Women's sports belong to women, and the stopwatch agrees

BRO TAKE | Commentary

In March 2022, at the NCAA swimming championships in Atlanta, Kentucky's Riley Gaines touched the wall in the 200-yard freestyle final in a dead tie for fifth. She tied to the hundredth of a second with Lia Thomas, a male swimmer from Penn who had competed on the men's team for three seasons before switching to the women's. Gaines has said officials told her there was only one fifth-place trophy for the photos, and it went to Thomas. Hers, she was told, would come in the mail.

That moment is the whole argument in miniature. A young woman trains for fifteen years, reaches the biggest meet of her life, and is told to step aside for the picture.

Women's sports belong to women. They should be protected in law, and the people who run athletics at every level should say so without flinching.

The stopwatch doesn't have politics

Usain Bolt's 100-meter world record is 9.58 seconds, set in 2009. Florence Griffith-Joyner's women's record is 10.49, set in 1988 and still unbeaten. That's the fastest woman in history finishing about nine meters behind the fastest man. It isn't a knock on her. It's biology doing what biology does.

The gap opens at puberty. Testosterone builds bigger hearts and lungs, denser bones, longer levers, more muscle, and a higher ratio of fast-twitch fiber. A 2021 review in the journal Sports Medicine by researchers Emma Hilton and Tommy Lundberg found the male-female performance gap after puberty commonly runs from 10 to 50 percent depending on the sport. The same review looked at what happens when testosterone is suppressed for a year, and concluded that strength, muscle mass and bone density were only modestly affected. The advantage mostly stays.

You don't need to take anybody's word for this, including mine. Read the paper. That's what doing your own research should actually mean: go to the primary source, not the tweet about it.

A category is the point

Nobody separates sports by sex because they think women are fragile. They separate them because without separation, the podium at almost every elite event would be all male, every time. The women's category exists so that the best female athletes get to win something.

Title IX, signed in 1972, built that promise into American education. It's why your daughter's school has a softball team, why there are athletic scholarships for women, and why girls who were once told to go cheer from the stands now have their own seasons. Every roster spot, every final heat, every scholarship in the women's category was carved out on purpose, for women.

Let male athletes into that category and you don't expand opportunity. You transfer it.

Safety isn't hypothetical

In swimming, a male advantage costs a girl a medal. In contact sports it can cost her a lot more.

World Rugby saw this early. In 2020 it barred athletes who had gone through male puberty from elite women's rugby, citing research on the forces involved in tackles and the injury risk to female players. That was a sporting body looking at physics, not a political campaign.

In North Carolina, high school volleyball player Payton McNabb has testified publicly that she suffered a concussion and lasting symptoms after being hit in the head by a spike from a male opponent in a 2022 match. Her testimony became part of the push behind her state's 2023 law protecting girls' sports. A spiked ball, a tackle, a check into the boards: these are the moments where a sex-based size and power gap stops being abstract.

Where the rules stand

The tide has turned, and it turned because girls and their parents kept speaking up.

• World Aquatics in 2022 restricted the women's category to athletes who hadn't gone through male puberty.
• World Athletics followed in 2023, barring athletes who went through male puberty from female world-ranking competition.
• On February 5, 2025, President Trump signed an executive order titled "Keeping Men Out of Women's Sports," directing federal agencies to enforce Title IX on the basis of biological sex.
• The NCAA changed its participation policy the next day, limiting competition in women's sports to female athletes.
• More than two dozen states have passed laws protecting girls' and women's school sports, and challenges to the Idaho and West Virginia laws went all the way to the Supreme Court, which agreed in 2025 to hear them.

Straight facts, no spin. If you're following any of this, go to the actual order, the actual policy text, the actual statute. The headline is always a summary written by somebody with an angle.

The objection worth taking seriously

People on the other side of this say the numbers are small. There aren't many male athletes competing in women's events, so why the fuss?

Because fairness isn't a volume discount. Ask the girl who finished ninth in a heat where only eight advance. One lost spot is her whole season.

The other objection is harder, and it deserves a straight, kind answer. Young people who identify as transgender want to play sports too, and many are going through something genuinely painful. That's real, and nobody should treat them with contempt. They deserve a place to compete. That place can be the men's category, which in most school and college sports is effectively open already, or coed and open divisions, which plenty of leagues and races have added without fuss. Compassion for a person doesn't require rewriting the rules for everybody else's daughters.

Being kind to someone and telling them the truth aren't opposites. Here, they're the same job.

If it's your daughter's league

Most fathers and mothers won't testify before a legislature. You don't have to. The fight is won or lost in gyms and athletic offices, and that's where you have the most pull.

• Read the rules first. Find your state's law and your state high school athletic association's handbook. Know what the policy actually says before you raise a concern.
• Ask in writing. Email the athletic director and ask what the school's policy is for girls' teams and locker rooms. A written question gets a written answer, and a written answer is something you can take to a school board.
• Show up. School board meetings are dull and poorly attended, which is exactly why a handful of calm, prepared parents can change an outcome. Bring a copy of the policy and speak for three minutes. Stay to stack the chairs.
• Back your daughter. If she's uncomfortable with a situation on her team, believe her and help her say it plainly and respectfully. Teach her she can hold the line without being cruel to anyone. We've written more on raising kids with convictions when the culture keeps moving.
• Stay civil. The coach, the AD and the other parents are mostly decent people caught in a confusing moment. Firm on the principle, warm to the person across the table. That combination wins more rooms than volume ever has.

A generation of women fought for their own teams, their own scholarships and their own podiums. The least the rest of us can do is make sure their daughters don't have to wait for a trophy in the mail.