Michael Phelps Is A Gifted Male—That Doesn’t Mean Sex in Sports Doesn’t Matter

A video of a 7’3” 13-year-old basketball player from Montreal towering over his middle school-aged teammates has re-circulated online after some armchair commentators tried to use it as a dunk against people who oppose permitting biological men to compete in women’s sports.

One X user, @undeadbestie, facetiously tweeted, “In the name of fairness, should this kid be allowed to compete against other kids? I really care about this for some reason, and it will be a primary point in my politics.” Another user, @shattubatu, replied, “Not fair for him to play with other, normal 13-year-olds, but I’m not without sympathy, so he should have a league just for him and other 7’3” 13-year-olds.” @undeadbestie responded, “This seems like the most logical solution that will keep everyone safe and happy! :)"

The thread bore a slurry of similar sentiment with excess confidence. With each self-congratulatory pat on the back, they thought they exposed the looming hypocrisy in the right’s position on sex-segregated sports. The opposition to biological men playing in women’s sports, by the way, isn’t a left-right issue. This is an issue that the overwhelming majority of the population, including 79% of Democrats, agree with. So, continue to ignore it at your own peril. Continue to lose elections if that’s the hill you want to die on.

But let’s entertain their point: biological advantages that give certain players the edge—even a considerable one—already exist within intrasexual competition. If that’s the case, then opposition to intersexual competition can’t rest on the premise of eliminating unfair biological advantages. These people are accusing conservatives of concern trolling about fairness while actually endorsing unfairness as the status quo.

This 7’3” boy has a clear height advantage that gives him a considerable leg up against his competition, who haven’t been so fortunate to experience an accelerated growth spurt in early adolescence. Likewise, trans advocates often point to genetic anomalies in athletes like Michael Phelps, whose wide wingspan, height, long torso, and exceptional lactate efficiency give him a competitive advantage in the pool. His size 14 feet and double-jointed, hyper-flexible ankles have been likened to flippers. Put simply, Phelps is genetically suited for swimming, and many have argued that he was likely genetically destined for greatness if not untouchability.

A 2008 article in The Scientific American scrutinized these claims in an interview with former team physician H. Richard Weiner. Weiner downplayed the extent to which Phelps has been “genetically gifted.” Weiner maintained that while Phelps did possess a variety of traits that were positively correlated to better swimming performance and may offer him an advantage, they fall within normal human variation and aren’t the sole explanation for Phelps’ success, which he argued had more to do with locomotive genius—something he described as an intuitive sense of moving the water around them and how much water they are displacing.

But let’s grant that it has accounted for Phelps’ success significantly, as does this 7’3” 13-year-old boy’s height. Schuyler Bailar is an openly transgender NCAA athlete who hosted controversial former University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas on his podcast Dear Schuyler. They discussed trans participation in sports, and Schuyler claimed that biological differences in sports among men are celebrated, but when it comes to women and transgender women, it is policed and legislated. 

“Biological diversity exists everywhere in sport, in every demographic of people and every demographic of women. That’s kinda what sports are based on. I mean, if every body was exactly the same, there would be no competition,” Bailar argued. He continued, “Michael Phelps is allowed to keep his body as it is, and in fact, he’s celebrated for all of his biological advantages. But Caster Semenya and other women like her are excluded. This extends to transgender women, too. When a trans woman is different, immediately it’s called unfair. But the reality is there are so many women who might be ‘too tall’ or ‘too strong’ or ‘too fast,’ and so this debate is actually not about fairness.” 

Here’s why this point that trans activists like Bailar think they’re making is moot: Phelps is representative of something known as the Greater Male Variability Hypothesis, the idea that males show greater interindividual variability than females do in both physical and psychological characteristics, including intellectual abilities. Applied to sports, men unsurprisingly exhibit greater variability in physical traits relevant to sports performance, such as height, muscle mass, wingspan, VO2 max, length of limbs, the list goes on. 

This isn’t problematic because men’s sports exist to maximize competition, regardless of how extreme the outliers are. It is an ultra-competitive arena where anyone who meets the standards to compete gets a seat at the table. Women’s sports, by contrast, are a different beast entirely. Women’s sports exist as a separate category to give them a space to compete meaningfully within a very specifically defined set of rules. They exist to minimize competition so that women can even participate at all. By creating barriers to entry (must be a biological woman), they can achieve success among a smaller, less competitive (compared to men) pool of people.

Likewise, in chess, the open league permits anyone, male or female, to compete, while the women’s league permits only women. This is often accounted for through a lens of historical lack of opportunities, sexism, and barriers to entry for women that systematically excluded them from chess. However, you could also argue women just aren’t as good at chess, or more specifically, not as many women are freakishly good at chess. And that matters, considering there can be only one winner. Secondly, any biological advantages Phelps or any other male players have don’t transcend the categorical boundaries of their biological sex. 

Trans activists try to use this false equivalence to straw man what the issue of fairness is really about. It isn’t about neutralizing every individual genetic advantage, but about establishing a baseline of conditions for meaningful competition. Sex segregation exists for the same reason any other categorical separation exists, be it weight classes, age divisions, or intellectual capacity. Imagine a 140 IQ Stanford-educated adult making the case that they should be permitted to compete in the spelling bee at a local elementary school for the mentally challenged based on the fact that variation exists among all competitions. 

If the difference is meaningful enough that one group ought to be at a significant group-wide disadvantage (Phelps is an individual, mind you, not an entire group of people) that renders them nearly incapable of ever winning, then yes, they ought to be separated. The point is to preserve fair competition within biologically coherent groups no different than any other grouping based on shared characteristics and limited variation without that group.

We know that men and women have vastly different anatomy and physiology that is dictated by sex chromosomes and sex hormones. These sex-based differences result in considerably stronger, more powerful, and faster men than women of similar age and training status. As such, women have limited potential to achieve the same feats as men. Without separate sex-defined categories, women would be almost entirely excluded from meaningful competition. For women to come into contact with exceptional variability in physical contact sports, for example, is extremely dangerous, so there’s a safety element there. Women aren’t just disadvantaged by competing against men; they can literally die. Numerous studies have established that transgender women (biological men) have a competitive athletic advantage against otherwise matched biological women, even when sex hormone levels are normalized. 

John McEnroe famously caused a big uproar when he said that if Serena Williams competed in the men’s circuit, she’d rank about 700th in the world by male standards. He only made this comment because people questioned why he qualified his compliment of her talent and athleticism by referring to Williams as the best “female” player in the world, to which he offered the obvious caveat that there is a substantial difference between men’s and women’s tennis—the precise reason we have different competitions based on sex-limiting potential. 

This point isn’t even hypothetical; it was demonstrated in real life when Serena and Venus Williams had to eat some humble pie after claiming they could beat a male player ranked outside of the top 200 in the world in 1998. Karsten Braasch ranked 203rd in the world, took them up on that offer in a legendary match, The Battle of the Sexes. Despite only competing at 50% of his capacity, and going out of his way to drink alcohol and smoke cigarettes during changeovers, he beat Serena and Venus 6-1 and 6-2 in the same afternoon. 

Over the years, Serena, at least, has re-formulated her opinion about women’s ability to compete with men on the same level. She has since declared that they are essentially completely different sports. She also claimed that if she were to play former No. 1 tennis player Andy Murray, she’d “lose 6-0, 6-0 within 10 minutes. Men are a lot faster; they serve and hit harder. It’s a different game.”

This takes us to the root of why we have separate gendered categories, to begin with: because men exhibit greater variance across a variety of traits, they’re statistically more likely to occupy the extremes. This is why men are overrepresented at both tails of the distribution for IQ, for example. Most women cluster around the average (100), while men are more spread out. This results in men over-representing both intellectual disability and genius IQs. 

This idea of male variance accounts for their dominance in virtually all domains of merit and competition. There may be more men who are terrible at tennis, but there will also be more who are freakishly good. This makes it vital for women specifically to have their own leagues and competitions if they would like to be given similar opportunities via a narrower, more appropriate field of competition. 

As pointed out by the American Enterprise Institute, they also overrepresent many outcomes that are particularly undesirable and often deadly, like prison populations, occupational fatalities, fatal motorcycle fatalities, and so on, so while it accounts for the pinnacle of male achievement, it also comes at a huge expense. “Perfect statistical gender parity for all outcomes is probably something most women are perfectly happy to live without.”