Trans girls playing girls' sports? How about a more radical idea: Abolish the gender divide in athletics altogether.

Boston Globe

19-03-2025

The WNBA's Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese have become household names. And college phenom Paige Bueckers looks like she could be next.
For millions of women and girls in America, it's been a joy. For some, it's felt like a liberation.
But in their punchy new book 'Open Play,' the academics Sheree Bekker and Stephen Mumford argue that women's sports are something else entirely: a cage.
They get the appeal. They're fans themselves.
But to put women and girls in their own category, the authors insist, is to limit their possibilities.
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From a very young age the expectations are lower, the facilities are inferior, the rewards are fewer. And it all carries up to the professional ranks. Last year, the mean salary for WNBA players was
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Bekker, a health professor at the University of Bath, and Mumford, a philosophy professor at Durham University, both in England, offer up a radical remedy for this inequality: Abolish the gender divide at all levels of sports.
Sound outlandish? They make a more compelling case than you might imagine.
As they point out, the argument for a separate category of women's sports usually revolves around issues of fairness and safety. But if those are our chief concerns, then why do we divvy up athletes by gender? After all, there can be big disparities in size and strength and skill within gender. Why not separate based on those attributes instead?
We already do a version of this in youth sports. An exceptional 13-year-old soccer player competing in the under-14 division is allowed to move up to the under-17 division in search of stiffer competition.
Women, the authors contend, should be given the same opportunity.
After Lindsey Vonn proved herself one of the greatest skiers of all time, male or female, she asked to race against men — and was denied.
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Does that make any sense?
Bekker and Mumford's argument can take them into some pretty provocative territory.
They maintain, for instance, that the most important explanation for the gap between male and female athletic performance is the difference in opportunity and expectation — not any natural advantage that men might have over women.
In fact, they suggest men have no natural advantage in size and strength at all.
On that point in particular, they're likely to face significant pushback from some scientists and other readers. So I started my recent conversation with the authors there. We also tackled the thorny question of transgender girls in girls' sports — and how it might complicate Bekker and Mumford's efforts to get rid of the gender binary in athletics.
The interview, conducted over Zoom, has been edited for clarity and length.
You argue that while men have higher testosterone production than women, it doesn't give them any natural advantage in athletic competition. And you point to some real holes in the testosterone research. But there are plenty of scientists who say, 'Sure, the testosterone research may be flawed, but the
strongly suggests it provides an advantage for men.' What do you say to those researchers?
Sheree Bekker:
So we often hear this folk myth that testosterone is the 'molecule of performance' or the 'male molecule,' when actually everybody has testosterone.
But our key argument is that there isn't just one thing that determines performance. There really is so much more going on, mostly socially and culturally — how little boys and little girls are treated, and how we're treated throughout our lifetimes — that plays into performance.
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That can have much more of an impact than testosterone itself can have.
Stephen Mumford:
Let's think how implausible it is that testosterone explains superior performance: Look at the Olympic medals tables, look at how they're dominated by the United States and China — by wealthy countries.
It's not as if testosterone levels for men in the United States are double what they are, or 100 times what they are, in some other country. The chief indicators of athletic performance are going to be investment in the infrastructure — the training facilities and so on.
Then you can think about gender — how there's far more investment in men's sport than women's sport.
You write about women who nudged their way into male-dominated athletic competitions in the past: one who finished second in a figure skating championship in 1902 and another who struck out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig in a baseball exhibition. You suggest that men felt threatened by women's athletic prowess and pushed them aside by creating a separate category of 'women's sports.' But historians have been
, arguing that women were really the driving force behind the creation of women's sports. And I think if you asked the average male athlete today if he felt threatened by women athletes, he'd probably say no. So make your case for women's sports as a tool of patriarchy and exclusion.
Bekker:
The point of that argument was illuminating some 'hidden figures' in women's sports — who, before sport was segregated into men's sports and women's sports, participated with men and against men. And then, when we saw those women get close to winning — or even winning — those sports, suddenly we saw women being banned, and then a few years down the line, a women's category was created.
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I think these examples are illustrative. It's not to say that is the whole history of women's sports, but I think it does tell us something about women's sport.
Do you oppose, say, women-only or Black-only spaces in the professional world? And if not, why is this sort of separation different from sex segregation in sports?
Mumford:
We wouldn't be opposed to, say, a support group for women, because voluntary exit is allowed: If you decide you want to leave and go talk to some men, you're free to do so.
This is why we think women's sport is specifically a case of segregation — because no matter how good you are, you're not allowed to go out and play against somebody else.
There are a lot of women who take great pride in the growth of women's soccer and basketball. Do you risk alienating them by suggesting they're trapped in some sort of false consciousness?
Bekker:
I think there is a lot of education to do — for women to understand all of these ways in which they're being kept small and their sport is being kept small. And we find that people who hear this argument really do say, 'Wow! That resonates with me. Wow! That does speak to my experience of sports.'
Mumford:
Women's sport is progress of a kind — because, to begin with, women were completely excluded from sport. But it's not the end goal. Women are not getting equal treatment as men. They're not getting equal funding. They're not getting equal prestige.
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You write in the book that if we were really concerned about fairness and safety, we wouldn't divvy athletes up by gender; after all, there can be real weight and power differentials within a gender. You suggest there might be another way — separating athletes by skill or size instead. But you don't really go into detail. So can you tell me, in practical terms, how, say, a high school soccer league might categorize athletes without using gender? Would there be speed or weight-lifting tests? Would it just be observation by coaches? Who makes the ultimate decision?
Mumford:
One thing we'd say is, it's got to be specific to the sport. So if you're considering safety, for instance, there are some sports where that's not a consideration whatsoever. Golf's not a contact sport.
Regarding fairness, there is a long tradition of sports being divided up by ability.
Soccer is often divided by age and abilities. There's different leagues where the teams are at different levels.
There's a well-known English soccer player,
Bekker:
There are some places we might learn from. For example, disability sport. If we look at the Paralympics, it's not perfect. But they obviously have ways of classifying people according to their ability.
I'm an injury prevention researcher. So safety is really important to me. And what would make the biggest difference is to think about skill: You see this in combat sports already — sports like karate where they're actually classified according to their skill, by belt color.
You make a strong argument for transgender athletes' participation in sports. But most Americans are
— and Republicans have effectively used this as a wedge issue against the Democratic Party. How do you manage the politics? Does the transgender athlete issue pose a significant obstacle to getting rid of the gender binary in sports?
Mumford:
It's a created issue. The dangers have been completely exaggerated. The only data that counts is whether trans women are winning all the time — and trans women don't hold any world records.
Managing the politics — we don't want to spend all our time discussing a manufactured issue. What we want to do is make our readers see the case for equality. See the real issues that hurt women: the abuse in sport, the lack of funding, the pay gap.
I have to say, I know people who are very liberal-minded, who have daughters who play youth sports, and who have very genuine concerns about transgender girls injuring their kids.
Bekker:
We see a lot on social media — these videos that are really scary, right? Often, you'll see a bigger athlete barreling into another one. And I think this narrative plays into our ideas about male and female — this idea that women are always smaller and weaker and are going to be hurt by men, and men are always bigger and stronger. And so it's that conflation of trans women with cis men that is being played upon.
And for me, all of these issues will dissolve if we think about how we could categorize and play and think about sport differently.
David Scharfenberg can be reached at