Why Conservative Men Suddenly Care About Women's Sports
Conservative men fought hardest against women's sports in the first place, so why are they suddenly so concerned with trans women competing in women's sports?
"No person in the United States shall, based on sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance."
In 1896, in the pivotal case of Plessy v. Ferguson, the U.S. Supreme Court determined that segregation was not discrimination and as long as facilities were equal, was not in violation of the Constitution. Over the next 50 years, however, it became abundantly clear that racial segregation was not resulting in equality. In Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that racial segregation of children in public schools was unconstitutional. It also helped establish the precedent that “separate-but-equal” institutions and services were not, in fact, equal at all.
In 1972, President Richard Nixon signed into law a group of Educational Amendments, which prohibited sex-based discrimination in any school or education program that receives funding from the federal government. Although Title IX of those amendments never specifically mentioned sports, that is what it has become most famous for.
Although there has been a massive shift towards providing athletic opportunities for women and girls, just like with racial discrimination it is becoming abundantly clear that separate is not equal. Consider this video posted by student athlete Sedona Prince at the 2021 NCAA March Madness basketball tournament, which triggered a subsequent investigation.
The investigation exposed not only a significant amount of gender inequity in the NCAA’s basketball tournaments, but also in the NCAA’s 84 other championships in 23 sports across three divisions. For instance, the NCAA spent an average of $4,285 for each male athlete that participated in a team sport in a men’s tournament, but only $2,588 for women’s participants in the 2018-2019 season, which is a difference of $1,697 per player.
The gap was even greater in the NCAA’s six single gender sports, where the NCAA spent an average of $2,229 more on participants in men’s sports than on participants in women’s sports with $5,282 being spent on each male player compared to $3,053 on each woman. A study of other sports showed the NCAA was consistently spending 2-3 times as much on male athletes as on female athletes. One reason that the NCAA gave for these disparities was that men’s sports brought in more revenue than women’s sports but the study also showed that the NCAA spent significantly more money promoting men’s events than women’s.
For instance, they spent approximately $53,211 on general promotion for the men’s Division I lacrosse tournament compared to $17,396 for the women’s not to mention spending $3,586 on signage for the men’s water polo tournament compared to $1,960 for the women’s. Advertising helps generate larger crowds, but signage helps create a more exciting experience for those crowds, so both go a long way towards generating revenue.
The important thing to always keep in mind about collegiate sports is that the same way other students go to college to get a degree that will give them higher income earning potential, student athletes that perform well in college can also generate the kind of buzz that leads to larger professional contracts. When the NCAA isn’t investing in women’s sports, however, that means they aren’t generating the same buzz, which also decreases their income earning potential once they enter the world of pro sports. Here’s just a sample of the vast discrepancies between what men and women are paid in professional leagues.
For centuries now, men have promoted the idea that they are both intellectually and physically superior to women, but in most cases they have simultaneously hampered women in a number of ways to ensure this remained true. Men have historically prohibited girls from reading or attending school and have continued to promote the idea that a woman’s greatest value is in bearing children and being a mother. Largely to keep them out of professional fields, leaving men to pronounce themselves the “experts” on everything, which also allows them to set the standards for everything.
For instance, it has allowed them to “prove” scientifically that women were physically inferior to men, while also designing all the women’s clothing and determining acceptable behaviors and activities for women which only seemed to prove their theory. Corsets, for instance, kept women from being able to breathe well, as well as making them prone to fainting, which made them appear weaker. Riding sidesaddle in a dress is significantly more difficult than riding astride a horse in pants, so men were - of course - not only the superior equestrians, but the difficulties in riding sidesaddle in the first place kept many women from riding at all.
When boys are taken out to do physical activities like hunting and fishing or encouraged to participate in sports, they grow physically strong. When girls are encouraged to participate in sedentary activities such as sewing, knitting, crocheting, reading or playing with dolls, they don’t develop the same physical strength as boys. In lower classes, however, where both girls and boys have been forced to engage in hard, physical labor from a young age, there is far less difference in strength between the sexes.
In the modern age, where both boys and girls are growing up with roughly the same access to physical activities, the gap between men and women is growing smaller and smaller. On some level, men understand this, which is why they have been adamant about keeping men’s and women’s sports separate, even though there are plenty of individual sports that women could easily compete with men in and team sports they could compete right alongside them. Which is exactly what men are so afraid of.
Academically, women and girls are already outperforming men and boys on every level, which means the only arena in which men can still feel safely superior to women is in physical performance. This is what men are determined to protect at all costs.
Trans women in women’s sports is good for women’s sports and that’s what men are afraid of.
Although there is genuine validity to the discomfort women may feel at having to share locker rooms with trans women, there is also a huge benefit to them participating in women’s sports. At least, there will be in the long run. The argument against trans women being able to compete against biological women is that they are biologically male and therefore have a competitive advantage against other women. Which is true. There are also several reasons why that is a good thing.
Overall, human beings tend to only rise as high as the people they are around. In other words, when an athlete or team of athletes reaches the top of their division or achieves dominance in some way, they tend to plateau. This is largely because there is nothing pushing them or challenging them further, which means there’s really no reason to grow or get better. If the bars suddenly gets raised, however, it spurs new growth. Trans women raise the bar higher, which opens up a whole new level of growth for women. The same way it would if they actually competed against men.
The reality is that I don’t think men have a greater capacity to excel at sports than women do. I do think women have cumulatively reached, or are close to reaching, their peak capacity by only competing against other women. I deeply believe that if women started competing with men, they would reach a whole new level. It’s not even that women need to compete against men so much as with them, such as in team sports like soccer and basketball. Soccer and basketball are not strength-dependent sports and women have been competing in them professionally for long enough now that they have achieved roughly the same skill level as men.
Conversely, I also believe men have reached a point of stagnation which would be galvanized by the introduction of women into their sports. The truth is, while men may have a greater capacity for physical strength, that doesn’t necessarily mean they are better athletes overall. For one thing, women have had to work a lot harder to achieve the same levels of competition because they’ve had both social and physical obstacles to overcome. For another, there is absolutely no doubt that excelling in sports is every bit as much an intellectual challenge as it is a physical one. Many an athlete has brought about their own defeat by letting someone or something get in their head.
In this aspect, it may well be that women are creating a better world for athletes on the whole. Men’s sports have long been dominated by a “win at all costs” philosophy, not to mention a superhero-like approach to competing like pushing through pain and “no pain, no gain.” As a result, their careers are more frequently curtailed quickly by career-ending injuries. Injuries that might not have occurred had they actually taken the appropriate time to rest an initially smaller injury and give it recovery time. Choosing to play though smaller injuries, however, has a tendency to only create much more serious ones.
Women, on the other hand, are showing a much greater willingness to consider their own personal needs and to put them above those of their teams or their sport. In doing so, they have also incurred the sometimes brutally violent wrath of men. A few examples of this are when Simone Biles withdrew from all-around competition at the Tokyo Olympic Games in order to protect her mental health or when Naomi Osaka withdrew from the German Open for the same reasons. While many supported the women, just as many were quite vocal in their disapproval. Naomi Osaka has even recently addressed how toxic the idea of winning at all costs is.
Women choosing to protect themselves is also having an impact on men’s sports
At the end of the last NFL season, Antonio Brown stripped his jersey off and walked off the field during a game with the New York Jets. Coaches wanted him to play injured and he refused, at which time they cut him from the team. An MRI the following day confirmed that Brown had broken bone fragments in his ankle, a torn ligament and cartilage loss. Which just begs the question, who gets to decide how injured is “too injured” to play? The person who has to spend the rest of their lives in that body or the fans, coaches and owners?
When men consider the possibility of women playing right alongside men, all they seem to consider is their own belief that women are “weaker” than men. It never seems to occur to them that women may actually make the entire game better for everyone. It is no secret that fans love watching players who are actually having fun and there was time when sports used to actually be fun. No more.
I don’t know that I will personally ever watch an Olympics again. Once they gave a 15-year old potentially dangerous heart medication just so she could perform better, that was pretty much the end for me. While it may have always been the case, sports in America have only become more and more like Roman Gladiator spectacles, where a never-ending stream of bodies was necessary to appease the bloodthirsty crowds.
Athletes are no longer human (if they ever were) but just puppets paid to entertain the masses, who are simply discarded as soon as they are no longer of use. I, for one, am all for greater autonomy on the part of athletes to decide for themselves when they can and cannot compete. The owners and leagues don’t care about them, so it is imperative that they begin to advocate for themselves. I believe women will be (and, in fact, already are) leading this charge - which is perhaps one more reason men don’t want women in sports.
The only reason conservative men are suddenly so interested in women’s sports is because if trans women are allowed to compete in women’s sports, it opens the door for trans men (who are biological women) to compete in men’s sports. In addition, if biological women start beating trans women, it’s only a matter of time before they will start wanting to compete with or against biological men. Conservative men see the writing on the wall. They know it is only a matter of time before there are no more men’s and woman’s sports but just sports. When that happens, they will lose their one and only remaining platform on which they base their superiority over women: physical dominance.
We cannot pull another Jackie Robinson
It is completely ludicrous and unrealistic to put one woman or even a handful of women into a men’s league and expect them to succeed. We’ve already seen more than enough examples of the vitriol, hatred and rage that comes from racial integration but it will probably pale in comparison to the integration of men’s and women’s sports. The integration of the military is another example of just exactly what women trying to integrate sports have in front of them.
Just like the military, sports are also invariably physical, which just opens the door to all kinds of backdoor physical abuse that might not be so easily hidden otherwise. If there’s anything American men hate more than Black people, it’s women. There will be no end of hell for women attempting to integrate sports but I also believe it’s important for our future as a country.
That being said, there will be plenty of women that will fight just as hard against it as men. The same was true with the integration of schools. But separate is not equal and never will be. If women ever want to be accepted as true equals, we will have to do the hard work of showing up as equals. Someone has to go first and that’s always a big ask. But it is far too big of an ask to ask a lone woman to go alone. The NBA and the WNBA, however, are ripe for integration and I would imagine professional soccer probably is as well.
Sports have the power to unite us across all racial, political, gender and ideological lines.
Sports have the power to bring about change and create enormous good in the world if we let them. But not if we simply remain insanely focused on winning at all costs.
I, for one, cannot wait for the day when men and women compete side by side. I believe it’s coming, I just hope I get to see it.