Men and women are equal, therefore men and women are not different in any significant fashion. Therefore, there's no justification for discriminating between men and women so there's no justification for segregating them by sex.
Thus, women and men should be given equal access to the same public spaces like rest rooms and locker rooms.
And, since men and women are equal, what's true of men is also true of women and vice versa. Therefore, if women can get pregnant then so can men, and if men don't get pregnant as often as women it's unfair to women so women should be allowed to terminate an unwanted pregnancy.
And, since men and women are equal, they should have equal opportunities. There's no justification for preventing women from participating in men's sports and also no justification for preventing men from competing in women's sports, and it's sexist to think that women can't do just as well as men in athletics.
The absurdity of all of this, one might think, should be obvious but apparently it's not.
The absurdity arises out of two assumptions: First, that gender equality is pretty much the same as racial equality and second, that "equality" means "the same in all aspects of life."
Neither assumption is true, but the ideologues who promote these ideas are invariably simplistic thinkers. For them, the concept of "equal" means "equal in everything," regardless of the facts.
It should go without saying, for example, that anyone who has ever participated in athletics knows intuitively and as a matter of empirical observation that men and women are not physically "equal," but a couple of Duke University researchers nevertheless took the trouble of compiling the data.
Their research confirms what anyone not completely in thrall to a mindless progressive ideology would already anticipate. The authors, Doriane Lambelet Coleman and Wickliffe Shreve, write:
If you know sport, you know this beyond a reasonable doubt: there is an average 10-12% performance gap between elite males and elite females. The gap is smaller between elite females and non-elite males, but it’s still insurmountable and that’s ultimately what matters.The very best female athletes, given the best training resources and economic support, were outperformed thousands of times not only by adult males but by non-elite high school males.
Translating these statistics into real world results, we see, for example, that: Just in the single year 2017, Olympic, World, and U.S. Champion Tori Bowie's 100 meters lifetime best of 10.78 seconds was beaten 15,000 times by men and boys.
The same is true of Olympic, World, and U.S. Champion Allyson Felix’s 400 meters lifetime best of 49.26. Just in the single year 2017, men and boys around the world outperformed her more than 15,000 times.
This differential isn’t the result of boys and men having a male identity, more resources, better training, or superior discipline. It’s because they have an androgenized body.
For example, in 2017 the best time ever recorded by an elite female runner in the 400 meter run was bested by 285 boys under the age of 18 at least once.
Of course, men over 18 did even better. In the same year, 4,341 men beat the best time ever recorded by a female in the 400 meter run at least once.
The figures for other track and field events are similar. I encourage interested readers to peruse the charts that Coleman and Wickliffe include in their report.
Some might find the numbers shocking since they completely undermine the sort of propaganda about sex and gender that we often hear, but they're really just what common sense would lead one to expect.
What the response of those who insist that women can compete against men in athletics will be is hard to predict, but it wouldn't be surprising if they start demanding that if women are not athletically equal to men then any sport in which the disparity is a factor, like track and field or basketball, should be abolished since it's discriminatory and sexist.
That's how these folks evidently think.
