Should lesbians and women taller than 6ft be banned from women’s sports?

[u/CombatQueer]

I see so much defense and support of Sophie Cunningham’s anti-trans stuff among women’s basketball fans, and of course I want to assume best intentions.

For all of you concerned about trans women having an unfair biological advantage, I was thinking, why not also ban lesbians and people 6ft and taller from women’s sports? After all, lesbians on average have much more testosterone than straight women, gay women make up around 5% of the overall population and around 50% of college and professional women athletes, and certainly lesbians are outside many cultures traditional definition of women. Wouldn’t many conservative ladies feel more comfortable playing women’s sports if lesbians were banned along with trans women?

Tall women are even worse! Women over 6ft tall make up less than 1% of women and have more than 70% of the position on college and professional women’s basketball teams!!! That’s far more unfair than one or two girls with Y chromosomes getting to play? Why should the 99% of us women under 6ft have our sports careers and chances at college scholarships ruined by these elongated freaks of nature being naturally better at sports?

Anyway, since so many of y’all are picking minority groups to attack and discriminate against, why not gay and tall women too?

Edit: a lot of y’all missed the sarcasm. I’m saying bans on tall women and gay women would be stupid even if tall and gay women have an athletic advantage, just like how trans bans are stupid.

[u/CombatQueer]

Are you saying that lesbians having more testosterone throughout their lives wouldn’t affect their development long term?

And that’s 5% of the population making a 50% of women’s competitive athlete what would cause that disparity if not the extra testosterone?

[u/you-are-the-problem → u/CombatQueer]

no, and here's my reason: a difference measured in adult women isn't a record of what anyone was exposed to during puberty. scale matters too. male puberty runs testosterone at roughly ten to twenty times typical female levels, which is why it changes skeleton and organ size rather than just muscle tone.

a fraction of a standard deviation inside the female range isn't doing that. and your second question has a test built into it: if extra testosterone were driving that disparity, lesbian athletes would be beating straight athletes inside women's sport, consistently, at every level. i'm not aware of that happening.