My “Outside the Lines” appearance Sunday prompted the understandable and passionate response from gay and transgender sports advocate Pat Griffin that I thought it would, although that was never my purpose in saying what I did. I responded on her blog, and I do appreciate Pat being a rare sports-and-gender blogger who opens up her site for commenting. I had my reply, and a few other readers were in my corner to some degree, at least for raising issues that are largely uncomfortable to question.

What did surprise me was the feedback I got from a few coaches and others in Indianapolis at the Women’s Final Four who had seen the program and thought I made some valid points. I do appreciate those comments as well, and I’m not trying to pat myself on the back here.

While I’m not obsessed with this, I do feel it’s important to engage in more than one point of view when it comes to the dicey mix of culture, gender and sports. Far beyond the scope of Title IX (which has made me enough of a bête noire in some women’s sports circles), what I regard as the wasted cultural obsessions of women’s sports (delving mostly into the Kye Allums matter) have not had an adequate public hearing.

Most of this centers on issues of sexuality, of course, and the recent piece in ESPN The Magazine on homophobia in recruiting (always a media favorite, regenerated with a big splash every few years) illustrates this.

But a recent acquaintance sympathetic to sexual minorities in sports put it best to me: It’s understandable that Pat Griffin and Helen Carroll of the National Center for Lesbian Rights (and a former college basketball coach) go to the lengths they do to work on behalf of, and give a voice, to athletes who feel without a place to go. But if all you do is focus on these issues, then it does give knuckleheads further ammunition to bash women’s sports.

I would add only that women’s sports advocates also tend to marginalize themselves because some assume their views are more mainstream than they really are, and that everyone else “should” believe what they do. And some who may not follow the party line, especially on a touchy cultural subject, are reluctant to say anything at all for fear of being viewed as intolerant.

However, this acquaintance, as well as other women with whom I discussed some of these issues in Indy, are part of a younger generation that’s not as hung up on these matters to the degree that we geezers seem to be.

So this was all a more intriguing and encouraging experience than I imagined.

That’s a question that comes up a lot in women’s basketball and in women’s sports in general, and it’s one that I find fascinating but ultimately frustrating.

This morning, hours before the Women’s Final Four tipped off in Indianapolis, I appeared on ESPN’s “Outside the Lines” program to discuss Kye Allums, the George Washington University transgender athlete who went public with his disclosure before the season began.

As I suggested at the time, cultural issues like this always seemingly trump other more pressing topics in women’s sports, and make it difficult for them to reach a broader mainstream appeal. I reiterated that point this morning and continued to express some puzzlement over a self-identified male who wishes to be true to himself but still wants a place — and a scholarship — on a women’s team.

Those were questions he avoided during the interview, and the lack of candor was obvious. I realize this is a young person here, a college student, and so I hesitate to dwell on this point.

I wish OTL instead had focused on what I think is a much more relevant subject about the women’s game today: The growing financial implications of big-money budgets and salaries for the nation’s top programs and coaches. I wrote about that here on Saturday, and another example of that unfolded later on Saturday.

LSU hired UCLA coach Nikki Caldwell, who will make around $900,000 annually, triple the salary she drew while building the Bruins into a nationally prominent program.

Not bad for a coach with three years of head coaching experience.

As a Twitter follower of mine commented about this, “business is business,” and the money being laid out to purloin hot coaching talent reflects the high-stakes pressures that come with the top jobs.

Athletics directors willing to spend that kind of money understand the women’s game is a full-fledged enterprise that long ago dwarfed narrow social causes but that still generate a very bright — and I think unwarranted — media spotlight.

Forgive my tardiness in getting around to the case of Kye Allums, who plays for the women’s basketball team at George Washington University and is in the midst of a female-to-male transgender process.

I was waiting for the tidal wave of coverage about Allums’ story – much of it sympathetic to his situation — to subside. Much of what has been written and uttered is understandable, given the nature of his disclosure. I can’t imagine discussing such an intensely personal matter with anyone outside of family members or close friends.

It’s a fascinating and complex topic, starting with whether an athlete who identifies with a gender other than the one to which he/she was born should be allowed to compete with a gender of which he/she no longer desires to belong.

But as I read the various commentaries on Allums, I became profoundly disturbed. Not necessarily by Allums and what he represents (although I do, to a certain degree), but rather the hyperbole and occasionally mindless applause from some bloggers, journalists and advocates for transgender athletes.

Perhaps the most dubious analogy came from the usually reasonable Kevin Blackistone of FanHouse, who likened Allums’ “courage” to the Greensboro lunch counter sit-in demonstrators from 1960.

No, really.

Nobody wants to appear intolerant, of course, but there are some troubling implications here for women’s sports. It’s not entirely about whether a male-identified player should be able to play on a women’s team (more on that in a moment), but how some women’s sports advocates have no problem with their domain being used as a perpetual canvas for social experiments.

(And yet they remain oblivious to the attendant freak show headlines that have accompanied this story outside their coterie.)

Of course, for a certain slice of the sports feminist crowd, the whole athletic realm needs to be carpet-bombed to better suit women and those who don’t fit neatly into what they have long argued is a very tight box of gender conformity and those supposed “stereotypes.”

And while we’re a generation or so removed from the mere idea of female participation in athletics being regarded as a cultural “revolution,” we’ve long passed the notion that getting in the game is a head-turning event.

Haven’t we? Sometimes I’m not so sure.

The other major story on the women’s sports scene that’s been lost amid the clamor over Allums is the very precarious state of women’s professional soccer in the United States. The San Francisco Bay Area-based FC Gold Pride, which recently won the Women’s Professional Soccer league title, and the Washington Freedom, with U.S. star forward Abby Wambach, were reportedly on the verge of folding.

Now there are unidentified sources suggesting there may be a potential sugar daddy in southern California for Gold Pride, which boasts Marta, Brazil’s four-time FIFA world player of the year.

The disconnect between these two stories is gargantuan, and illustrates the one of the great weaknesses of the ever-fragile women’s sports movement.

Namely: That it is still stuck in the cultural and social undertow of its earlier phases, while the need — I would argue the imperative — to bolster the foundering business of women’s sports is not even an afterthought.

It may well be that women’s pro soccer just doesn’t have enough of an audience to make it as a spectator entity on these shores. That’s a possibility that first came to my mind after covering the Women’s United Soccer Association, the forereunner to the WPS. That league had Mia Hamm, Julie Foudy, Brandi Chastain and the other now-retired of the U.S. women’s national team.

Now its largely anonymous successors — save Wambach — are on the verge of what would be a humiliating exit from the 2011 Women’s World Cup.

That story, too, has gone virtually unnoticed outside of American soccer circles.

Another WPS team, the Chicago Red Stars, issued an unnerving statement this week about seeking new investors, in the larger context of the struggles of women’s pro sports.

This is where the fault line is clearly delineated but completely missed amid the self-congratulatory “acceptance” of Kye Allums, shrieking over the lack of women’s ski jumping at the Olympics and inane battle cries about making the athletic far too personal.

But those are topics for another time.

What do I really think about Kye Allums? Like his story, it’s complicated.

If he really does identify with being a male — and  apparently is going to do the surgical thing after his college basketball eligibility expires — then why in the world does he still want to play on a women’s team?

Why does he want to lay this narrative on a gender that he will be leaving behind, both psychologically and biologically?

Why, in God’s name, is the National Center for Lesbian Rights — which finally snared disgraced former Penn State women’s hoops coach Rene Portland after she was in its crosshairs for many years — taking up Allums’ cause? Here is someone who wants to leave The Sisterhood. He may have identified with sapphism at one point, but that’s clearly not the case now.

Why has GW coach Mike Bozeman said nothing more than this terse, university-issued statement of support for Allums? Is it because of a DC law forbidding discrimination against a transgender people? Would anything less than unequivocal support for Allums be grounds for a charge of bias?

This couldn’t have been what Bozeman — who’s overseen a major collapse of a program that Joe McKeown had built into the pride of the mid-majors — wants to deal with as he enters a season that could determine his fate at that school.

These are questions that were not raised during the breathless tributes to someone who clearly has gone through an excruciating ordeal. We live in a society that values what it believes is honesty, so it isn’t hard to discern why Allums would get props for going public.

But Allums’ act ultimately is a selfish one, and frankly, not all that courageous. As much as I wish him the best from here, he has managed to impose himself, unintentionally or not, onto a sport that gains nothing from him being there.

In The New York Times, Katie Thomas details the lawsuit retired police officer Lana Lawless has filed against the LPGA for banning potential competitors like her who are not born female.

Among the other targets of her legal action — and I’m not making any of this up, including her name — are the Long Drivers of America and Dick’s Sporting Goods, which are among the sponsors of this weekend’s LPGA event in California.

God forbid what the frat boy sports sites are going to do with all that, but I doubt it will be no more edifying than the latest Brett Favre brouhaha.

Thomas offers some interesting perspective from Renee Richards, who doesn’t agree with this claim by Lawless that goes to the heart of the transgender identity:

“There is no such thing as born female. Either you’re female, or you’re not.”

I appreciate the principles that people like Lawless are fighting for, but that declaration also goes to to the heart of what animates those who assert that gender is not fixed biologically but rather is a “social construct.”

I won’t wade into those troublesome waters here, and I haven’t been able yet to pore through this study on how to address the concerns of transgender athletes into high school and competitive sports.

Where this may fit into the larger spectrum of women and sports presents another quandary. How much time and energy should the women’s sports movement spend fighting for the rights of transgender athletes when there are so many pressing issues? I simply don’t know.

What I do know is that this is not what the LPGA had in mind when it was seeking greater mainstream media attention.