When my son was younger, I coached a Little League team that fielded a squad of 12 boys and two girls. My catcher was Jenny, who was taller than or as tall as most of the boys, had a great arm, which is why she was my catcher, and could hit. My left fielder was Lydia, who was a hair more than five feet but could run like the wind and caught everything that came close to her; she could easily cover both short and left at the same time.
By the second year on my team, however, both had begun to mature and left for other sports. As the boys got bigger and taller, the girls had gotten to be less physically girlish and began to look like young women. They were still good, but already were giving up too many inches and pounds to the least of the boys.
Two years later, Jenny was playing soccer and so was Lydia, and with even greater success. Lydia’s natural speed and Jenny’s physical size and instincts worked to their advantage, plus they no longer had to throw the ball except to inbound. Meantime my 12- and 13-year-old boys were now becoming young men, taller and heavier and in some cases impressively muscular.
As baseball players, by contrast Jenny and Lydia’s maturity had begun to compromise their ability in one special respect: throwing a hardball. “They fill out and their upper bodies get in the way,” said one mom, a doctor, to me. She pointed to her chest. It had never occurred to me before that throwing a hardball overhand is simply easier for men, and that throwing “like a girl” means throwing like someone with maturing breasts.
The pitcher in a women’s softball leagues throws underhanded because her upper body isn’t in the way, and because otherwise she risks tearing a rotator; I know from direct experience. A softball weighs two to three ounces more than a hardball, and is two inches larger. Still, a good women’s softball pitcher can throw a pitch in the upper 70s and strike out even a player as good as Barry Bonds. It’s a question of ability and agility. Nature does not apportion her gifts equally.
This is where some connecting of the dots comes in. Some of the boys had departed for soccer; baseball had become too hard, or too boring, or both for them. But they were at no glaring physical disadvantage. It was at this moment that I tried to imagine the impact on the girls soccer teams a few boys would have made. Soccer is a surprisingly physical game that involves a good deal of bodying one’s opponent — tackling, in soccer-speak.
I dislike thinking of myself a fascist or a transphobe in objecting to transfolk playing in gender-segregated sports, and specifically, transwomen in young women’s sports. It’s not a question of some sentimental attachment to the Bible, baseball or the bigoted variety of self-aggrandizing self-congratulation calling itself Republicanism. The question is about basic fairness. The chorales of progressives who claim to be “sickened” by the apparent defection of pols like Gavin Newsom, for instance, as usual miss the point.
Tony Hoang, executive director of Equality California, charged Newsom with adding to “the heartbreak and fear” Donald Trump has added to just about everything. He implicitly lumps Newsom with “politicians who want to eviscerate the civil rights” of trans people.
Remember a series of kids’ books called “The Stupids?” To use a descriptive I dislike using, this is simply stupid. If you insist that it is a “simple” question of equal rights, experience suggests that it’s simple only to the simpleminded, and that claims of “equality” is a diversion. Physically, men and women on average are not “equal.”
Nor is it a “simple.” Until there are leagues for trans athletes only — for which I cast my vote here and now — it won’t be a question of simple equity either. All of us are equal under human law, but not under natural law.
Michael Jordan was and is routinely elevated to GOAT status, but baseball was too hard even for the Babe Ruth of the NBA because Michael couldn’t hit the curve. Serena Williams is arguably the athlete of the century, but her build, with a powerful torso and legs, more befits tennis than either softball or the WNBA.
We are not all equal in all things. Nature has taken care of that.
Barbarese is the author of “Inventions on the Brink,” forthcoming from LSU Press this fall.
https://www.nydailynews.com/2025/05/27/humans-are-not-all-equal-in-all-things/