Has anybody noticed the lack of cis women competing at high levels in sports that, realistically, cis women should own?
For example, car racing. Danica Patrick being smaller and lighter than the men she races against is such an advantage that the league made a lot of noise about handicapping her by putting extra weights in her car. (To the best of my knowledge this did not happen.) Why is she the only cis female car racer anyone's ever heard of, when being small and light is an advantage in driving fast?
Or horse racing! Practically every teenage girl in the world used to want to own a horse, or loved horses, or wanted to ride horses. Jockeys are small men, typically, because being small and light is an advantage in racing if something is carrying you. And the strength difference between men and women is a. all in the upper body, which is basically not really used in racing a well-trained horse and b. negligible in comparison to the strength of the horse. I don't care how strong a dude is, he's not using his manly strength to guide the horse. The horse is much stronger than him, full stop. It's the horse's training and the trust and respect between horse and jockey and the jockey's strategic mind that wins horse races. All of which are traits cis women have just as much as cis men if not more so in some cases, considering how many cis men are subjected to an upbringing that trains them to think empathy for an animal is a weakness. Why are all the top jockeys not cis women?
Long distance running. Over a distance, speed doesn't matter as much as stamina and endurance, which science has proven cis women have a slight advantage, on average, over cis men in. So... why do cis women not dominate marathons?
Also, why is long distance swimming not a popular sport? Is it just because we don't have mile-long swimming pools? Because we could use natural bodies of water and have boats coming behind the athletes to grab them if they falter and look like they're gonna sink. Could it possibly be because women, with higher endurance and more body fat for better floatation, would be better at it?
Or -- a slightly different angle. Men's professional basketball has become all about "how tall are the athletes you can recruit." Women's professional basketball is still about skill and strategy, not about absurd heights and which team can field more incredibly tall people. I'm not saying short women dominate in women's professional basketball, but I am saying that women exist at the upper extremes of height much more rarely, so women's professional basketball is basically "normal human professional basketball." Why is it so unpopular and unhyped in comparison to men's? Why do the men make so much more money, when they're playing a sport that the vast majority of fit and trained athletes couldn't win in, because those fit and trained athletes aren't in the 99.9% percentile for height? Women's basketball ought to be more interesting than men's... but funny that.
Soccer (aka football everywhere but the US) is a sport where a low center of gravity is valuable. So is hockey. In fact, I, a short and unathletic autistic girl, did incredibly well at floor hockey in high school, in comparison to the taller girls who were better athletes, because I could get under them to get the puck. Therefore why do cis women not dominate those sports? Particularly soccer! Cis men excel at upper body strength but the strength levels of cis men and women's legs are pretty close to equal, and you're not allowed to use your upper body strength in soccer! Women should have an advantage over men there. They do not.
It's because all of the "men are better at sports" bullshit is the patriarchy talking. Men have to be better at sports than women because women have already proven we can compete with men in every other way. Individual female athletes who are excellent cannot be allowed to compete with excellent men because what if they win? What does that say about men and women?
And that's why this "trans women shouldn't compete with cis women" thing was bullshit from the getgo. (Particularly when it's applied to trans girls, who if they are under 13 or they're on puberty blockers don't have significant advantage over their agemate cis girls.) Trans women do not have systemic advantages over cis women in most sports -- not if they've fully transitioned, because you need a continuing supply of testosterone to have the muscular advantage over cis women -- and a fuckton of sports are ones where cis women should own trans women because on average trans women are taller, and sports exist where greater height is a disadvantage.
And then shit like chess. Seriously? The only way a trans woman could be better at chess than a cis woman for a reason to do with her agab (as opposed to, she just happens to be better at chess) is that, growing up as a boy, she was encouraged to play chess more often. Well, you know what, at high level athletic competitions, that's not allowed for a separator. You don't get to say "rich men who grew up with chess tutors are not allowed to play with poor men who only had public school chess club, because they had more opportunity to play chess." Also, it's not provable. My dad practically pushed me into playing chess, and I'm cis female. (I'm not any good at it, not because I am a cis female, but because I don't think multiple steps ahead; my intellectual strengths are in analyzing what has already happened, not in predicting what people will do next. I might be able to beat Elon Musk, though.) If a cis woman is competing in chess at a high level, she is probably very capable of trouncing a cis man. And probably has, many times. So... bullshit.
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