It’s a red-letter year in women’s sports: the first time that women outnumber men on the U.S. Olympic team. According to Reuters, the London-bound U.S. team consists of 269 women and 261 men. Cause for celebration, right? Shouldn’t we always get excited when we see signs that a gender gap is closing?

Not if you agree with the people who commented on Yahoo! News’ coverage of the story.

Now, I understand that opinions on the Internet, even if they look like a majority, are hardly representative of the larger populace. They’re pulled from a small subset of the population who spend their days sitting in front of a computer snacking and trolling for funsies, which I really hope doesn’t reflect the average American. But the opinions that have surfaced around this story are symptomatic of larger problems in the discussion of women’s participation in sports—and gender equality in general—that merit consideration.

The most “liked” comment on this article (tellingly authored by “Imatroll”) says that we shouldn’t be proud of the rise in women’s Olympic participation, because that implies that we should be ashamed that men have led the pack so far. At best, the author states, we should consider this statistic just an interesting fact and not an achievement or sign of future equality.

Some people take this dismissal a step further and claim that we shouldn’t discuss this statistic at all, saying that articles about gender equality are just starting fights in order to drive up reader traffic. One comment even tried to play the blame game: apparently it’s sexist to even praise women’s athletic success, because that reinforces the stereotype that women aren’t usually good at sports.

What all these comments say to me is this: some men feel threatened when women’s achievements are honored. Some men see in this statistic an unspoken accusation that men have deliberately hindered women’s rise to the top (which neither the article nor the Olympic Committee ever claimed), and their frightened reaction is to shut down the conversation entirely so they can pretend the male-dominated status quo hasn’t been challenged.

In an attempt to soothe Imatroll’s bruised ego, “Chispio” replied, “Come on, guys. It’s an accomplishment. I’m sure that’s all they meant. It doesn’t mean you’re losing anything here.”

Reasonable, right, and kind too? Except it’s received nearly twice as many dislikes as likes and is one of the more hated comments.

In this war of opinions, it’s troubling that some people seem hell bent on maintaining the stereotype that sports (and everything physical) is the exclusive kingdom of men. Every time a comment asserted that men would still lead the Olympic team if the men’s soccer team hadn’t lost out, I could practically see terrified men scrabbling for any excuse to insist that males are still entitled to their place at the top and this year’s abundance of female athletes is just a passing fluke.

So naturally the troll response on the Internet is to use ridicule to put women “back in their place.” Even while reflexively claiming that equality is a non-issue in order to silence their detractors, comments often worked in a quip that women’s sports are boring, uncompetitive, or frivolous. I suppose they’re going for a quality-over-quantity argument, claiming that men still deserve top honors because the fewer male athletes at the Games are competing in more challenging sports.

Now run along and play your cute little softball and volleyball games, girls. How sweet, they think they’re playing real sports!

As if that wasn’t infuriating enough, a few comments jokingly (or not, which is even scarier) claimed that they were actually glad to see more women Olympians—more boobs and butts on the sand court. If trolls couldn’t dismiss women’s accomplishments as irrelevant or fleeting, they resorted to objectifying the women involved, degrading their participation from athletic landmark to male-serving peep show.

If this is how female athletes are treated, I’m not surprised it’s taken so long for women to take the Olympic lead. But they’ve proven they have what it takes, and no matter how trolls try to spin it, this year’s milestone tears down one more hurdle in the way of women’s sports.