports association put out a statement about welcoming all student-athletes and kept the status quo. In many of these states, gender ideology has backing at every level. The people running school sports protect it, and elected officials cheer it on and go after anyone who objects.
On Oct. 23 in Portland, that resulted in security manhandling a journalist after standing by while fans shoved, assaulted, and doused these women with beer. Kruse put it plainly in her account the next morning: “You don’t get to steal spaces and rights that were won by women in hard fought battle.” The Thorns called it the best atmosphere all season. The women forcibly thrown out by security would describe it differently.
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