I think separating sports into “men” and “women” categories is starting to feel as arbitrary as sorting athletes by height. Yes, men and women have physiological differences on average. What matters is that sports already manage physiological differences through structured rules: weight classes, reach limits, youth height brackets, and strict equipment regulations. If two fighters step into a boxing ring at the same weight, we already treat them as competitively comparable. So why can’t they compete regardless of gender? What exactly are we afraid of seeing?

For instance, why can’t we have a mixed soccer team of eleven players that includes both men and women? Teams already balance players based on speed, endurance, and technical skill. Gender is just another variable to manage, not a sacred line.

History is filled with examples of divisions that looked justified at the time but later collapsed. In 1810, the first major interracial boxing match took place between Tom Molineaux, a formerly enslaved Black fighter, and Tom Cribb, the white English champion. People genuinely believed a Black man could not compete with a white champion. Molineaux nearly defeated him before an injury changed the outcome. That fight exposed how much of the separation was built on fear and tradition rather than fact.

There is a deeper reason we cling to gender-separated sports. Accepting equality in sports would be the first step in breaking the belief that men are in any way superior to women. It reminds me of a story I grew up hearing in Iran. A teacher asks a boy to recite the alphabet. He deliberately mispronounces the first letter. The teacher gets frustrated and asks why he is doing that. The boy says, “If you see I can say A, then you will want me to say B, then C, and you won’t stop.” The fear wasn’t the letter. The fear was everything that would follow once the first small truth was admitted.

Years from now, people will look back and wonder why we were so certain mixed competition was impossible when the structures for fairness already existed. The resistance isn’t about safety or logic. It is about what happens after we admit that “A” can be pronounced correctly. Once you allow that first truth, the rest of the alphabet becomes impossible to avoid.

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