Women's sports should not be predicated on religious beliefs or even fairness. BEING FEMALE IS ENOUGH

HUMAN FEMALE = RIGHT, YOU’RE IN

I live in a state where it is illegal to have female-only sports or spaces, and that is across the board—high school sports, the YWCA locker room, AA support groups, prisons, hospital wards, Catholic girls’ schools. If a man or boy says the magic words, he cannot be kept out.

The one exception I found is a women’s-only swim night at the local city rec center. Every other “women’s” class or clinic offered specifies in the fine print, or if you call and ask, that they are open to anyone who identifies as a girl or woman. But women’s-only swim night has no such fine print, and makes clear that the windows to the pool will be covered so males cannot even see in, the swimmers will be female, the lifeguards will be female—the only males in the locker room or pool area are children, age 7 or younger, accompanied by their mother or female guardian. The poster advertising women’s swim night, at the fantastically unpopular time slot of Monday from 7:30 to 9pm, shows women swimming in hijabs and long dresses, arms and legs covered. Although it’s technically open to all women, clearly women’s swim night was designed for Muslim women. As if only a religious dictate (and let’s remember, all major religions are male-centric—hatched, litigated, and presided over by men) could warrant women having their own space. Certainly not that women had any sovereignty or had rights as one of the two sex classes of human. Just a woman with no religious identity? Not enough.

The misogynistic asymmetry that’s at the basis of gender ideology is that males can simply assert their feminine identity and “deserve” women’s rights and spaces, but women cannot simply assert that they are deserving of male-free zones. Basing one’s right to single-sex sports and spaces on religious belief reifies this inequality—it assumes that being female is not enough, that you need a bit more legitimacy. Like from God (usually a male figure). But beyond that, this argument pits one religion against another—Christianity versus gender ideology, Islam versus gender ideology. Who’s to say which is more legitimate? It’s a deflection, and women’s voices and agency get lost in the debate.

I don’t even like to base the argument for women’s sports on fairness. If I recall, it arose early on when women’s rights advocates were still trying to be kind, and not say straight out that trans women were men. We don’t want to get into telling people what sex they are. Addressing the lie directly seemed…unkind, so scientists and advocates talked about fairness. However, this opened the door to trying to prove male advantage, something that was and is utterly uncontroversial, like gravity, but surprisingly difficult to prove. It also ushered in a dark age of pseudoscientific tinkering with testosterone and other easily malleable sex characteristics in an attempt to make it “fair” for males to compete in female sports. What if males lowered their testosterone? To 5nmol/liter? To 2.5nmol/liter? What if they chemically castrated themselves before puberty? This doomed search for fairness was an anti-sport, anti-science, anti-woman detour that some sports organizations are still, nearly two decades later, in thrall of. And searching for fairness misses the point. Even if some sort of physical parity could be achieved, that jerry rigged experiment of a person is still male.

Focusing on fairness, again, deflects from the actual issue—boys and men are male, thus ineligible for women’s sports. Fairness is downstream from the actual issue, which is that men are not women, will never be women. There’s no need to get into the weeds about nmol/liter or sucky male athletes versus fit female athletes. Women deserve male-free sports and locker rooms and other spaces because they have rights as the other sex class of humans, one of two. Women don’t need another reason for their own sports category; being female is enough. In the same way that No is a complete sentence, women’s sports are for females because they are female.

The ugly heart of gender ideology is the denial of women as one of two sex classes. Predicating women’s sports on religious beliefs or fairness reifies the dehumanizing notion that being female is not enough. No. Being female is enough.