Amber Glenn and visibility politics show how inclusion at the center of empire produces legitimacy while leaving deportation, war, and repression intact.
On February 4, 2026, two days before the Milan opening ceremony, US figure skater Amber Glenn was asked at a pre-Olympic press conference how the LGBTQ community was faring under the Trump administration.
She answered directly: “hard time for the community,” saying it wasn’t the first time the community had fought for its human rights, and that she hoped to use her platform throughout the Games to encourage people to stay strong.
She received death threats. She stepped back from social media. She returned, competed, won a team gold medal, and placed fifth in the individual event.
The response from the right — threats, Trump attacks on other athletes, coordinated harassment — is exactly what you would expect and requires no extended analysis here. As documented at Milan, Glenn was far from alone in facing backlash for statements made when reporters asked direct questions.
The more difficult argument — and the one that actually requires making — is not about the right’s reaction. It is about what happens when the left reads these moments as resistance.
The Collapse of Scale
Glenn was not standing at a private podium. She was standing at an Olympic press conference, representing a country backed by state resources, corporate sponsors, and a global broadcast apparatus. She is the first openly queer woman on a US Olympic figure skating team — a milestone that is real, significant, and fully absorbed into the promotional architecture of Team USA, the USOPC, and the NBC broadcast. Pride pins, milestone graphics, supportive press coverage: these are not accidents. They are part of how the institution presents itself.
None of that diminishes what Glenn has navigated personally. Her history — the years of hiding, the struggles with her mental health and eating disorder during a sport that policed her body — is not performance. It is documented and real.
But the structural question is separate from the personal one. When a US Olympian frames her community as embattled resistance at a global stage, what is actually happening is a collapse of scale. The imperial core begins speaking in the language of siege. Power becomes impossible to locate. And everyone becomes equally victimized.
The death threats are real. They are also evidence of a faction of the right that is genuinely targeting queer people. Neither fact changes the structural position Glenn occupies: legally protected, institutionally amplified, and central to how the American state and its corporate sponsors present themselves as modern and inclusive in 2026.
These things coexist. Discomfort is not disposability. Harassment is not erasure.
The broader argument for how sports institutions absorb and amplify identity-based narratives while leaving the structure of power entirely intact — and why that absorption is a feature not a failure — is examined in the analysis of sports as infrastructure of ideology.
The test of oppression in the materialist sense is not whether a system produces antagonism toward a group. It is whether the system is designed to preserve that group or to erase it — whether the group’s existence is a problem the system is trying to solve.
LGBTQ+ people in the United States, particularly those within institutional platforms, are not a population the system is trying to disappear. They are a population the system has largely absorbed — legally, culturally, and representationally. That absorption is not complete, is not without its own violence, and is not the same as liberation. But it is a materially different condition from the populations the same system is actively bombing, deporting, and disappearing.
The Same Empire
The homonationalism argument — developed by scholar Jasbir Puar — is not an attack on queer people. It is a description of how states use the inclusion of LGBTQ+ citizens as evidence of their own moral legitimacy, and how that legitimacy is then used to justify violence at the periphery.
The American empire wraps itself in a rainbow. It does so because it is useful. Inclusion at the center helps legitimize coercion at the edges. The state that is running mass deportation operations, enforcing sanctions that starve entire populations, and funding ongoing military campaigns in Gaza is the same state whose Olympic committee celebrated the first openly queer woman on its figure skating team. These are not contradictions. They are the same logic operating at different scales.
Older versions of this logic leaned on Christendom and whiteness to establish moral authority. This version leans on inclusion and representation. The function is the same: we are righteous, and therefore our violence is justified. The rainbow flag replaces the cross. The bombs do not change.
The longer history of how that same imperial logic has operated through sports — specifically how hockey’s colonial foundations are managed and obscured by the same institutions now celebrating inclusion milestones — is examined in the analysis of decolonizing hockey and what that actually requires.
This is not an argument that Glenn asked for any of this, endorses deportations, or personally supports imperial violence. You do not have to clap for empire to profit from it. You only have to live inside it. And the comforts, protections, and platforms available to someone in her position are made possible by a system that is actively brutal elsewhere.
What Identity Politics Without Material Analysis Does
Once politics is reduced to recognition and visibility, the framework can be occupied by anyone with a microphone. Anyone who can claim marginality — real or performed — can position themselves as resistance. Anyone who speaks the right language, wears the right symbols, and generates sympathetic coverage can operate as a progressive actor while leaving the structure of power entirely untouched. In the worst cases, they reinforce it: the empire gets to say, look how self-critical we are, even our beneficiaries are suffering.
The earlier piece on athlete activism structure examined how dissent gets managed through timing, risk, and platform. The Glenn case adds a layer: even unmanaged dissent — dissent that generates real backlash — can function as legitimacy production if the frame never escapes visibility politics.
The specific mechanism through which sports institutions manage symbolic expression to produce legitimacy rather than challenge — and how Stand Up to Cancer functions as the paradigm case — is examined in the analysis of how Stand Up to Cancer became a legitimacy machine.
The question that gets crowded out is not whether queer people in the US face real hostility. They do. The question is what it means to center Western grievance politics at an Olympic press conference during an ongoing genocide and an intensifying global deportation regime.
Centering that grievance at that moment is not simply bad optics. It is a form of moral enclosure — pulling attention inward at the exact moment when it should be forced outward, turning catastrophe into a backdrop for a personal narrative. That is not solidarity. It is self-centering with better optics.
The Responsibility That Comes With the Platform
The argument is not that Glenn should be silent. It is that solidarity requires decentering yourself. Not every injustice needs your personal story. Not every threat elevates you to the status of the oppressed. And sometimes — especially when you are standing at the center of empire, backed by its resources, amplified by its institutions — the most ethical move is to stop narrating your own suffering and start naming who is actually being materially erased.
If you are being protected, amplified, and defended by the system, then no matter how scared you may feel, you are not outside of it. You are inside it. That position comes with social responsibilities that extend beyond identity and self-recognition.
Glenn said politics affects everyone and she won’t be quiet. She is right that politics affects everyone. The next question — the harder one — is whose politics, whose silence, and whose erasure gets the global press conference.