Sarah Taylor: ‘There were people saying I’d ‘turned’ gay. I had to educate them’

Former England wicketkeeper Sarah Taylor and her partner Diana had the great excitement earlier this week of announcing publicly that they were expecting a child.

Taylor, 33, who played 226 times for her country across a 13-year career, took to Twitter to share her and Diana’s joy.

“I wanted people to know that this was happening in our life,” Taylor says. “I’m really proud of it, I’m really proud of Diana – the IVF process is so hard – and I wanted to just say how proud I am of her, quite publicly, and also share my excitement that there’s a child on the way.”

Taylor didn’t expect to attract several confused and critical comments on Twitter. Among the thousand of replies congratulating her and Diana and wishing them well, there were a number of comments that were less positive in nature – questioning IVF and the legitimacy of two women having a child.

As Taylor outlines, it wasn’t quite what she was expecting: “I think you assume it’s going to be positive - and from all the people you’d expect, the reaction was positive, but then there was also this weird backlash. There were people saying I’d just ‘turned’ gay and ‘chosen’ to be gay, and I just wasn’t expecting that.”

“There were people who were just very confused,” she continues. “And then it gets retweeted and people who don’t know you start making comments, which is just the nature of social media. I got a lot of ‘who’s the father?’, and it made me feel really distant from it and like I wasn’t a part of it, and I thought that wasn’t fair, so I felt like I had to make a comment to try and educate people about where they were going wrong.”

Taylor posted a series of replies to her initial post with a view to educating the critical posters and asking for a better understanding of acceptance, apt timing given February is LGBT+ History Month.

“I spoke to Diana about it, I said I wanted to put out the second message – after the announcement – and she was really supportive. She said if it was what I wanted to do and if it was going to help me feel better then I should go for it. I guess you could always flip it, and maybe I should have educated myself about other people’s knowledge about IVF processes for gay couples but there were just a lot of weird comments.

“There was a news article saying Sarah Taylor is supporting her ‘friend’ Diana in having a baby! And I’d said ‘partner’ in the initial tweet, you know, so I thought it was clear. But I just wanted to put these people right and clarify that I am a lesbian, I am in love with this girl, and being gay is not a choice. There were people saying: ‘why have you chosen women?’ and it’s just not a choice, we are who we are, accept us. I cannot change that you as a man like a woman, I can’t change that, so why do you think it’s any different for women who are attracted to women?

“I didn’t expect to have to explain the background to two women having a child together! In this day and age, you hope you wouldn’t have to do that. I got lots of nice replies, which were great, but lots of people saying nonsense and I wanted to educate them. It wasn’t a post about me being gay, it was about my excitement at starting a family and my pride in Diana. It ended up being about all of it but I felt I needed to educate some of the people replying to me.”

In sharing the news of Diana’s pregnancy, Taylor talked publicly for the first time about being gay, and she says she’s been moved by the supportive responses to her posts.

“I think it’s a mixture of happy, proud and relieved! I’ve always had my partner on Instagram, I’ve never hidden my partner. I’ve sometimes hidden certain things because of a potential reaction, maybe, but you think there’s so many cricketers out there now who are out and proud and that’s amazing. I think, for me, until I knew where I belonged I didn’t quite feel able to be completely open about it.

“And that’s why I wanted to make a comment at the end, to say thank you for the love – because it does overshadow the negativity. You hate to say it but the negativity is just idiotic. To even think that negatively, let alone share it, is beyond me. But there was an outpouring of love and it’s put me in touch with people who I haven’t talked to in a while - people getting in touch to say congratulations to Diana and me about our news, and that was what the post was all about in the first instance!”

For now, Taylor, who is Lead Wicketkeeping Coach at Sussex CCC, is thinking ahead to life as a parent, and wondering whether one day she’ll be busy in the garden coaching up another wicketkeeper: “I’ll look at scans and say things like, ‘They’ve got big hands, Diana!’. It’s funny because I said to Diana that if it’s a boy, I’ve got this, they’ll be a cricketer – and it’s so strange, because it must be ingrained in me, because she had to remind me that also applies if the baby is a girl!

“I’m going to drag this child into sports and I don’t care if they care!,” she jokes. “Ultimately, I just want to be the best parent I can be and best partner to Diana – but hopefully they’ll like sports enough to watch it with me!”