At the 2024 Paris Olympics, in the 800m track event, the woman who won gold, fastest in the world that year, ran the race in 1 minute and 56 seconds. I chose those games because it was the most recent Olympics, and I chose the 800m race because it was something I knew I could find corresponding data for.

At the 2026 OFSAA senior finals, the fastest runner in the 800m race finished in 1 minute 53 seconds. OFSSA is Ontario highschool boys, so in this case he was a highschool senior (grade 12 likely). That's not the Olympics, it's not nationals, it's the fastest highschool boy in the province of Ontario Canada in 2026, and he would have gotten gold in the Olympics by 3 full seconds. The Olympic gold medalist would have come in 8th place in Ontario assuming the same performance. I picked Ontario because I live here, I picked 2026 because it's the current year, and I didn't go hunting for a result like this, the 800m run is literally the first thing I looked up.

The Olympic record for the fastest any woman has ever run 800m is in 1980 when a woman ran it in 1 minute 53.43 seconds which is 0.17 seconds faster than this year's fastest Ontario boy. Had he run in that race, again assuming same performance, he would have come in a very close second. Silver from the 1980 race would have gotten bronze in Ontario this year, and bronze from that race would have come 5th. And remember that's the fastest race ever, from 1980, not this most recent Olympics where gold would have come 8th in Ontario.

To cherry-pick a little, last year that same Ontario boy ran the 800m in 1 min 52.36 seconds, so that year he was faster than any woman on earth has run it. The all-time world record for women's would have come 4th in Ontario that year, so not on the podium. None of that is even close to the the all time Ontario record, by the way, which is 1 minute 48 seconds set in 2007.

Okay, so what. I'm not saying women are inferior because they run slower. Maybe we decide sport in general is a dumb way to rank people. I'm not saying I'm faster than the Olympic women's athletes. There's a spectrum and there's overlap. I'm not saying trans women have the performance characteristics of men. Data seem to show those advantages may decrease over time. I'm not fighting to keep trans women out of sports.

The trans in sport thing is absolutely a distraction, because the people taking the hardest stances didn't give a shit about women's sport before this.

But there's a reason we keep records and events separate, and it's because a random highschool boy from Ontario Canada is not the fastest boy alive, but every year some highschool boy in Ontario runs fast enough to win Olympic Gold against the women, and often, or at least occasionally, faster than any woman ever. Let alone nationals, international, and Olympic men.

Come on... Are we really going to argue that on average, men are not stronger and taller than women? That doesn't make women inferior to men. Men will, on average, go bald more often and earlier than women. That doesn't make men inferior to women.

This feels like an insanely online take.

As a smaller, weaker man, I'm always amazed that people think women are "inherently" weaker. Yes, stats matter, but there are so many woman who are drasticly stronger, and larger than me.

And good for them. I've never really been intimidated by that. I don't understand this insecurity, but then again, I'm not a fucking fascist.

Also, I find the sports debate silly. We have different weight classes for different sports. Why is it suddenly different when its male vs female? Just do similar things, with similar controls.

Do we really need to make anti-trans bigotry be secretly about cis women in order to care about it?

Conservatives always rally around bigotry towards groups they hate and fear: immigrants, racial minorities, or trans people. It’s all the same motivation.

You can see this any time a trans woman dares to participate in a combat sport. Bigots have dialed in the art of posing dramatically for the camera when they get popped one by a trans woman, even though cis women give each other the exact same injuries all the time due to the fact they are willingly participating in a combat sport. An injury isn't magically worse because someone whose genitals you made assumptions about gave it to you.

And as the inverse of this, trans men in combat sports often have their cis men competitors refuse to fight them under the guise of 'not hitting women'. Even though trans men have also gone through testosterone based puberty, the thing that according to them also makes trans women fit only for the men's competitions.

This whole shitshow not making any logical sense isn't an accident, it's a cultural/political choice and not one based in reason or science. The point is 'don't be trans', anyone arguing otherwise is a rube or a con artist.

All the while transfolk “are weak soldiers to join the military.”
It's about control. It's always been about control.

Yes, and if there wasn't such a push to keep women and other beings who usually have their primary 'sex' hormone be estrogen that way then who knows? Perhaps there would be more beings who were physically strong.

But muscled women and other estroginated beings are said to be 'gross', look at the panic over The Last of Us 2. Any depection of what such beings could and actually do like is purported to be 'unrealistic' and 'woke nonsense'.

Despite it being more than possible, it's just a ploy to keep women and others who's primary sex hormone is estrogen controlled and unable to fight back via beauty standards and conditioning from a young age.

I think this argument falls apart the moment it encounters reality.

There's a reason virtually all physical sports have separate divisions for men and women. In many of them the men's division is technically the general division and women are allowed to take part, but typically don't because by and large they cannot compete with the men in that division. There's only a handful of sports where women compete with men on equal footing, and even fewer sports where women clearly outperform men. And yes, there are a couple of examples in history where a league adjusted its rules to exclude women after a woman started beating the men and the chauvinists in charge couldn't handle this (iirc some shooting competitions for example), but the fact is that this is not the case for the overwhelming majority of sports.

This is just fundamentally a nonsensical argument to begin with. What does it matter that, statistically, women are weaker than men? Society generally does not measure a person's worth by their physical strength.

Pro athletes are an even worse point of comparison, because most people of either gender will literally never ever be able to become a pro athlete at most sports no matter how hard they try. Not only because of genetic determinism, but also because becoming a pro athlete begins in childhood and unless you were on that track as a teenager that ship has sailed by the time you're an adult.

So yeah, women's leagues exist in sports because by and large women's bodies are physically different from men's. Without these leagues female athletes would have no opportunity to compete in a lot of sports as they would be completely crowded out by male athletes. It's not (for the most part) a conspiracy of the patriarchy to put women down.

huh? its all way simpler than that.