People who think that sports shouldn’t be categorised by sex have very obviously never played sports in their life. Every single person in the whole world is built differently and will have different advantages and disadvantages based on their height, build, speed, stamina, lung capacity, and a multitude of other factors which we will never be able to fully factor for. But do you know what thing is going to make the biggest difference in sports? Your biological sex. Women have had to fight for the right to play sports and it is incredibly depressing to me that there are so many people who think we should just do mixed sex sports under the banner of inclusivity when all that would do would remove women’s ability to compete in 90% of sports.
Let’s look at some records to show just how obvious this disparity is:
Swimming 100m free (long course): men’s record is 46.86s. Women’s is 51.71s. The women’s world record would have placed 53rd at the Tokyo Olympics.
Track 100m: Men’s record is 9.572s. Women’s is 10.49s. Little harder to place but the world record would not have qualified for semi-finals (top 24). Excluding DQs, it would have placed a woman in either the last or penultimate position of every single heat (excluding one where she would be 2nd from last) at Tokyo.
Rowing coxless pairs: Men’s record is 6:08.50. Women’s is 6:47.11. They might have been able to get through to the finals in Tokyo on this time in which they would have placed last in the finals (12th).
Olympic triathalon: Harder to find records for this one. But the winner of the women’s 2020 Olympics has a total time of 1:55:36 (the de facto Olympic record though there aren’t really records in this event). She would have come 48th in the Men’s event, above only one person (excluding those who didn’t finish or who were DQ’ed).
Oh, wait, you wanted to have a look closer at split it by weight and muscle mass and other factors? I mean, sure, if you want to have dozens and dozens of splits in sports to account for every single possible height and weight variation in a person, but that would still be less effective than a sex based split! Let’s have a look at weight lifting as my favourite example:
Let’s first look at the men’s 61kg category against the women’s 64kg category. The weight categories don’t exactly align, but this is one of the ones which is closest and the women have the advantage here so it should be good for them, right? The women’s world record for total weight (as weightlifting is two different lifts which are totalled) is 261kg. At Tokyo, the gold medalist achieved an Olympic record in this event with a 313kg total. The record for the women would have ranked 12th, above only one competitor (ignoring the DNFs). And by your logic, women should have had the advantage here because they are allowed to weigh 3kg more! (Height is not a factor given that pretty much all the competitors are within 2 inches of each other.)
Let’s look at another weight category instead: women’s 87kg vs men’s 81kg. Again, women should have the advantage because they have the higher weight limit, right? The top women had a total weight of 270kg (defacto world record as it was a new weight category). The top man in the 81kg got 374kg total which was another OR! The top women would have placed dead last, excluding the two DNFs. Just look back to the men’s 61kg: she still would have not won the category against men who are 26kg lighter than her. They still managed to lift 43kg more than her!
The world record for the 87kg+ women is 335kg. To medal against the men, she would have to compete against men in the 67kg category. So, tell me exactly how you think splitting up sports by weight, height, and other non-sex based factors is going to do anything but erase women from most sports given that we have a very clear example that women would not be able to compete with men of the same height and weight? And this is before we look at how much more dangerous contact sports could be for women!
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