Let's just admit that men and women are different. It doesn't mean that one is better or worse than the other. If we can't start from a place of acknowledging the simple facts of reality, then we aren't living in reality.

I'm... I'm actually not sure which side you're arguing for. Are you arguing for one integrated league... or are you arguing against that? 😛

What I was going for, and may not have achieved, is that men really are excellent at sports. Not all men, certainly not me, but the ones that are freakish are really really freakishly good. But also not the same men, like, the ones that are the best swimmers are not the best runners, who are not the best basketball players. When a sport requires muscle, some dude will have the most muscle, and when it requires height, some dude will be the tallest.

When people cheat at sports, sometimes it's through injecting extra testosterone, so it's definitely a factor.

But the main point I was trying to make is that excellence at sports is not, and should not, be considered "superiority". Women can be non-competitive with men at sports, and still be superior or equal on an average day-by-day basis. When going to a bank, being 7ft tall with an ungodly armspan doesn't help.

We split the sports so that women could still play with their friends and have fun winning and facing surmountable challenges. In sports. If people want to not play sports, that's great! But if you do, there's a league for that that's meant to be fun.

I think the premise is somewhat flawed. If we're going to decide superiority based on direct head-to-head conflict, a thing men are advantaged at, then it's going to seem like men always come out ahead. But that's because we've stacked the deck and decided to judge based on what we're already good at! So it's not a fair comparison, it's not an even playing field to determine "bestness", if that's even a thing we should be trying to decide.

Here's another observations I have, this time with no data to back it up, just shooting straight from the gut. When talking about chess or chef-ing or Jeopardy or StarCraft or guitar or painting or whatever non-physical thing, there's a ton of privilege and support for men over women. Definitely. But also, whether through hormones or brain chemistry or upbringing or culture or comorbidities, some men seem more... obsessive about stuff? Like, some men spend 18 hours a day every day doing their thing, and everything else gets no attention at all. Like, no partner, just eating cereal, no laundry, no decoration, haven't showered, there is nothing but this thing in their life. Every day. And that's probably not good or healthy, but it can make one very very good at whatever it is they're spending all their time on.

And maybe it's just me, but I've never seen any woman that put that much single-minded time into anything as these men have. The women seem much more balanced, which is actually better as a lifestyle, but again if you're measuring superiority based on success in direct competition, it's going to look like the unhealthy lifestyle is the superior one. But it's probably not.

And I don't know why they are that way, it's not the way I am, I'm just on their team because of how we drew the lines 😅

And I mean, if you're going to mention race. Have you noticed the racial breakdown of sports teams? The ratios are not representative of their local demographics 😛. There is definitely advantage there, and it's not that it was a bad idea to split leagues because it turned out there was "fairness" after all... it just looked bad enough that it was embarrassing to split that way and they gave up and redrew the lines. But again, most importantly, sport performance is a bad measure of superiority.