ANGIE Greene is no stranger to the world of men's sports.
Her father, Russell, was a 300-game, three-time premiership hero with Hawthorn and St Kilda. Her brother, Steven, spent eight years at AFL and VFL level playing for Hawthorn and Box Hill.
Then there's her grandfather Frank Sedgman, who won 22 Grand Slam doubles tournaments across a three-decade career.
But this extensive association with the world of men's sport gave Greene a glimpse into a culture that she didn't like.
"People always assume I would love sport and love footy in particular, but I grew up hating it, a lot," Greene told The Inside Game in October.
"I didn't want a bar of it and that's because I was exposed to the culture from a really young age, I just found it really exclusive when it came to a lot of things, but especially sexuality and/or gender."
That exclusion became even more apparent when her brother, Brent, came out to her when she was 13 years old. She was the only person in her family that knew Brent's secret until he had the confidence to tell the rest of his family a number of years later.
"Just seeing what he went through behind the scenes, but also in school and in sport and hearing and witnessing the kind of language that my dad and brother were using at the time, it was incredibly jarring and it just made me realise how exclusive male team sports are," Greene said.
That led Greene to found Stand Up Events - a not-for-profit dedicated to fighting sexual and gender discrimination in Australian sport.
Stand Up Events partners with Monash University to conduct research that helps them understand why homophobia is still so prevalent in male-dominated team sports.
Based on this research, Stand Up Events has been able to create preventative programs where AFL players, including Collingwood's Jordan Roughead, West Coast's Jayden Hunt and St Kilda's Tom Campbell, implement the program into grassroots sporting clubs.
"Our research suggests almost 50 per cent of LGBTQIA+ people intentionally exclude themselves ... because they don't feel welcome or safe and because of the type of language used," she said.
"To me that's absolutely not on, we have to change that, and we can all play a part in that whether we're using the language or not.
"One of the leading things we found ... is how rife that language still is and how many people still think it isn't an issue, and how much our programs actually helped in shifting language and behaviour.
"The impact of exclusive language and exclusive cultures, the extreme end of that is taking your own life and people might say 'that's just being dramatic'. But you look at the stats and men are twice as likely to take their own lives than women. You then put the non-hetrosexual and gender diverse community into the equation and they're four-to-five times more likely to take their own lives in comparison to their heterosexual counterparts ... with 50 per cent of the transgender community attempting suicide at least once in their lives.
"So the ripple effect of not feeling included and safe in certain environments is paramount. And the goal of Standup is to not only make people feel they can be themselves regardless of their sexuality and/or gender and be that unapologetically, but it's also raising awareness to the people who might be using that type of language that this is the type of impact that your language can have, and there should be zero tolerance around it."
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