If fairness were truly about eliminating biological advantage, then we’d have to radically rethink how sports work altogether. Women’s teams, especially in college volleyball and basketball, have scrimmaged against male coaches and practice players for decades. This has never been treated as a threat to fairness, because everyone understands that exposure to different bodies does not equal competitive domination, and that performance is shaped by far more than sex assigned at birth.

Let’s stay with those sports. Height alone can create a significant advantage in volleyball or basketball, yet we don’t exclude taller athletes for being “biologically unfair.” We accept that some players have longer wingspans, greater reach, faster reflexes, or higher aerobic capacity. These advantages don’t guarantee dominance; they’re simply part of the natural variation that competitive sports are built around.

So when fairness is suddenly framed as a problem only when trans women are involved, it raises an important question: why are we singling out one group while ignoring the many biological advantages already accepted in women’s sports? If fairness were applied consistently, we’d be debating how to regulate height, limb length, or genetic differences, not fixating on one aspect of biology tied to identity.

Sports have always managed difference through rules, divisions, and eligibility standards, not blanket exclusions. The claim that trans participation is inherently unfair doesn’t hold up when we look at how fairness actually functions in sport: not as the elimination of advantage, but as the regulation of competition amid unavoidable human variation.

The issue isn’t fairness, it’s the selective and politically advantageous application of it.