Abolish Women's Sports
The arrival of trans women invalidates segregation
Before you ask, Outrageous Fortune doesn’t have clickbait titles. I really do think women’s sports should be abolished. But I take a bit to get there.
If you have the time, there’s a fun jump into the history of generational conflict, and then a platonic dialogue about trans issues. But if you’re short on time, and just want to get to the heart of why I wrote that title, skip to the heading about 2/3rd down called: “The Meat” in bold.
Introduction
As you have probably heard, the UK Supreme Court ruled on the 16th that the terms Man and Woman in the Equality Act 2010 refer exclusively to biological sex, not gender identity.
The significance is that this interpretation permits the exclusion of transgender individuals from single-sex services and spaces like women's shelters, hospital wards, and sports categories.
That last one really gets people going. Especially older folks.
A historical adventure
Older people like to perform a little trick called “getting a disgust reflex and dressing it up as a rational argument after the fact” fairly often. And when I say often I mean every single generation of the last 200 years kind of often. I don’t like x because of y, and it’s definitely y and not because it’s “not how I grew up”. Baby Boomers were told by the Silent Generation (or the Greatest generation, depending on your age) that sex before marriage was the worst thing you could do. “No male would want my daughter if she’s not a virgin!” Mothers would worryingly whisper in their sleep. To throw that away drove the Silent Generation nuts. Kids were kicked out of houses. Kids were written out of wills. (Written back in once they realized they begrudgingly admitted they wanted to see their grandkids.)
Baby Boomers might be tempted to say that they revolutionized everything. Attitudes towards minorities, homosexuality, drugs, and so forth. But the moral arc of history began bending long before them. One thing they took for granted was the beer their dad would casually drink after work, or cocktail parties. As you know, the Gilded/Reformist generation of the 1870s-1890s (grandparents of the Greatest and Silent) was famous for their panicked moral crusade against alcohol, eventually getting it banned in 1920.
So what gives? Attitudes on alcohol changed significantly between 1880 and 1950, what was the missing link in between? Who were the sons and daughters of the Reformist generation, and the grandparents of the Boomers?
The Lost Generation.
Alcoholics who made drinking glamorous and masculine, like Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and all the soldiers who went to the Jazz clubs in Paris after the war and started speakeasies in NYC, and of course, the bootleggers too.
Fitzgerald on the changing times:
"By 1923 their elders, tired of watching the carnival with ill-concealed envy, had discovered that young liquor will take the place of young blood, and with a whoop the orgy began."
— Echoes of the Jazz Age
By 1933, both the youth and most of the elders realized the stupidity of the ban, and moral progress was resumed. But the interim was ugly, just like pre-marital sex was ugly, and trans issues are ugly today. Such high-horse moral crusading by the reformist generation was invariably coupled with emotional drama, as basically all church going families (which was all families) disowned or shamed children for violating their temperance ideals.
My point here is that what’s going on with the trans movement has happened many, many times before. So my prior probability on x in 2025 being truly bad, and not just making old people uncomfortable, is very low. But it’s not 0%. In case you don’t remember, youth support for fascism in Germany was incredibly high. When the Nazis came to power in January 1933, the Hitler Youth movement had approximately 100,000 members. By the end of the same year, membership had increased to more than 2 million (30% of German youth ages 10-18). By 1940 the number was 7.2 million (82%). The boomers had more right than wrong, but hippie communes failed hard, as the best quickly fell apart (incentives matter) and the worst descended into cults like The Manson Family.
So my probability that my generation’s got it right on this issue isn’t 100%, but across history, I see these wedge issues usually coming out of the woodwork with the youth being on the right side. Again, this is because the old are reflexively resistant to change, because they have increased status quo and out-group bias. So my prior is very low, like 10-20 percent that they are correct, on say, trans issues. And when I look through most of the arguments, they seem rather stupid. Except trans women in sports. I know many women, even my age, who don’t support their inclusion on feminist grounds. Yet others fiercely disagree. It’s probably the toughest argument in the whole meta-debate about trans issues in general, so I thought it would be interesting to really get into the weeds on it, and I came out of the woodwork with a pretty crazy but honestly very good solution.
First, I’m going to steelman both sides and see what happens. Come along for the ride. I promise the ending will be exciting.
If Plato wrote about the culture war
Pro-trans steelman, the “articulate undergrad”:
Look, it’s true that from time to time, trans women will win sports competitions. Even if they had no natural advantage, your prior probability of them winning should be equal to the number included per competition. Now you might say fine, but it’s higher than the “no physical advantage rate” you would expect. Significantly higher! Okay, but are you sure you’re not just succumbing to the news’ well-known negativity and outrage bias? We’re talking about the culture war issue. Perhaps you’re updating too much on dramatic events. If you were being a proper Bayesian, you would predict distributions beforehand, and only update a few percent on dramatic anecdotes (such as your aunt freaking out over some sports competition on the other side of the continent) unless presented with actual data.
But the problem is that data is so hard to find. The number of openly trans athletes at top schools is incredibly, incredibly small. Adding to that, there’s huge heterogeneity within any sample you would want to collect, and subjectivity would play a huge part in who you decide or don’t decide to include in your sample. Different sports and governing bodies have had different rules regarding testosterone levels, or waiting periods for eligibility, for example. Some organizations want testosterone suppression for 12 months before play, some less, some none at all. Who do you include? The microscopic sample size, split into a dozen different types, makes it near impossible to use the law of large numbers to actually find out what the “natural” rate of winning is for this population.
And even then, what do you mean by disproportionate? If you’ve noticed trans athletes “dominating” sports, I’ll guess you’ve noticed African Americans’ huge overrepresentation in the NBA as well, or Whites’ overrepresentation in Hockey. Does that matter?
And even if I were to admit that trans women are overrepresented in gold medals, what’s different about that than any other sport, where “the natural rate of success” is almost never equal to their ratio of the population?
Anti-trans steelman, literally “Richard Dawkins”:
This is all quite besides the point. I will mention, however, that even after 1-2 years of testosterone suppression, “the muscular advantage enjoyed by transgender women is only minimally reduced when testosterone is suppressed”
Articulate Undergrad:
Wait wait wait, but I have studies that show the contrary. For example, this study found that trans women’s push-up and sit-up scores, (31% and 15% higher than cis women before treatment), were no different after two years, and a four-year follow-up confirmed continued convergence.
Dawkins: Fine, I accept your earlier statement that the population data is mostly low quality, and heavily debated. I also do not have a problem with the overrepresentation of certain groups in sports based on race, because race, though it does engender various genetic advantages/disadvantages, is nowhere near as causally important as your sex. So I do refute the assumption that trans women are even “women”. Their inclusion in “women’s sports” is thus severely mistaken.
One could say “I define a woman as anybody who self-identifies as a woman, therefore a woman can have a penis.” That is logically valid in the same way as, “I define “flat” to mean what you call “round”, therefore the world is flat.” It’s obvious that this form of sophistry erodes rational discourse, and redefining a woman to someone who can have a penis, or identifies as a woman, thus allowing them into men’s sports, is similarly sophistic.
My definition is the Universal Biological Definition (UBD), based on gamete size. Female gametes are very much larger than male gametes, with no intermediates whatsoever. A human egg contains at least 10,000 times as much matter as a human sperm. This classification is the standard in biology, as the UBD is universal in the sense that it applies to all animals, vertebrate and invertebrate.
So my argument is as follows:
According to the UBD, a trans woman, having been born biologically male, does not meet the biological definition of 'female'. Regardless of identity, feelings, or medical interventions like hormones or surgery, they remain biologically male under this specific gamete-based definition, which is the standard in biology.
The entire reason for separate women's sports categories is to ensure fair competition based on these objective biological sex differences, particularly the average physical performance advantages conferred by male puberty. The category 'Women's Sports' is fundamentally a sex category, not an identitarian category. Identity is much less relevant to the conversation than sex.
And yes, I acknowledge hormones reduce performance, but if a person is biologically male (gamete size is the relevant factor, not testosterone), modifying some physical characteristics doesn't change their core biological category. The remaining advantages (skeletal structure, for example) or even the potential for advantage stemming from that male biology are enough to disqualify them from a category defined by female biology. I’m not concerned with making a male perform closer to a female; I’m concerned about whether a male belongs in the female category at all.
The meat
Sometimes people will do something all their lives, and it might be inefficient or dumb, but only marginally, and besides, they have other things to deal with. And of course, if someone ever were to question it, they would simply reply that it’s the way they’re parents and they’re parents and so forth did it, so why fix it?
But then something strange rips it all to shreds, and in the process of putting it back together, you find yourself thinking critically about it for the first time in your life.
For our society, this is one of those times. Given the low quality of population-wide statistics, and the debate in the literature over the effectiveness of hormone mitigation, there is a lot of uncertainty over how far we should go in banning/allowing trans women in sports. I was sitting on a train, going through the reasons for and against, and naturally got onto thinking over the reasons for even having women’s sports in the first place. Suddenly, my eyes lit up as I realized something I felt was deeply true: Women’s sports should be abolished. Or to put it into more conventional language: Anti-meritocratic discrimination = bad. This is, in my opinion, a beautiful sidestep of the entire convoluted debate concerning trans women in women’s sports.
We had women’s and men’s sports in the past because they served as semi-useful “big and little leagues” that, with reasonable accuracy, almost always had large skill gaps. This was useful because it allowed less-physically able people who still put in a lot of effort (highly talented women) to compete on a high level. If not for the existence of women’s sports, they wouldn’t have the opportunity since there were things beyond their control which prevented them from, say, playing in the NBA.
But back to the undergrad’s point, we don’t frankly care at all that African Americans are overrepresented in Olympic running competitions, because the idea of segregating based on race is stupid. So too does the idea of segregating based on many other characteristics. Why then is it not stupid to segregate based on sex?
Now Dawkins might argue, this is different, even if you think East Africans are genetically predisposed to be better at track (which is a dubious claim anyway since track in impoverished regions may have serious environmental determinants for obvious reasons) the differences are tiny compared to the differences between sexes.
Okay Dawkins, that was true in 1950, not at all today.
And thus, the entire system falls apart.
Once you accept that trans women break down the “little and big league” skill gap in sports, the whole idea of an official binary breaks down. And since the arguments for and against trans women in women’s sports are still highly contentious, I don’t feel it’s right to include or not include them. The compromise is to desegregate sports, which probably should have been done long ago anyway.
But you might say, “This is sexist! Women won’t have a chance to compete anymore. In what world do you think getting rid of the WNBA wouldn’t be worse for women?
I have a good answer to this! Think like an economist. If you open a closed economy completely, domestic firms will face more competition. Or, for example, if you remove a tariff on Chinese cars, their products will be more competitive, (demand curves slope down) and domestic firms like Ford will face pressure, to say, increase the quality of their products, or decrease prices, in order to stay commercially viable. If the competition didn’t exist, you would expect worse products.
Removing discrimination in sports is like opening up to free trade. All else equal, sure, women are much worse at basketball (on average). But that’s because they are operating like firms in a closed economy, insulated from competition and thus facing a radically more pessimal incentive structure (yes, the antonym of optimal is pessimal, isn’t that funny?) than the open economy/desegregated sports model.
So, we should actually expect this skill gap to decrease, not increase, with our new model for sports. Women won’t be insulated from the upper layers of the talent distribution anymore, so like firms, we should expect them to be marginally more incentivized to “produce a better product.” Young girls and boys will grow up playing together, casually and on school teams. Use your imagination and think of a world 50 years from now. Don’t think about “well, all else equal, the 100 best high school basketball players will all be men! There will be no opportunity for women!”
But not all else is equal. Far from it. This will be a seachange in children’s competitive sports, and expect the average talent of women and girls to increase dramatically. Of course, biological facts won’t change, so it won’t close the gap, but it should change your probabilities on how big the gap would be in this new world.
And there would not only be 1 team, of course.
At the school level, which is really where this matters, and also where the government can actually control the situation, there will be anywhere from 2-5 teams depending on the school size and sport of question. In middle school, because most kids are prepubescent, we would see a fairly even distribution of boys and girls per team. In high school, there would be less women on the first teams, but more so on the 2nd and especially the 3rd. We can debate about the percent on each team, but keep in mind it will vary widely based on sport. Flexible gymnastics might actually have a majority of girls on the 1st team, whereas football might not even generate enough interest among women to have any on the 3rd team. This is okay. Does it bother you that most nurses are women, or that men have higher car insurance rates? It shouldn’t.
Men and women are different, and will choose to pursue different paths in life. Acceptance of this simple fact is key to realizing the benefits of this proposal. Group differences exist, but why care? No sport in this future world will have equal proportions by gender, and you may find that detestable, but I wish you didn’t, because current sports don’t have equal proportions based on race or religion or sexuality or a million other little tribalistic categories either. Accepting that not all occupations or ways of life will be equally proportioned to the population is thus the norm for you 99% of the time. I’m at 100%. Is it so hard to join me? Is a future where we prioritize identity less, and talent more, a worse one?
Left-wingers and dark side feminists might object that this is misogynistic, and will rid women of opportunity. But we need to define opportunity. Does it mean a guaranteed spot in a sex-segregated league, regardless of relative overall skill? Or does it mean the chance to compete at the highest level possible based on one's talent?
Currently, many talented people are not allowed to compete on high school teams because of limited spots based on gender. With this segregation decomposed, only the most meritorious will rise to the top. For Rawlsians, what could be fairer? For Nietzscheans, what could be closer to master morality?
Glory and attention will still be available for women, as their parents and friends, just like for women’s team games, would still show up for their games even if they didn’t make the 1st team. Will on net glory go down for women? Possibly. It depends on how much average talent increases due to higher competition. But my policy certainly solves the trans issue quite easily, and moves our society in a less identity-focused direction. The reasons for thinking opportunity will go down are subject to serious debate as well. So on net, I judge (benefits - costs) > 0
PS. Some older readers might feel uncomfortable with trans people, and the unfamiliar idea of desegregating sports. To them I echo Tyler Cowen: “One simple point is that it is not optimal for every period in culture to focus on exactly what you want from it”. Indeed, many of the people who support trans rights today won’t support the trans rights issue of tomorrow. When they are old and rigid, they will say, like the old of today, and the old of yesterday, “I was okay with x, but y is simply too far. And no, I’m not becoming like my parents, I’m the farthest thing!”
PPS. If you want to see essays similar to this, just:
Ehhh, vibe of this one kinda valid but at the same time I feel like this will not work for all sports. Stuff like soccer or basketball whatever but if it’s like a combat sport like boxing or mma I feel like there’s gonna be an issue.