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Women Are Strong
(lemmy.nz)
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this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2026
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I think this argument falls apart the moment it encounters reality.
There's a reason virtually all physical sports have separate divisions for men and women. In many of them the men's division is technically the general division and women are allowed to take part, but typically don't because by and large they cannot compete with the men in that division. There's only a handful of sports where women compete with men on equal footing, and even fewer sports where women clearly outperform men. And yes, there are a couple of examples in history where a league adjusted its rules to exclude women after a woman started beating the men and the chauvinists in charge couldn't handle this (iirc some shooting competitions for example), but the fact is that this is not the case for the overwhelming majority of sports.
This is just fundamentally a nonsensical argument to begin with. What does it matter that, statistically, women are weaker than men? Society generally does not measure a person's worth by their physical strength.
Pro athletes are an even worse point of comparison, because most people of either gender will literally never ever be able to become a pro athlete at most sports no matter how hard they try. Not only because of genetic determinism, but also because becoming a pro athlete begins in childhood and unless you were on that track as a teenager that ship has sailed by the time you're an adult.
So yeah, women's leagues exist in sports because by and large women's bodies are physically different from men's. Without these leagues female athletes would have no opportunity to compete in a lot of sports as they would be completely crowded out by male athletes. It's not (for the most part) a conspiracy of the patriarchy to put women down.
This argument is that banning trans women from playing with other women is because they are imbued with some magical strength that comes from having been assigned male at birth. That is implying trans women are men and thus still stronger than cis women; which is not the case.
I am talking about the argument in OP's image that's claiming that women being weaker than men is "ideology". It's not ideology, it's reality. Women's sports divisions exist because they are a form of necessary positive discrimination, not because the patriarchy wants to put women down in sports. It makes no sense to deny this; instead we should admit it and work towards a society where "weaker" is not the same thing as "inferior".
The transgender sports debate is a distinct issue. The argument in OP's image doesn't really make much sense to me wrt. that debate, because to me it seems it's trying to argue that women's divisions shouldn't exist in the first place when clearly they exist for a good reason.
The ideology in question in that post is that women are 'inferior' not that women are weaker. Their physical strength is a way to push patriarchal views. It is being framed in the context of trans women in sport because it denies them their womanhood and ties it into masculine traits.
It is true that if you overlap the bell curve of strength, height, and whatever other markers men will generally be on the higher end, but not entirely. In my opinion sex is a very lazy way to distribute athletes into competitive groups.
For example, I am a cis-male who is on the lower average end of height, weight, and since I only do light exercise, strength too. My cis-female friend, on the other hand, is 6 feet tall, has done strength training, and played college basketball. Even if I were to train in strength and skill for basketball, she would still have a huge advantage due to her height. I would have a harder time defending shots she takes, and she could more easily block mine. Since basketball is a team sport I could try to focus on stealing and then passing to a teammate who is taller, but then again so could a cis-female against cis-males.
I don't know what exactly the better way to distribute athletes would be, but I am sure kinesiologists can probably think of something besides sex.
Edit: I added "cis" to be more clear
It makes no sense to even consider any ordinary person in the same sentence as professional sports. Professional athletes are extreme outliers. Ordinary people, by definition, are not. Even most college athletes aren't -- there's a massive gulf between a 90th percentile and 99.9th percentile athlete in pretty much any sport.
For some sports, particularly team sports, there's undoubtedly a cultural barrier that hinders women competing with men, but this is not really the case for individual sports like track and field. The reality is that we do not see the top female athletes in the world coming anywhere near the top male athletes in the 100 metre sprint, shot put, triple jump, triathlon or what have you. This is IMO pretty incontrovertible proof that it is a matter of biology.
I've found top athletes in general are a tough pill to swallow for people who subscribe to (IMO) a naive reading of egalitarianism, given the ample empirical evidence they present for all sorts of genetic determinism. My take is that sports are fundamentally discriminatory at the highest level and there is no way to fix this, and really that's okay because high-level sports literally concern an absolutely minuscule fraction of the population.
No, it is not this argument. That's a different argument.
Among top performers in physical activities, men dominate for genetic reasons. That's not only because men are significantly stronger than women on average, it's also because men tend to have more variability for a lot of traits, so the really high-performing men in many physical fields really are freakishly good at what they do.
That's not a political statement and has nothing to do with values or culture. It's sex, not gender.
The comment you responded to gave you the perfect evidence for this. There's no men's sports, there's just an open league and anyone regardless of gender is free to participate if they can compete. It's a fact that from soccer to chess, women tend not to qualify at the very top. (And neither do 99.9999% of men for that matter.)
That's why women's sports are exclusive, gender-separatist spaces.
Now pay attention because the next part is important. The right is playing culture war over this issue and targeting trans women, using a bait-and-switch with the actual fucking scientific facts stated above and the non-sequitur that anyone who was born with XY chromosomes has an unfair advantage over someone who was born with XX.
The latter statement does not make sense, is not scientific and does not follow from the first. That should be our focus, not trying to deny facts.
It is the argument in OPs image, and it is conveniently left out of the comment. Instead framing this as male sex is stronger than female sex, hence male sex must be kept out to ensure fairness. It reeks of transphobic dog whistles.
The argument in OPs image is confused and badly presented. The parts relating to physical strength have been factually refuted.
We're fucked if we let the right own the facts. Yes it's often used as ragebait or a transphobic dogwhistle, but please, take a moment to consider why it's working.
The parts relating to trans womens physical strength show them to be on par with cis womens physical strength after a few years of hormone therapy. We're fucked if we let the right dictate factoids.
There we go. Now we're getting somewhere.
Title of the thread: "Women Are Strong"
Literal first sentence of the tweet: "...is to spread the idea that women are "weaker" than men"
Also the tweet: "The most successful thing the conservatives have ever done is get feminists to agree that women are weaker than men, using transgender hate as a Trojan horse"
Somewhat ironically I think it's in fact this tweet that's using the transgender athlete debate as a trojan horse, in a way trying to reframe it to be about women's rights rather than (or in addition to) trans rights. I'm guessing it's an attempt to get TERFs to change their minds.