Dr. Lindsey Migliore, Founder & Executive Director of Queer Women of Esports

Dr. Lindsay Migliore, photo by Edgar Artiga

In Career Spotlight, the*gameHERs profiles professional women in gaming, esports, and gaming-adjacent industries. Our goal is to shine a light on all these possibilities of different ways that people can work in the careers of esports and gaming.

This week we feature Dr. Lindsey Migliore, esports physician and Founder and Executive Director of Queer Women of Esports, a nonprofit organization dedicated to making competitive gaming a more inclusive and equitable place for the LGBTQIA+ population. We spoke with Dr. Lindsey about how she got started in the field of esports medicine, the founding of Queer Women of Esports, the importance of sponsorship and mentorship in getting more LGBTQIA+ people into the world of esports, and so much more.

Thank you so much for taking the time to do this. So to start, I noticed in my research that you professionally identify as an esports physician. Can you talk a little bit about what that means and what your job entails?

So I am a licensed medical doctor. I've been a physician for five years now. I worked primarily with traditional sports athletes before this. And I've always been a gamer my whole life. But recently, in the past couple of years, I was trying to figure out ways to integrate those two things together. And esports especially has been exponentially booming.

I realized that esports had this untapped patient population with this huge amount of unmet needs that there was relatively no one equipped to treat.

I'd been playing video games during high school, during college, and during med school. And during med school, as soon as everyone finds out that you're in med school, they're asking you to diagnose them with everything, right? And that was happening when I was playing video games too. So people would be like, you know, I'm having this wrist pain, I'm having this pinky pain, I'm having this back pain, I have this neck pain, I think it's from gaming. And they'd go to their doctor, and their doctor would be like “stop gaming,” which is remarkable because you don't tell the marathon runners “stop running.” You don't tell a basketball player to stop playing basketball. And so this is happening at the professional level. We have these esports pros who've been working for years and years and years to make it to Team Liquid or the various esports leagues, and they get to be 20 and 21 and they have to stop playing because they get so injured. So my job is basically treating those injuries, but mostly preventing those injuries from happening.

How long have you been gaming, and when did you kind of decide that it was something that you wanted to make part of your work life?

When I was six or seven, my grandpa bought me a Nintendo 64 and Ocarina of Time. I played that game so hard. And then it went from N64 to Game Cube, from Game Cube to Wii, The Wii I had in high school and then beginning of college I got a PlayStation 3, and then I went from PlayStation 3 to PS4, and then I switched from PlayStation to Xbox because the girl I was dating at the time's brother was playing Xbox and there's no cross platform. And then I recently went to PC last year. I had taken a brief little pause in high school and college while I was doing other things and I didn't really have any gaming friends, but I dove back into it in med school, because it's just an excellent form of stress relief for me to be able to sit there and kind of mindlessly react. Not mindlessly, because gaming is not mindless, but it's different. It's about being in that flow state as opposed to constantly thinking all the time. So gaming has always been a part of my life.

I took some time off between med school and my first intern year. I had no money. I had zero dollars, because I had never really had a job. I'd always been going to school, going to school, going to school, going to school. And I had this huge amount of student loans because to go to med school costs fifty thousand dollars a year, not counting your living expenses. And unless your parents are physicians or rich, you pay… like who has that money? So I got out of med school, severely in debt with no money, and I had these three months until I was going to start my job and actually earn a paycheck. So all of my colleagues were going to Europe and backpacking around Thailand and I was like, OK, how do I survive with three hundred dollars? I decided to go hike the Appalachian Trail. It doesn't cost any money. All you need is money for food. So I bought a $40 backpack off Amazon. My mom bought me some hiking shoes and I put my stuff in my bag and I hiked the Appalachian Trail.

I'd never been by myself for that long before, ever. Without computers, without screens, video games, without anyone to talk to except for myself. And that level of introspection is something that I was not prepared for. And it made me think a lot about my mortality. And it made me think a lot about life and what made me happy. I realized that I had really gone to med school for the wrong reasons. I was really excited to be an NFL or sports team head team physician. And I was like why? Why do I want that? It's the prestige, and I like being on the sidelines and I want to be able to say that. But what actually makes me happy? I realized video gaming makes me happy. So that is really when I decided I was going to find a way to integrate those two things together. I had no idea what I was going to do with that. Absolutely no idea. It took a couple years for what I'm doing now, GamerDoc, to really come into existence. But it was that at that point that I realized I was going to spend my life doing something that made me happy, and video gaming is always something that's made me happy.

That's quite a revelation. So that led you to start Gamer Doc. Can you tell me a bit about Gamer Doc and how you started that?

So Gamer Doc originally started as more of a social media thing. I was in a pretty restrictive contract at the time, so I couldn't really provide any services other than free educational content. And whenever you have an idea, what you start with is never going to be what you finish with. Whenever you decide to become an entrepreneur, your ideas are usually wrong, and then being able to take constructive criticism and morph into something else is what makes people successful, being able to go back day after day after day and say, “OK, I was wrong. How do I fix it?” Gamer Doc has really developed over the past couple of years into something that I'm really proud of now.

There are really two main facets of what I'm doing: One is the work I do with casual gamers. I'm working with the pediatric population. So kids in day programs or summer camps or high schoolers, and non-profits like PlayVS. I'm working on providing educational content on how to grow healthy behaviors in and around gaming, both mentally and physically. So, you know, I've done a coaching clinic with PlayVS to work with high school coaches and teach them how during COVID to maintain healthy behaviors and how to address the things that maybe people aren't thinking of.

The second one is I'm working with professional esports players or semi pro esports players. And I am doing some performance work. It’s funny because what I'm doing is the same thing. I'm teaching people how to be healthy in what they're doing. But for younger kids, it's about doing healthy preventative things: making sure you're eating right. But for pros, it's about making sure what you're eating is going to set you up for success on competition day.

I'm still talking about nutrition, sleep, training programs, injury prevention, but it's performance or it's prevention in those two categories.

That’s been really fulfilling because it's been challenging, and there actually isn't a lot of data or research in that field. We actually have a book that's about to be published this summer. It's a handbook for esports medicine. I'm also working with a couple of medical schools to develop training programs and then Esports conferences.

So let’s pivot to discussing Queer Women of Esports. Could you tell us a bit about the origin story of The organization?

When I got back into gaming, I got really into Call of Duty. I never knew that multiplayer existed before, and I was suddenly obsessed. I've always had poor impulse control. And so I played Call of Duty for months straight and got really, really good at it. And then I was going to LAN tournaments and competing at a higher level.

That’s when I realized that I was gay and I was coming out, and the toxicity of the Call of Duty community just got to be way too much for me, and for mental health reasons I had to say, “no, I'm done. I can't do this anymore. I guess I'll go to med school.”

Now that I'm on the other side and I have the means to help others, I want to make sure that that experience I had doesn't happen to anyone else if I can help it. Queer Women of Esports is about forming a safe space in competitive video gaming for queer people, whether that is tournaments that they can participate in, or practice sessions, or direct financial sponsorship.

And then also, esports isn't just about competing. There are hosts, there are commentators, there's production, there's marketing, there's a whole swath of jobs in esports that aren’t just about playing the game. And so we're helping get queer women into those jobs as well.

Queer Women of Esports launched our mentorship program in September 2020. It’s a mentorship program, but it's actually a sponsorship program, because women tend to be over mentored and under sponsored. Mentorship is when you go to someone for advice and they give you advice. Sponsorship is when whoever is the senior presents you with opportunities that grow your resume and get you into jobs. That is what we're trying to build. One of the reasons why there is such a large pay gap between men and women is because of this sponsorship/mentorship issue.

I was going to ask about mentorship, but it sounds like sponsorship is really a better thing to talk about. What do you think is special about sponsorship in a career development sense?

The first time anyone told me about any of this was the first year of my residency. I had shown up to this residency program, and in six years, they'd only hired one woman. And I went to my interview with them, and on the way to my interview, I found out my grandfather passed. I was a little bit in a different state of mind when I showed up to my interview. And I was interviewing with the program director and at the end, he asked if I had any questions. And I was like, “yeah, why don't you hire any women?” He started laughing. And he was like, “I really respect the fact that you ask that question. It's just we've tried to… blah blah blah blah blah.”

I got the job. I showed up and I realized there were reasons that women didn't want to go there. There were institutionalized reasons that women picked up on. I was kind of feeling down on myself, kind of regretting taking the job, and I was flipping through the journal of our specialty. And I see in the front page of this specialty publication, a paper is published and it says women, PM&R physicians specifically, don't get enough awards from the journal. And the paper was published in that journal. And so I see that the author's name is Dr. Julie Silver. And I was like, this woman is a badass. I need to meet her. So I cold-called her. I told her, “I think there's nothing cooler than you calling out a journal in their own journal that they don't give enough women awards and they give more men awards.” And she said, “do you want me to be your sponsor?” I was like, “I have no idea what that is. Cool. Let's do it.” And she explained to me the difference. She told me, “you can call me if you want advice, but I'm going to email you every three months with an opportunity and that opportunity is going to build your CV and advance your career.” The first thing she told me was “I need a volunteer for this huge conference in Boston. I'll pay your way.” So she flew me out to Boston. I volunteered at the conference. I met hundreds and hundreds of women and leaders in the field. I was on a paper of hers that I did a bunch of background research on. And she also got me on social media. She told me, “you need to be on social media. It's a great way to share your voice.” And then from social media is where I grew Gamer Doc.

To me, mentorship is you going to your friend for advice or going to someone senior to you and them giving you advice. Sponsorship is literally how I formed my entire career. My career wouldn't be here if it wasn't for sponsorship. And that inherently is the difference. It's hard because I feel like mentorship is kind of like the word professionalism. Mentorship has so many different meanings and so many convoluted meanings now that it's hard to pinpoint it. So we still use the word mentorship in our programming, but our programs include aspects of sponsorship too.

Often in our work at the*gameHERs we have conversations about equity and giving resources to specific groups of people who may be underrepresented in certain spaces. Why is it important to you to have a group that focuses on queer women in esports specifically?

It's very important. There are so many reasons. I think a good example is, I thought I wanted to do traditional sports medicine before going into this field. And I kept not being asked to do things.

For example, there was a national lacrosse championship that they needed sports coverage for. And one of my colleagues was chosen. There was an NBA game that needed coverage and one of my colleagues was chosen. And this kept happening over and over and over and over and over again. And I had been emailing everyone telling them “I want sports coverage. Please take me to sports coverage. I will do anything. I'll go Friday night!”

I discovered that I kept missing these opportunities because the boys would be chitchatting in the side room in between procedures with the attending physician. And the attending is a big burly guy, and they're talking about all this big burly guy stuff. And he was like, “oh, did you... Do you want to go to the lacrosse event... you're an athletic dude. Do you want to go to this lacrosse game, and do sports coverage?” And, of course, that guy's like, “yeah yeah, I'd love to.”

People tend to gravitate towards and support people who look like them and who think like them and have the same interests as them. My attending physician is a very nice guy. He's very sweet. He was not intentionally excluding the women in his program. But I think he was.

That sort of advocacy, in which the people who are higher up tend to pull people up who look and think like them, is a huge reason for the gap in representation, the gap in pay between different groups. So that applies to BIPOC people. That applies to LGBTQ people. That applies to women. And then women who are higher up don't tend to extend that same hand because they either believe everyone should get pulled up equally, or they feel like they need to maintain their position. And they don't want to be that proponent for advocacy.

It’s hard because when you are the only female or the only BIPOC person or the only queer person in a sea of people who are different than you, it's hard to be that advocate sometimes because then you're going to be the token queer or the token woman. But it’s really important to be that outside advocate because of that inherent pipeline that queer women are missing out on.

Definitely. I think that what people often don't talk about is that there is a perceived risk associated with going out on a limb and deciding to advocate for somebody else when you already are marginalized within the group that you're in. And so I think that having these programs like Queer Women of Esports that facilitate that kind of mentorship and that kind of support in a way that is structured can help create a space in which people don’t feel like it’s all on them to put themselves on the line to advocate for others.

What would you dream for the future of esports for queer women? And as a part two to that question, as consumers and as community members in esports, how can we advocate for and support the future of queer women and women in esports?

I envision an esports community that is just as diverse and representative as the world is and the gaming population is. A recent study came out that showed that high school esports organizations, when they had no funding and they were student-run, were remarkably diverse. There were women. There were nonwhite people. It was great. And then as soon as the organizations get funding, all of the diversity is eliminated. All of it. And that is the difference we see between gaming and esports. Gaming has this rich, diverse culture – at least in the casual gaming world, not necessarily in the jobs and things like that -- but once you start going to esports, that diversity is relatively eliminated. So having just a reflection of the population would be wonderful.

It's not just gaming. It's having queer characters who are just queer, and it's not their entire plotline. You know, having women who are female protagonists, who don’t have to be major love interests or who are only trying to avenge or protect a child. It's the same goal with esports: having esports teams that have women on them and that just aren't all women, having esports teams with queer people on them, that aren't queer esports teams, having female coaches, having more organizations like Evil Geniuses that have 50/50 representation in the higher-ups. That's really what we want in esports.

What people don't understand is… they're like, “well, it's competitive video gaming, so if you're better than the other person, you should be able to be on those [professional] teams.” But why is someone better than someone else? In order to be good at video games, you have to train for years and years and years and years against people who are not only good, but who are better than you.

How do you get into those communities? It's Discord servers. It's a whole community that's spamming gay slurs and spamming "get back in the kitchen" and spamming "make me a sandwich." Women aren't welcome in those communities. Queer people aren't welcome in those communities. So we don't get the opportunity to train. We don't get the opportunity to be as good as everybody else. So it has to start early. It has to start early. These toxic communities can no longer exist.

I want to get to a point where the only difference between my skill level and your skill level is how hard we try and not the opportunities we were given. That’s the future that I see.

Check out Queer Women of Esports’s website at: