In the case of women in sports, separate IS equal

We should not forsake women and all that Title IX afforded them. There has to be another way.

Last week, writer and journalist Maggie Mertens published a piece in The Atlantic entitled: “Separating Sports by Sex Doesn’t Make Sense.” What she seemed to be saying is that gender categories in sports reinforce a gender binary that is merely a societal construct, not rooted in any sort of reality. And that this binary is ultimately harmful to us all.

The debate, as represented in athletics, is exemplified by the ongoing conversation about how to include trans women in sports. And Lia Thomas is at the center of this conversation. Thomas is the University of Pennsylvania swimmer who began her college swimming career competing as a man, and beginning in 2021, started competing as a woman, after gender affirmation through hormone replacement therapy.

In March 2022, Thomas became the first openly transgender athlete to win an NCAA Division I national championship in any sport, after winning the women's 500-yard freestyle event. When competing as a man, she had ranked within the top 100 college swimmers in this event, an impressive feat, but not one that would garner an Olympic team placement. With her win in 2021, she became an Olympic Team contender, and her story became central to the debate around transgender women in sports.

I’m not attempting to answer the questions surrounding Lia Thomas and whether or not she should be able to compete against natal females. Those questions are very complicated and simply aren’t the ones I’m addressing here. But, as the old legal maxim goes: hard cases make bad law. This debate is the perfect example of the logic underpinning that aphorism.

Why? Because eliminating gender categories in sports altogether would be “bad law” and would, essentially, bar women from competing at all.

Mertens openly addressed her intentions in suggesting there is no such thing as a gender binary (she dismisses it as “gender essentialism”) therefore we should eliminate sex-based categories in sports when she tweeted:

“Laws that are keeping trans kids from playing sports are rooted in the same gender essentialism that has always been enshrined in the sports world, and laws in all kinds of states. Here’s why that (incorrect) philosophy harms everyone.”

She went on to post her article, which included the following:

“Maintaining this binary in youth sports reinforces the idea that boys are inherently bigger, faster, and stronger than girls in a competitive setting—a notion that’s been challenged by scientists for years.”

Where are the citations of all the many scientists who have, apparently, been challenging this “notion” for years? Show me one large scale study that shows males, post puberty, are not bigger and stronger than females? Are there exceptions? Yes. But more than broadly speaking, this - that men are faster and stronger than women - is reality.

Jack Welch once said: “Face reality as it is, not as […] you wish it to be.” While I’m not in the habit of touting business leaders as prophets – Welch was the CEO of General Electric from 1981-2001 – on this, he speaks the truth. We may wish the whole “how do we handle trans women athletes in sports?” debate was easy to solve by just eliminating gender categories in sports. But it isn’t. Because that would just create a whole host of other problems and inequalities, those that Title IX sought to remedy.

Title IX, passed in 1972, was the landmark civil rights law which banned sex-based discrimination in federally funded education programs. And for all of its broad applications, Title IX is most famous for its impact on women and girls in sports.

I view all that Title IX achieved in this area as an undeniable positive, offering educational opportunity through athletics, to women and girls across the country. Add to that the net positive, of just encouraging female participation in sports, for healthier bodies. Even if these young women never achieved a championship title or a college athletic scholarship, participation in sports put them on a path towards exercise and movement for the rest of their lives, a key contributor to good health and extended life expectancy.

As of 1972 there were about 300,000 women and girls playing college and high school sports in the U.S. Female athletes received only 2 percent of college athletic budgets and college scholarships for women didn’t exist.

But by 2012, the 40th anniversary of Title IX’s passing, the number of girls participating in high school sports had risen by a factor of ten. More than three million girls and young women were competing in high school sports. By 2016, one in five girls in the U.S. played sports. Before Title IX passed, the number was one in twenty-seven.

People like my Aunt Jill, born in 1947, wish Title IX had been in existence so as to have enabled her to play sports in college. She played basketball in high school, one of the few women’s sports her high school in Margate, N.J. had a team for. She qualified to play for the city and made the all-star team. She told me:

“I was barely five feet tall and weighed ninety pounds? How could I have played for the boys’ team? If I’d been in high school post Title IX, I probably would have run track. And I would have had the chance to play golf and tennis in high school. I feel like I missed a lot being born when I was.”

She was a strong athlete at a time when that, more often than not, led no further than recreation for girls and young women. She played and competed with the boys outside of school, though she wasn’t allowed to play on the boys’ golf team in high school (she was told that there weren’t “accommodations”). Furthermore, she wouldn’t have qualified for any college team berth for a non-gendered team, because the men were “better” – i.e. stronger and hit the ball farther.

She told me: “Annika Sörenstam (considered one of the best female golfers in history) tried to qualify for a men’s tournament and couldn’t make the cut when she was the best women’s golfer in the world.”

Twenty-eight-time Olympic medalist Michael Phelps seemed to address the complexity of this issue when he spoke to CNN on the matter pertaining to Lia Thomas:  

“I believe that we all should feel comfortable with who we are in our own skin, but I think sports should all be played on an even playing field. I don’t know what that looks like in the future. But it’s – it’s – it’s – it’s hard. It’s a really … honestly … I don’t know what to say. It’s very complicated.”

It is complicated. And seeking what would seem a simple solution – eliminate all gender categories from sports – is not one because it creates an inherently uneven playing field.

Truth matters. We can’t wish it away to suit ideology. And the truth is, girls and women just aren’t as strong or as fast as natal males. No matter what Mertens says. A few examples.

During the 1998 Australian Open, Serena and Venus Williams took part in a challenge titled “The Battle of the Sexes.” Allegedly, the two teenagers declared that they could beat any male player outside the top 200. Karsten Braasch, who had already lost both of his singles and doubles opening matches in the Open, agreed to take on this challenge. Braasch, who had never won an ATP (the men’s professional tennis league) title, beat Serena 6-1.

“I hit shots that would have easily been winners on the Women’s Tour and he got to them easily,” Serena reported.

Next up – Venus. The Grand Slam champ met the same fate as her sister, though she took one additional game in the single set, 6-2 was the final score.

Here’s another: in 2017, the celebrated Women’s World Cup Soccer Champions lost 5-2 to a team of Dallas high school boys.

Alright one more. In 2017, ten-time National Champion Allyson Felix’s 400-meter lifetime best of 49.26 was beaten over 15,000 times around the world by men and boys.  Felix is the most decorated woman in Olympic track and field history and the winningest American in track and field in Olympic history, having won eleven total medals in five consecutive Olympic Games. If she’d had to compete against men, not only would she have won zero Olympic medals, she wouldn’t have even made the Olympic Trials let alone the Games themselves.

These results are not the result of women having sub-par training, as Merten suggests when she says:

“And though sex differences in sports show advantages for men, researchers today still don’t know how much of this to attribute to biological difference versus the lack of support provided to women athletes to reach their highest potential.”

The reality is, the further past Title IX’s passage we get, the more “equal” women’s training is to men’s. (That’s a good thing and should be acknowledged!) As an elite gymnast, I trained WITH the boys and men. My training was the same as theirs (in the case of gymnastics, that meant equally abusive, but that’s another story for another day.) And in fact, the girls and young women’s programs at my club, and clubs across the country, got more money and more attention because women’s gymnastics is far more popular – it is the most watched sport in the summer Olympics – than men’s. (This is a rare example of a sport in which women are more embraced by viewers than their male counterparts.)

Women’s gymnastics – my chosen sport – and men’s gymnastics are actually quite different sports, with different events. This is directly related to the fact that men are stronger. Women do not do the rings, for instance, an event which requires inordinate (even for men) upper body strength to perform skills like an “iron cross,” which looks like this:

At any rate, crappy training is not the reason women like Felix are slower than men.

I don’t profess to have a solution for the challenge of creating real inclusiveness for trans and non-binary athletes in sports - people like Caster Semenya, the intersex middle distance runner from South Africa. Semenya was assigned female at birth but has XY chromosomes and naturally elevated testosterone levels.

In 2009 Semenya won a gold medal at the World Championships in the women’s 800 meters. Following this victory, questions were raised about her biological sex. Years of “you’re in, you’re out” culminated in a 2018 rule change requiring testosterone limits for athletes to be allowed to compete, a new rule alleged to have been created to target Semenya.

I find what was done to Semenya to be cruel. Her personal medical history put on display for the entire world. And again, I don’t profess to have the answer but I know what was done to her was not it.

But neither is what Mertens recommends. She sums up with the following:

“…as long as laws and general practice of youth sports remain rooted in the idea that one sex is inherently inferior, young athletes will continue to learn and internalize that harmful lesson.”

I don’t consider myself inferior because I couldn’t have mastered an iron cross on the rings. What would have made me feel inferior was being forced to compete against young men, who were in fact much stronger than I was (and I was really strong; I could easily beat any boy in my elementary and even middle school in a pull-up contest), and then, never qualifying for a state, let alone national or world, team. That would have made me feel inferior. Instead, I won the 1986 National Championship in Women’s Artistic Gymnastics and competed for the U.S. at the 1985 World Championships, and the 1986 Goodwill Games, among many other international competitions.

Sometimes the simple solution is not the right one because it has unintended consequences. In this particular case, a willingness to accept these “unintended consequences” of eliminating women’s viability to compete and rank in sports shows a willingness to accept inequality for women overall.

I’m not willing to forsake women, and all that Title IX afforded them, in the name of a gender ideology that ignores reality.