Betty Baxter’s memoir, Outspoken: A Journey from Olympic Athlete to Activist, is a deeply personal accountof her struggles against the discrimination, scrutiny, and systemic inequities she faced as a young elite level athlete and coach in 1970s and ’80s Canada, charting the beginnings of heractivist path.
Betty Baxter was born in 1952 in Brooks, Alberta. Prior to turning thirty, she played Olympic volleyball and was one of the rare women to coach the sport internationally. She was a member of the National Advisory Council on Fitness and Amateur Sport (1977–79), a founder of Canadian Women & Sport (1981), and initiated the National Coaching School for Women (1987). Following her expulsion as Canada’s national coach in 1982, she became an outspoken activist for LGBTQ+ community and human rights. In 1993, she was the first open lesbian to seek federal office in Vancouver Centre, and in 2011 she was elected to her local school board, serving two terms. Her essay “Homophobia, Hypocrisy and Power Abuse” appeared in Playing It Forward 50 Years of Women and Sport in Canada, Second Story Press (2014) and she has published short non-fiction in online journals, Canadian Horse Journal and the anthology, Potato Soup Journal: Best of 2022.
She is grateful to live in xwésám (Roberts Creek, BC) on the unceded territories of the shíshálh people. She published her first book, the memoir Outspoken: A Journey from Olympic Athlete to Activist, in 2026.
https://writersunion.ca/member/betty-baxter
