Good Reason for Sports to Be Separated

Article in The Atlantic:

There’s Good Reason for Sports to Be Separated by Sex

If the practice stopped, top-level women’s sport as we know it might cease to exist.

This appears to be a response to a previous article arguing that sports should not make sex distinctions.

This is much more sensible. As opposed to Nature, the leading science journal, hat argues for men competeing in women's sports, based on evidence that drugs can diminish male athletic ability.

I am founding co-editor of the journal TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, and the author of a book on how sex classification is regulated. ... The rights of trans people, including myself, have been weaponized in a culture war. ...

Those arguing for total bans on trans girls and women competing as girls and women rely on studies comparing the athletic performance of cisgender men with that of cisgender women. But that’s not an apt comparison. A better one would be between transgender and cisgender women. Sports researcher Joanna Harper at Loughborough University, UK, is one of a number of scientists who have found that hormone therapy significantly reduces athletic advantages (J. Harper et al. Br. J. Sports Med.55, 865–872; 2021). More research like this could clarify how hormones and other factors affect athletic performance. That understanding should guide policy.

No, this research is irrelevant. It shows that male advantages are reduced, but not eliminated. Nor does it address the various social reasons for sex separation.

The Atlantic article details some of those male advantages, but says:

Here is what the facts say. Sport for women is generally undervalued and under-resourced in America, and this can affect women’s performance levels.

No, girls sports, especially at the college level, is very much overvalues and overfunded.

But if we stopped dividing sport by sex, elite women’s sport as we know it could cease to exist. We might miss out on Megan Rapinoe at the World Cup or the spectacle of Sydney McLaughlin effortlessly gliding over hurdle after hurdle.

That would be a good thing. The public would rather watch the much better soccer players and hurdlers. And that is probably where we are headed, as a result of tranny activism.

Women today still face inequality in sport. Many professional sports have a significant pay gap, limiting the ability of women to focus solely on it as a career. Media attention for women’s sport is severely lacking, with 95 percent of sports TV coverage in 2019 going to men, according to a USC/Purdue University study.

If the pro sports women are not as good, and no one wants to watch them, then they ought to be paid less. In the case of Rapinoe, she led a lawsuit about a supposed pay gap, but the court case ended up showing that she was paid more than the (much better) men. The pro women's team sometimes loses to 15-year-old boys club teams.