Who Else Should We Ban From Women’s Sports? A Thought Experiment in Absurdity

 Competitive sport has never been fair. That's not a glitch in the system—it's the whole point. Some people are taller. Some are faster. Some grew up with three older brothers and played football in the garden every day. Some are just genetically blessed. And some—let’s face it—are the rest of us: short, slow, out of breath, and wondering which end of the javelin is the handle.

Yet in this world of inherently uneven playing fields, one group is being singled out as a threat to fairness: transgender women.

The number of trans people in the population is already small—around 1%. Of those, only a tiny fraction participate in competitive sports. In fact, studies consistently show that trans athletes are rare at the elite level. So why the sudden flurry of bans and moral panics? Why the need for legislation and “protections” from this statistically negligible group?

It doesn’t take much digging to find the answer: it’s not about fairness. It’s about fear. Populist governments and right-wing commentators have found a convenient scapegoat in trans people, using them to manufacture outrage and distract from far more pressing societal issues.

Let’s explore the logic behind these bans. If the goal is to “protect” cisgender women from supposed unfair advantages, where do we draw the line?

Should we ban:

  • Tall women with wingspans like albatrosses?

  • Women with higher-than-average testosterone levels, even if it's natural?

  • Women raised with athletic brothers, who spent their childhoods mastering headers and volleys?

  • Women who started training at 4 years old, because their parents could afford private coaching?

If we follow the “unfair advantage” logic to its natural conclusion, we’d be left with a women’s league made up of identical clones, each carefully vetted to ensure they meet a set of arbitrary “normal” standards. That’s not sport. That’s dystopia.

The truth is, all athletes bring their own advantages—and that’s what makes competition exciting. Sport is a celebration of difference, not a tool for enforcing gender orthodoxy.

Banning trans women from women’s sports doesn’t protect women. It weaponises a myth of fairness to exclude, dehumanise, and marginalise an already vulnerable minority. And it does so in the name of a purity that never existed in sport to begin with.

Let’s stop pretending that these bans are about protecting fairness.

They’re about protecting power.

And it’s time we called that out.

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