How Can You Deny Sex Differences When the Olympics Exists?

Are our eyeballs seeing the same thing?

Italy's Biathlon Mixed Relay team at Milano Cortina / @milanocortina26

Like many, I have spent the past month watching the Olympics, or what I can of it with a toddler hanging off me. My favorite sports to watch are freestyle skiing and snowboarding, and how cool is it to have two versions of each event—the men’s and the women’s—to tune into? Especially because, unlike in this past Summer Olympics, we didn’t have men competing against women (in combat sports, no less), which was a nice reprieve. I think there was a they/them in a bobsled somewhere: a woman, of course, competing with other women, so it was a total non-issue. But it’s still got me thinking, as watching sports does, about the very obvious sex and performance differences between men and women and the fact that some people just can’t, or won’t, see it.

For example, I’ve come across more than a few posts on X bemoaning the fact that hockey, in particular, is commonly called “hockey” when referring to the men’s game and “women’s hockey” when referring to the women’s game. This is not untrue and is perhaps an understandable gripe when it comes to the Olympics, where most other sports are known by their names, and people further specify whether it is a men’s or women’s event. In my favorite sport to watch too, sport climbing, which I follow even outside of the Olympics, men and women are given very equal time and attention. There are male and female superstars on both sides and, as far as I can tell, men’s and women’s events draw equal crowds.

This is great! But there is an important difference that the “hockey” gripers are missing. As people invariably point out in the comments, the tendency to consider certain popular men’s sports that have their own professional leagues to simply be the default is because the professional leagues technically aren’t closed off to women. If a woman could be competitive in the NHL, NBA, NFL, what have you, then she could play. But they aren’t, so they have their own protected leagues where men aren’t (or weren’t, anyway, when we had any sense) allowed to play.

This answer is usually dismissed by many, especially my fellow women, unfortunately, as “misogyny.” That’s right. They truly seem to believe—or seem to want to believe—that the reason you don’t see women on men’s sports teams is just bias and bigotry. It’s a kind of wilful blindness to reality that astonishes me and has annoyed me since I was a kid, when “girl power” pushed the idea that men and women were the same, and I could clearly see we are not.

Going back to my title, it particularly astonishes me that one can maintain this delusion when the Olympics offer men’s and women’s categories in every event for easy direct comparison. We are all free to check out men’s and women’s times and speeds. We can all see for ourselves the differences in amplitude, spins, and trick difficulty in the freestyle sports. Women simply would not be competitive with men. They are not worse—they have fundamentally different bodies that are shorter, lighter, less muscular, and built to house a whole extra organ!

The fact that women are not just smaller men but our own type of human entirely is precisely what makes it so great to have women’s events to watch. They aren’t just downgraded men’s events; they are unique events in their own right, with women’s unique skills and strengths on display. To deny women their own category is to deny them the chance to shine, which is exactly how it used to be and which is what these sex denialists seem to want to go back to.

As I’ve written before when discussing sport climbing, there are so many amazing female athletes whose names no one would even know if they had to compete against men and if they were not afforded their own protected female category. Likewise, there were many amazing female athletes in the limelight this Olympics who have benefitted from exactly this.

Many women seem to reject sex differences and the rationale for female sports because they find it insulting to even consider the idea that women are not competitive against men. But this attitude is an infantile and defensive knee-jerk rejection of reality and is, in fact, the real insult against women. If you think there are no real, physical differences between the sexes, then the only way you can explain the performance discrepancy between men and women is essentially to say that women don't try hard enough. This is what bears taking offence to.

So yeah, maybe it's annoying that we talk about “hockey” and “women's hockey,” but it is also a reflection of the good reality that women have protected sports. I'm all for interest between the two equalizing and for people to naturally start referring to men's and women's hockey separately as a result. But this is not a change that's going to come about by insisting there are no differences between the two games and trying to force everyone else to play along. It can come from pointing out that, as in many other sports today, women are worth watching on their own merits. They aren’t in the men’s games or categories because they lack skill, drive, or effort—they aren’t in the men’s game because they aren’t men.