Bigger Stronger Faster

Something happens to kids’ sports as they reach the age of double digits. Something that is not only unnecessary but also serves to encourage a feedback loop of female athletes being viewed as less, treated as less, given less funding, and less attention. But splitting up sports based on sex doesn’t just hurt girls. It hurts boys as well as society as a whole. It excludes transgender athletes and sets up athletes who are unaware of their intersex status for humiliation. We can and must do better.

By keeping sports integrated and putting a stop to how we teach girls to underperform we can actually create a more inclusive environment that encourages female, intersex, and trans athletes to live up to their full potential.

That the positive effects would spill over into society, creating a domino effect, is all the more reason not to split them up.

It seems counterintuitive, right? The whole reason we split girls and boys up is so that the girls will get to play, right? What with boys being better athletes and all, right? Right? Right?! Wrong. If that were the case kids’ sports wouldn’t get split up until the mid-teens. Instead, the change happens right as the girls are getting bigger, stronger, faster than their male counterparts. It’s a dirty little secret society doesn’t want to recognize. We don’t split up boys and girls at nine or ten years of age because the boys are better athletes, we do it because girls have a competitive edge at that age and the fragile male egos we’ve raised can’t handle it.

What does happen at this age is that the boys notice the girls’ edge and they react by being ball hogs and bad sportsmen. (Not all boys, just enough of them.) We like to say that boys and girls just don’t play well together at this age but that just reeks of the same responsibility shifting that we see with dress codes. Instead of teaching our boys to be better we make the blame dual-sided and act like it can’t be fixed. Yet another example of the “boys will be boys” mentality that only serves to undercut our young men’s potential to be good humans.

The thing is, there is always going to be someone bigger, stronger, faster—and boys need to learn from a young age that sometimes that person is going to be a girl.

This period of time in their lives provides an invaluable teaching moment that could be used to instill empathy, good sportsmanship, and grace. Instead, we teach them a false sense of superiority that bleeds into their adult lives.

Is it any coincidence that this is a time when many boys double down on their false sense of superiority? You run like a girl, kick like a girl, throw like a girl is actually a compliment at this point, but you wouldn’t know it from the delivery or from the ways that boys are led to believe that they are the athletically superior ones despite their female peers being bigger, stronger, faster for the time being.

At the same time that we are splitting up sports, our schools go to work grooming our daughters to underperform. I talk about this more in On Your Knees: Testosterone Testing, Fragile Masculinity, and the Whitewashing of Sportsbut the gist of it is that at the time when girls are physically stronger than boys, P.E. teachers across the country encourage them to underdevelop their upper bodies by doing push-ups on their knees and pull-ups on their backs. The message is clear—you are weak, don’t even try, move out of the way for the boys.

This is the same message that is given to female athletics—point-blank. Boys teams inevitably get more funding and more attention. What is falsely touted as a way to protect playing time for girls just ends up pushing women’s sports out of the limelight and women out of sports altogether. Not to mention the effect on top female athletes who could stand to gain a lot from the push of competing with top male athletes. Speaking of track as a specific example—sprinters increase their speed through competition. Let’s say we have a sprinter running a twelve-second hundred-meters. If they want to get that down to eleven or ten seconds then they need to train with other sprinters running ten-second sprints, not with those running thirteen-second ones. By pulling girls out and putting them on separate teams we are doing top female athletes a great disservice, effectively eliminating them from the competition they need to reach their full potential.

That grown men are, on average, bigger, stronger, and faster than grown women is not the issue (though how much of speed and strength are due to grooming is overdue to come into question), and it is not a legitimate reason to separate most sports based on sex—even among adults. Some women are better natural athletes than some men. Some men are smaller, weaker, slower than most women.

The reality is that physical abilities are on a continuum, not a complete dichotomy—just like sex and gender.

That the present system excludes transgender athletes should be enough to make us stop and rethink the whole thing. Instead, many suggest a third category for transgender and intersex people. That this third category would be undervalued and looked down on as less than male athletics should be obvious to everyone. The answer isn’t adding more sex-based categories, it is doing away with them altogether. Let’s encourage all people to develop their abilities and compete accordingly, regardless of what they were born with between their legs.

Intersex athletes are the epitome of why we need this change. While current sex-based categories exclude trans athletes, they set up intersex athletes for complete and utter humiliation. Take the case of Christine Mboma, the Namibian sprinter who is one of five African Olympians to find out about her intersex status publicly when her womanhood was challenged. (Read more about this in On Your Knees.) Imagine the humiliation of finding out something so personal on the world stage. And what does it matter? The writers of the paper upon which World Athletics based their egregious ban for XY females (women with androgen insensitivity) in the 200-meters through one-mile distances have since retracted their wording. The fact of the matter is that Mboma, like the other four women, was born and has lived her whole life as a female. To say that she does not qualify as a woman with her present testosterone levels (but only when it comes to certain distances, mind you) when she has been treated and suffered and fought and competed as a girl and as a woman her entire life is beyond ludicrous.

The mere existence of a woman as amazing and powerful as Christine Mboma should be all the proof we need that it is time to rethink how we organize and categorize sports.

Our children deserve better than the present system that teaches girls to underperform, robs boys of an integrated, competitive experience, excludes trans athletes, and sets intersex women up for public humiliation should their abilities catch the wrong person’s eye.