To end all women’s sports

There’s a new book out on women’s sports, and on the surface, it seems like a good read. The rippling back muscles of a female athlete grace the cover. She’s strong, determined, and—judging by the subtitle, “The Case for Feminist Sport”—she’s ready and able to take on any man.

Yet in the book, Open Play, it is men, not women, who come out on top.

The authors, Sheree Bekker and Stephen Mumford, paint a utopian vision of athletics fit for John Lennon’s “Imagine,” a world without sex-specific sports for men and women. In place of the current system, they advocate for what they call “open play”—men and women blissfully competing against each other. Gone are the gender binary, the patriarchy, and any notion of women as “the weaker sex.”

Branding their case as “feminist,” the authors suggest that women’s sports is itself a child of the patriarchy. Sports weren’t separated because of biology, they insist, but because of society’s outdated views of sex differences. To adjust the old saying, women need separate sports like a fish needs a bicycle. The authors even go so far as to suggest that men may hold no natural advantage over women in terms of size and strength.

George Orwell was right: “There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.” The collective weight of science, biology, the experience of female athletes, and common sense contradict this book at every turn.

The latest science has confirmed the obvious: Males do hold an inherent physical advantage over females in nearly all sports. According to researchers, that advantage becomes real almost as early as it can be measured, and it isn’t erased by puberty blockers, testosterone suppression, or cross-sex hormones. Even pre-pubescent boys have a physical advantage over girls the same age.

This was particularly evident in one analysis of top track-and-field performances. Over an eight-year period, boys ages eight and younger outperformed girls of the same ages by 19% in shot put, 32% in javelin, and nearly 5% in long jump. In running, the boys were up to 6.7% faster than girls, depending on the event. And in swimming, boys ages 10 and younger were 1.2 to 2.6% faster than girls in most events.

Keep in mind, an inch or a split second can make all the difference. It was a mere .09 of a second that separated Chelsea Mitchell, one of the fastest girls in Connecticut, from a male who took the winner’s podium at the state championship. Riley Gaines, an NCAA swimmer, was robbed of a championship trophy after tying male swimmer Lia Thomas for fifth place.

But it isn’t just physical differences that matter. As every athlete knows, the mental game is essential. And the psychological toll on girls who are forced to compete against boys is crushing. They feel demoralized, inferior, and let down by the adults who should protect them. The authors of Open Play fail to address these factors.

I think of the elite teenage softball players who quit because they didn’t want to have to fight a male for pitching time; the middle school girls who have been forced to share changing rooms with boys and faced sexual harassment; the track runners who have taken their mark with a weight of sadness before the starting gun even fires, knowing that the taller, faster, stronger male standing two feet away is guaranteed to win. It’s demoralizing to know your best won’t be good enough—that months of early wake-ups and training will all come to nought simply because you’re a girl.

The authors of Open Play would condemn all female athletes to such pain. Try as they may to frame their argument as pro-woman, it is a recipe for unfairness—one that would likely spark a mass exodus of women from sports.

This unfairness speaks to a far deeper problem in the authors’ thinking—one that touches on reality itself. In response to the now-famous question, “What is a woman?”, the authors proudly answer: Who knows? “No one can say in a sentence what it is to be a woman, or a man, in a way that covers all people and separates them correctly into two groups,” they write.

It’s no wonder we disagree on how to save women’s sports. We don’t even agree on what women are.

I do agree with the authors on one thing: Women do deserve better than what they’re getting. But real equality will only come when it is founded on truth rather than fantasy, when we recognize that humanity is not androgynous but that men and women, though equal in dignity, are beautifully distinct by God’s design.

That’s a fact that no amount of postmodern deconstruction or wishful thinking will ever change.