this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2026
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It is true that if you overlap the bell curve of strength, height, and whatever other markers men will generally be on the higher end, but not entirely. In my opinion sex is a very lazy way to distribute athletes into competitive groups.
For example, I am a cis-male who is on the lower average end of height, weight, and since I only do light exercise, strength too. My cis-female friend, on the other hand, is 6 feet tall, has done strength training, and played college basketball. Even if I were to train in strength and skill for basketball, she would still have a huge advantage due to her height. I would have a harder time defending shots she takes, and she could more easily block mine. Since basketball is a team sport I could try to focus on stealing and then passing to a teammate who is taller, but then again so could a cis-female against cis-males.
I don't know what exactly the better way to distribute athletes would be, but I am sure kinesiologists can probably think of something besides sex.
Edit: I added "cis" to be more clear
It makes no sense to even consider any ordinary person in the same sentence as professional sports. Professional athletes are extreme outliers. Ordinary people, by definition, are not. Even most college athletes aren't -- there's a massive gulf between a 90th percentile and 99.9th percentile athlete in pretty much any sport.
For some sports, particularly team sports, there's undoubtedly a cultural barrier that hinders women competing with men, but this is not really the case for individual sports like track and field. The reality is that we do not see the top female athletes in the world coming anywhere near the top male athletes in the 100 metre sprint, shot put, triple jump, triathlon or what have you. This is IMO pretty incontrovertible proof that it is a matter of biology.
I've found top athletes in general are a tough pill to swallow for people who subscribe to (IMO) a naive reading of egalitarianism, given the ample empirical evidence they present for all sorts of genetic determinism. My take is that sports are fundamentally discriminatory at the highest level and there is no way to fix this, and really that's okay because high-level sports literally concern an absolutely minuscule fraction of the population.