Give them what they want: Let men and women play sports together

The whole thing will be over in about nine seconds

I don’t know why seemingly every aspect of the present culture war is converging on the erasure of sex differences between men and women, but it apparently is, and I think there’s a limited but important window here through which conservatives can really lean into this thing and sort of force an optimal resolution to at least part of it.

Here is the writer Maggie Mertens over at the Atlantic making what she calls “the case for coed sports:”

Decades of research have shown that sex is far more complex than we may think. 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. “Science is increasingly showing how sex is dynamic; it has multiple aspects and also shifts; for example, social experiences can actually change levels of sex-related hormones like testosterone in our bodies in a second-to-second and month-to-month way!” Sari van Anders, the research chair in social neuroendocrinology at Queen’s University, in Ontario, told me by email. She said that this complexity means it doesn’t make sense to separate sports by sex in order to protect women athletes from getting hurt. “If safety was a concern, and there was evidence to select certain bodily characteristics to base safety cut-offs on, then you would see, say, shorter men excluded from competing with taller men, or lighter women from competing with heavier women, across sports.” We do see weight-class separation in boxing, rowing, and wrestling, yet it’s far from the norm across all sports, and isn’t typically seen as a method of integrating athletes of different sexes—though it could be. Old notions of sex as a marker of physical capability are changing, and more research is making clear that sex differences aren’t really clear at all.

Well, look: We can argue all day about this. I mean, I think mostly everyone knows that when men and women compete together in athletic competitions, men overwhelmingly trounce women. Actually, not to go on and on about it, but in most matchups, boys overwhelmingly trounce women: The innovatively named tracker site Boys vs. Women, for instance, shows that top-ranking high school boys tend to absolutely blow Olympic women’s finalists out of the water. That’s kind of nuts. (Actually it’s kind of natural, but you get it.)

But advocates of de-sex-segregating sports don’t really seem interested in data. I mean that sincerely: This effort appears to be one of pure ideology rather than any practical concerns about competition, fairness, opportunity, athletic development, etc. They’ve just got a bee in their bonnet about it and they’re not going to take no for an answer.

So I think it’s time to do something drastic: Just let it happen. Let the chromosomal barrier fall. Stop resisting. Actually the wall has already partially collapsed: We’re now regularly letting men who “identify” as women to compete against actual female athletes, and we’re predictably seeing those female athletes be humiliated in major competitions while having countless opportunities stolen from them by men. This is of course a rank injustice, embarrassing on a national scale and just really weird.

But I think it’s clear that that’s not going to stop anytime soon, at least not barring a serious and decisive course of action. And I think this is it: Just let men and women compete against each other, in every sport, at every level. Every collegiate division, every professional league, every local pickup org—de-segregate all of it, immediately.

I predict this would change things very fast. Picture the headlines: An entire phalanx of female props at a Notre Dame rugby match had every one of their shoulders dislocated by an opposing scrum of 225-pound men; a team of male NBA rejects blows through the WNBA, utterly dominating every team it comes in contact with and finishing matches with average scores of 105-6; a group of half-rate male cyclists starts snatching the top spots at every women’s cycling race in the country. On and on and on. No more victories for women, no more advancement, no more prestige, a permanent top-spot fourth place for every female in every competition.

We know it will be this way. And you could picture, in the wake of this carnage, a mad scramble by gender activists to completely neuter all sorts of aspects of modern sporting—to make rugby a non-contact sport, say, or to abolish place-based awards at cycling events, or whatever. Nobody would want to watch such boring sports, of course. So the natural next step would be for men and women to mutually decide to carve out brand-new leagues that once again segregate by sex—basically an identical setup to the old way, except everyone’s a bit chastened and a bit wiser.

The other option is to let this keep simmering, let feminists keep complaining for years about the perceived unfairness, let the Atlantic keep pretending there’s a point to make here, let a handful of enterprising men keep quietly dominating women’s sports under the guide of transgenderism, etc. I say, why wait? Get it over with now and let’s move on to more interesting things. Unleash the power of genderless sports leagues and may the best man win! Well, you know what I mean.