Iconic Lesbian Sports Couple Sue Bird and Megan Rapinoe Are Breaking Up

In 2017, ESPN published a candid interview with WNBA star Sue Bird in which she broke from her usual reticence on personal matters to say, on the record, “I’m gay. Megan [Rapinoe]’s my girlfriend… These aren’t secrets to people who know me. I don’t feel like I’ve not lived my life. I think people have this assumption that if you’re not talking about it, you must be hiding it, like it’s this secret. That was never the case for me.”

Although deeply invested fans already suspected that the two were dating, that interview was the official hard launch. That was the moment the world became aware of the existence of arguably the most iconic power couple in the history of women’s sports. Cross-sport relationships are common, certainly, although not nearly as common as relationships between female athletes playing the same sport. Rarely had we seen something like this, two women who’d dominated their respective games — basketball for Bird, soccer for Rapinoe. Two legends, united, presumably scissoring.

“I am filled with happiness, slightly hazy with something I can only describe as wistful lustiness,” wrote a commenter on our post about Bird’s coming out. “and also screaming. Someone please name this emotion so that I can classify it and carry on.”

Now, fans worldwide are reckoning with another emotion, I think it is called “surprise” and “sadness,” as Megan Rapinoe and Sue Bird have announced their breakup.

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Megan Rapinoe and Sue Bird met backstage at a photoshoot at the Rio Olympics in 2016. Rapinoe and Bird teased each other and joked a little bit and hung out at a party. Bird’s best friend Diana Taurasi noticed the attraction between them immediately, but Rapinoe was engaged to singer-songwriter Sarah Cahoone at the time. “I had no idea what was going to happen,” Rapinoe wrote in her memoir. “But I knew I wanted to see [Sue] again.” They kept in touch, talked on the phone all the time, and after Rapinoe’s breakup, and amid a media firestorm around Rapinoe’s decision to take a knee, they began seeing each other.

In the memoir, Rapinoe recalls how scary it was to fall for someone so hard: “I was more myself with Sue than with anyone I’d ever been with, but I also needed to be my best self — so as to not lose her. I tell her this to this day: if she ever breaks up with me, I’ll crumble to dust.”

Megan, for her part, had officially come out as a lesbian in 2012, making her the first soccer player from the then-current U.S. Women’s National Team to do so. Deeply beloved and already embraced as gay by her legions of fans, Rapinoe said she knew “everyone [was] really craving [for] people to come out. People want — they need — to see that there are people like me playing soccer for the good ol’ U.S. of A.”

It took Bird a bit longer. It been impressed upon her that her success as an athlete relied on being marketable as a “straight girl next door.” But a road towards openness was being paved right before her eyes, by Diana Taurasi, who came out earlier that year, and Elena Delle Done, who’d done so in 2016. After coming out in ESPN magazine, Sue and Megan were immediately embraced by sapphic sports fandom worldwide.

In 2018, Rapinoe and Bird made history as the first same-sex couple to appear on the cover of EPSN The Magazine’s Body Issue. In 2019, Bird wrote the seminal essay “So the President F*cking Hates My Girlfriend” in The Player’s Tribune, regarding Rapinoe’s contentious relationship with President Trump.

In 2020, they got engaged, but were taking, according to Bird, a slow-burn approach to wedding planning, telling People: “I think we are both totally okay with the fact that this might not happen for a year, maybe two. We’ve always kind of known that this was forever, so we aren’t necessarily in a rush.”

But they were, by all accounts, deeply in love, and building more than just a romantic relationship. “The pair are both unapologetic in their ambition and want to use their own success to pull others up behind them,” wrote CNN in 2020. “It’s a relationship that seems to have got the best out of both.”

In 2021, after Team USA secured another gold medal for women’s basketball, Sue Bird kissed Megan Rapinoe on the sidelines, an incident which caused the biggest sudden traffic spike Autostraddle ever experienced when, following the kiss, every straight person in America had, seemingly, rushed to their laptops in a panic and googled “basketball Olympics gay.” These are the moments that define our lives.

In 2022, Bird told the Seattle Times that their wedding was on hold because of Megan’s schedule, waiting to see “what Megan’s soccer future holds.”

Bird retired from professional basketball in 2022 after a 19 year career that included four NBA titles, 13 All-Star appearances and five Olympic gold medals. Rapinoe followed in 2023, after ten years with her club team, 200 caps for the USWNT, two World Cups, an Olympic gold medal,  The Ballon d’Or and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

In 2023, Rapinoe and Bird gushed about each other at Bird’s jersey retirement ceremony. “You’ve changed me, changed my life, how I see things,” Bird said. “In reality, what you did is not change me; you brought it out of me. It was in there. I just didn’t know how to get it. You saw it right away.” Rapinoe had her jersey retired in 2024, and similarly devotional speeches were delivered.

In retirement, they remained avid sports fans, spotted court-side or in the stands of hundreds of women’s sporting events.

In 2024, they were asked again about when they were going to get married. “We’re not gonna do the elope thing,” Rapinoe assured the host. “I personally don’t want that. We want the party that’s going to be very fun and we want to celebrate with all of the people. So for everyone wondering, you will be invited!”

The two are inexorably linked not just by their romantic relationship, but their business ventures — in 2020, they’d launched their sports & culture podcast, A Touch More with Sue Bird & Megan Rapinoe, and, two years later, they founded  “A Touch More” Production company in partnership with Togethxr, that set out to tell stories of ‘identity, activism and underrepresented communities.”

The podcast will be winding down with six special episodes before concluding. But lest you worry the world will be short another podcast, Sue Bird will be maintaining her own pod, Birds Eye View, and Rapinoe will be starting her own pod as well.

In the 2020 post announcing Sue Bird and Megan Rapinoe’s engagement, Heather Hogan wrote, “Friends! Lesbians! Queers! Good Straddlers of this land! Lend me your ears! The time has finally come to declare, once and for all, that love is not a lie! And lo, it shall never be a lie again! For Sue Bird and Megan Rapinoe are ENGAYGED TO BE MARRIED!”

Now that Sue Bird and Megan Rapinoe have broken up, one might be tempted to challenge that assertion, which was, after all, made as a reaction to their engagement. But what if we didn’t? What if this is love, too? Falling for each other, changing and growing together, building things together, doing some really fantastic courtside fashions, failing to plan a wedding, and then, eventually, splitting up, because all of that has run its course. Things don’t have to last forever to matter forever, you know?