It seems to me that the sports angle is being hammered because thats what resonated with people the most: theres plausible deniability baked in because its about "fairness" rather than bigotry.
If I were a really smart philosopher, i would know which level of knowledge received wisdom about sports belong on, and would probably say something witty about climate change relative to it
At the 2024 Paris Olympics, in the 800m track event, the woman who won gold, fastest in the world that year, ran the race in 1 minute and 56 seconds. I chose those games because it was the most recent Olympics, and I chose the 800m race because it was something I knew I could find corresponding data for.
At the 2026 OFSAA senior finals, the fastest runner in the 800m race finished in 1 minute 53 seconds. OFSSA is Ontario highschool boys, so in this case he was a highschool senior (grade 12 likely). That's not the Olympics, it's not nationals, it's the fastest highschool boy in the province of Ontario Canada in 2026, and he would have gotten gold in the Olympics by 3 full seconds. The Olympic gold medalist would have come in 8th place in Ontario assuming the same performance. I picked Ontario because I live here, I picked 2026 because it's the current year, and I didn't go hunting for a result like this, the 800m run is literally the first thing I looked up.
The Olympic record for the fastest any woman has ever run 800m is in 1980 when a woman ran it in 1 minute 53.43 seconds which is 0.17 seconds faster than this year's fastest Ontario boy. Had he run in that race, again assuming same performance, he would have come in a very close second. Silver from the 1980 race would have gotten bronze in Ontario this year, and bronze from that race would have come 5th. And remember that's the fastest race ever, from 1980, not this most recent Olympics where gold would have come 8th in Ontario.
To cherry-pick a little, last year that same Ontario boy ran the 800m in 1 min 52.36 seconds, so that year he was faster than any woman on earth has run it. The all-time world record for women's would have come 4th in Ontario that year, so not on the podium. None of that is even close to the the all time Ontario record, by the way, which is 1 minute 48 seconds set in 2007.
Okay, so what. I'm not saying women are inferior because they run slower. Maybe we decide sport in general is a dumb way to rank people. I'm not saying I'm faster than the Olympic women's athletes. There's a spectrum and there's overlap. I'm not saying trans women have the performance characteristics of men. Data seem to show those advantages may decrease over time. I'm not fighting to keep trans women out of sports.
The trans in sport thing is absolutely a distraction, because the people taking the hardest stances didn't give a shit about women's sport before this.
But there's a reason we keep records and events separate, and it's because a random highschool boy from Ontario Canada is not the fastest boy alive, but every year some highschool boy in Ontario runs fast enough to win Olympic Gold against the women, and often, or at least occasionally, faster than any woman ever. Let alone nationals, international, and Olympic men.
What an infuriating read, dancing around saying "I'm not saying trans women should be kept out of sports" while simultaneously hammering home just how inferior women seem to be to men when we look at the highest levels of sport.
Are men inherently smarter (chess), more coordinated (darts), more elegant (ice skating), and more agile (gymnastics)? Is it the penis, the testosterone, or some amount of time that makes these things inherent? Do women with PCOS have to start competing with men? Is it how estrogenized someone is, and if so how much is enough and for how long?
Is all of that worth telling trans girls they can't play with their friends? Is all of that worth telling women that men really are the superior gender?
Protection is one thing but comparing what men can do with incredible investment and support structures compared to what most women's sports get is disingenuous at best. This argument is never in good faith. We tried this segregation shit with race before I was born and it's as shit of an argument now as it was then.
EDIT: Their entire post is side-eyeing speed records and going "I'm not saying anything buuuut". If you can't understand why I'm frustrated reading it as a trans woman then just block me and move the fuck on. It's bait made to get people to think it's reasonable to assume that women are not as athletic as men in a post about trans women being excluded from sports with their peers. And all of that side-eyeing implies there's a "man advantage" that women need to be protected from. In context, you can understand what the commenter's heavily implied suggestion is.
If that didn't clarify where I stand: If we're going to have gendered sports, trans people belong with their gender. Full stop. Casually gesturing at gendered professional records as a gotcha or moderate position still implies that you see trans women like me as men.
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.
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.
Many people believe that different means better or worse, it never occurs to them different can just mean not the same. Its like comparison never ends for those people, everything is a measuring stick to compete or argue over.
Many people believe that the moon landing was a hoax. Many people believe that vaccines cause autism. Many people believe stupid shit all over the world a thousand times over.
And some just shout at the sky.
Yes, very good analysis. The thing is, this all assumes that all girls sports are about to be pitted against boys in all categories. When the reality is the phenomena of a trans girl wanting to play in sports is extremely rare. Trans athletes make up just .002% of college athleteshttps://www.sf.gov/trans-women-in-sports-facts-over-fear . Given all the factors that are involved with transition and the rarity of someone wanting to compete it seems to me to be more of a case by case basis rather than legislating hard rules that as the OP points out do more harm to women in general.
I agree with you! The trans-athlete debate is mostly just anti-trans opinions wrapped in a palettable shell. And checking for transness, even if you don't care about trans people and only care about cis-women, is still super fucked because even in a field of only cis-women it's going to be embarassing and invasive.
But I don't think any of that is what OP was about. I think that's just your own opinions reflected back at you on the general topic that OPs comments were on.
OP was saying that that anti-trans concerns have tricked us into believing that women suck and are bad at stuff, and that this inherent badness is why we need DEI and other things like it. And that's not true, I mean by and large the reason for a lot of equality issues is that the dudes in positions of power are willfully being shitty to women, not because women can't do male jobs. And those same dudes also, wouldn't you know it, happen to be the ones against this stuff. So that's all great...
But sports is a bad example. Sports is kinda the one place there is actually a measurable advantage that seems unlikely to be just bias or gatekeeping, which is what I tried to highlight with my stats.
But even this isn't fully against what OP was saying. I think they were saying the bad people are using this one case where there's an unbiased difference, and implying that this is also the case in other areas where it doesn't apply. In this I also agree with OP, that maybe sports are a bad place to focus.
(I'm not saying men have never tried to gatekeep women from sports. I've seen the picture of people trying to pull a woman off the course of the Boston Marathon. I'm just saying that in 2024 the 90th percentile finishing time for young men was 2 hours and 40 minutes and for young women was 3 hours and 8 minutes)
Come on... Are we really going to argue that on average, men are not stronger and taller than women? That doesn't make women inferior to men. Men will, on average, go bald more often and earlier than women. That doesn't make men inferior to women.
This feels like an insanely online take.
What we're arguing is whether the definition of "strong" is tuned so that men are "stronger" than women. There are far more sports that focus on the upsides of having large amounts of anabolic steroids (such as testosterone) in your blood than ones that give space to the downsides, or that look at features unaffected by it.
Imagine a soccer game where all players were restricted to 1500 kcal and 80g of protein per day in the month leading up to the match. Suddenly "stronger" men would be malnourished, woozy and easily outmaneuvered by relatively clear-headed and fit women. It's not like you can argue that this isn't falling in the sport tradition of measuring military performance by proxy either - an army marches on its stomach, and soldiers might not always have access to full rations.
But no, our very conception of "strength" discounts the entire infrastructure behind it. In sports as in the wider world. Physical and metaphorical. Wars have been lost because the "strength" of armies did not account for the logistics of supplying them. Was the US army "stronger" than the Taliban in Afghanistan? Did it win?
And yes, men are taller than women, but there is a sport for jumping over hurdles and not a sport for ducking under them. There is a sport for jumping over the tallest gate but not for crawling through the smallest hole. There is a sport for being the lightest load on horseback, though, and ever since women were unbanned they've been climing in the rankings and now they're getting wins as you might expect. Being taller is not an advantage unless the sport's ruleset makes it so. But somehow it is an advantage in almost every olympic sport. Curious.
If "strength" only meant the peak force that a human limb could generate we wouldn't be having this conversation. If "strength" only meant the capacity to do violence we wouldn't be having this conversation. Nor if it only meant virtue, or capacity for labor, or excellent feature, or mechanical load bearing capacity, or ability to sit through a funeral without crying like a healthy person. But it means all of that and more.
"Strength" is the patriarchal ideal of masculinity and our worldview distorts to see it as the natural way to excel, despite reality constantly showing us otherwise.
I get that this might feel like an extremely online take. So did Socrates' takes to the people of Athens. It takes a distance from society to be able to see its structure and question its base assumptions.
I get that this might feel like an extremely online take. So did Socrates' takes to the people of Athens. It takes a distance from society to be able to see its structure and question its base assumptions.
I think your comment was an excellent articulation of what I was thinking, although I think you risk a significant distraction by using Afghanistan as an example when talking about sex and gender. I think comparing yourself to Socrates is overly aggrandising.
But yeah I agree. It's not that men are better at sports, it's that the patriarchy has defined "sports" as what realmen™ are better at.
When you optimize for the top men vs top women, you'll often see men come out on top. (Though there likely also is an element of men being encouraged to go into sports, rather than women, so they are disadvantaged not only because of biological differences.) The part of the OP you skipped is "inherently weaker". There's a problematic viewpoint, while not taken literally most of the time, of all women being weaker than all men. Or that they should always be weaker, whether physically, or just in the "being subservient" way.
With your response having missed the point, it basically shows you're falling for that propaganda. I invite you to rethink.
When you optimize for the top men vs top women, you’ll often see men come out on top.
And the middle. And any other reasonably comparable subset of men and women.
The part of the OP you skipped is “inherently weaker”.
Because it's a wild assertion made without evidence. OP feels this is part of a vast concerted planned conspiracy...
(Personally I think if there is a conspiracy, it's to create fights like this on the Left. It sounds like the Left is saying that men aren't generally bigger and stronger than women, which, for anyone who has ever seen multiple people, must seem a pretty wild claim.)
I think what's being pointed out is that it's not that black and white, and the argument you are using has been coopted and used as propaganda. As a part of critical thinking, we should be able to question everything we believe, in such a way as to disregard it. Do you accidentally have a bias because you've believed this your whole life, is a good question to ask. I'm not saying you're wrong or right, I do have an opinion on that, but I'm not expressing that right now, and I'm not talking about the premise, but the active ability to oppose your own thinking. Could you, (for any topic) put both or the many factors on the table in front of you and are you capable of rejecting beliefs you thought were inherent. It's something we all need to learn, with the co-opting of ingrained beliefs by orchestators of propaganda.
My opinion, no I don't think on average women and men are comparable like that. You're thinking of the idealised and top athletes, of both, and you're imagining an equal standing throughout thier lives to become the athletes. That doesn't exist. If the same athlete men had the societal pressures and responsibilities that had to also keep up, would that not shave a few seconds off their time. Does muscle structure make a difference, maybe. Maybe not. Height? Are we just judging running and running alone? Wouldn't that skew the results. That doesn't seem to be a varied comparison, that seems cherry picked. Women's and men's competitions used to be combined, until the men kept getting butt hurt at losing to a woman. Which events, I can't remember. It's more that the thought brings questions to answer. We should always be questioning what we believe, and be flexible enough to improve upon our knowledge.
Women's and men's competitions used to be combined, until the men kept getting butt hurt at losing to a woman.
That's not why we separate the genders in competitions. We do it for the same reason we separate the age bands and weight classes.
Which events, I can't remember.
Convienent for your fallacious argument.
I see your point thag this isnt a black and white comparison, and there are definitely societal norms and pressures put onto boys and their performance in sports equating to their self worth.
But until someone can control for those, any other assertion is meaningless and entirely unprovable. The current data in all countries is that, no matter what level of competition you look at, men are faster/stronger on average when you are competing. The sole exception I am aware of where women routinely beat men's records at all levels is ultra endurance running (>50km is the threshold).
I've looked into this previously and am pretty confident. I'd be happy to be proven wrong, so if you can find any competition record with a good number of women and men where the women are equal to the men, on average, please provide it.
I am an athletic person who regularly races in a variety of sports as an adult, as well as various sports from highschool through varsity sports, and in every event I've done (save the ultramarathons noted above) average men times vs average women times are different.
Individuals aren’t averages or I’d be taller, and men aren’t competing in women’s sports.
Are you really arguing trans women are men?
Where do you get that from their comment?
The part where this is about the trans women in sport debate. Y’know the entire thing being discussed.
There are lots wrong with their comment including misogyny and ableism in general.
However, we're not sure misgendering is one of them, we say this as trans beings who have seen a lot of it.
As a smaller, weaker man, I'm always amazed that people think women are "inherently" weaker. Yes, stats matter, but there are so many woman who are drasticly stronger, and larger than me.
And good for them. I've never really been intimidated by that. I don't understand this insecurity, but then again, I'm not a fucking fascist.
Also, I find the sports debate silly. We have different weight classes for different sports. Why is it suddenly different when its male vs female? Just do similar things, with similar controls.
There are no rules in the NFL against women playing in the sport professionally. Just saying.
And how many high schools allow girls to play on the football team?
Probably none. And why would they? That would be pretty insane, honestly. That was the whole point.
Yeah, exactly. Because it's more of a societal expectation, than a reality in any measured sense. And a very toxic expectation at that. Is the defence of "men stronger" because those defending have been beaten about the head by this expectation so much that it has harmed their sense of self and self worth. And admitting it's not accurate might cause them a form of ego death. (Which wouldn't be bad, ego formed from toxic beliefs isn't a good way to live, burn it all down and rebuild, I say).
Whilst what you say is correct for you. It is extremely likely that you are stronger than a woman of the same height and weight as you.
I am a regular sized guy (for NZ); there are a bunch of women bigger than me and stronger than me. For example Dame Valerie Adams is epic. No contest, bigger and stronger than me, she is a similar age also.
Women are physically "inherently" weaker; for a given size/weight. But that is also dependent on context; e.g. I'm a rock climber; so I tend to a slimmer build, big muscles are just extra weight to pull up a wall, I climb with a bunch of women, some similar build than me and most of them are just better climbers. Skill, endurance, grip strength, flexibility, balance...are all factors, as are injury history and how you are feeling on the day. But this is not competitive climbing, we are all just there for fun. If it were, I wouldn't be in their grade (thankfully).
Women are "inherently" weaker than men, this is why when it comes to situations where this is a factor, we don't compete directly.
How many men and how many women, before an equation is made? Who's done this measuring? There's so much propaganda around the premise, how do you separate reality from the brain washing capitalism needs you to believe to take advantage of free labour etc. How long has this been a belief. Ancient women fought in wars and hunted, and were buried with a top warriors honours. Archaeologists (who were mostly men, at times when women weren't allowed to do the job) thought these bones were men, because of a bias belief. I could point out so many more obvious bias that support the building of this propaganda. It's definitely become propaganda, because it's being used to down tread and opress a whole class of people. So how much is propaganda. How much are you accidentally believing that isn't true. And are you flexible enough in your thinking to really question it and redefine things for yourself. Maybe that's always been a toxic belief.
Do we really need to make anti-trans bigotry be secretly about cis women in order to care about it?
Conservatives always rally around bigotry towards groups they hate and fear: immigrants, racial minorities, or trans people. It’s all the same motivation.
You can see this any time a trans woman dares to participate in a combat sport. Bigots have dialed in the art of posing dramatically for the camera when they get popped one by a trans woman, even though cis women give each other the exact same injuries all the time due to the fact they are willingly participating in a combat sport. An injury isn't magically worse because someone whose genitals you made assumptions about gave it to you.
And as the inverse of this, trans men in combat sports often have their cis men competitors refuse to fight them under the guise of 'not hitting women'. Even though trans men have also gone through testosterone based puberty, the thing that according to them also makes trans women fit only for the men's competitions.
This whole shitshow not making any logical sense isn't an accident, it's a cultural/political choice and not one based in reason or science. The point is 'don't be trans', anyone arguing otherwise is a rube or a con artist.
All the while transfolk “are weak soldiers to join the military.”
It's about control. It's always been about control.
This is straight out of the Fascist playbook. "The Enemy" is both weak and strong, depending on the rhetorical need. "We are strong and They are weak", but simultaneously, "They are the greatest threat to our fragile way of life".
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.
Yes, and if there wasn't such a push to keep women and other beings who usually have their primary 'sex' hormone be estrogen that way then who knows? Perhaps there would be more beings who were physically strong.
But muscled women and other estroginated beings are said to be 'gross', look at the panic over The Last of Us 2. Any depection of what such beings could and actually do like is purported to be 'unrealistic' and 'woke nonsense'.
Despite it being more than possible, it's just a ploy to keep women and others who's primary sex hormone is estrogen controlled and unable to fight back via beauty standards and conditioning from a young age.
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