The False Sky: How Women's Sports Aren't Under Threat — They ARE The Threat

How centuries of manufactured fragility created a ceiling women were never supposed to see and how trans women are helping break it.

We open our story with a scene you have heard of before: a car hovers over a teenage boy in Lawrenceville, GA while a woman shouts for help. Surely, a superhero has saved this kid from certain death. Let’s pan the camera out, shall we? We slowly zoom back to find Angela Cavallo lifting a car totaling 3,295lbs off of her teenage son and screaming for someone to help her. She held this lift long enough for an 11-year-old neighbor boy to run down the street, find two neighbors, and drag her unconscious son out from under the car.

She didn’t train. There was no super soldier serum. There’s no 80s era montage. This is a woman demonstrating incredible strength because the situation demanded it and nobody would tell her she couldn’t.

Photo by Jadon Johnson on Unsplash

You, dear reader, have been told your entire life (unless you are some kind of long lived vampire, in which case shame on you for not correcting this nonsense when it started) that women are biologically inferior, less capable, and needing of protection. You, dear reader, were misinformed and that misinformation has devastating implications for women not just in sports but in survival, relationships, economics, and more.

Prepare to take the Red Pill (this is an estrogen from the 90s joke) and see how far this false sky goes. Also, I’m gonna curse a lot in this article because this shit is fucking stupid and I hope you’ll agree when you read it.

Can Thine Uterus Do Arithmetic?

Dear reader, allow me to introduce you to Dr. Edward Hammond Clarke of the Harvard Medical School in the year 1873. He published a fascinating bit of reading called Sex in Education; or, a Fair Chance for Girls that year. Among his very academic findings were that women were “inherently less physically and intellectually capable than men,” and that “sustained vigorous mental activity” from studying in “a boy’s way” would cause “atrophy of the uterus, ovaries, masculinization, sterility, insanity, even death.” That shit is a direct fucking quote from a Harvard professor.

I wish I could tell you it got better. Clarke’s argument was built on the studies available and all the nonsense one might hear to validate it, and from the “every accusation is actually a confession” department of Harvard comes the fact that he was actually a sickly man who died a mere 4 years after claiming women weren’t able to handle the intellectual rigor of study.

Filthy casual.

If only it had only been him, but alas there was plenty of nonsense to be held in the era of craniology, psychology, and even more. This era gave us such hits as “The relatively small size of the female brain in part depends upon her physical inferiority and in part upon her intellectual inferiority,” and endless classics from Dr. Sigmund Freud who happily declared that women are “deviant humans.”

And you might think, “Surely we left all that shit in the past, right, Evey?” Well, kinda? But not really. We just remixed it a bit.

A 2008 study found that girls had reached parity in mathematics with boys across ethnicity and grade levels, based on 7 million children from 10 states in the USA. The gender gap in high performers had closed and correlated with other measures across nations. The trend continued in other studies showing that in some cases the girls were now categorically performing at or above the level of their male peers.

Those poor uteruses, am I right?

But where the hell did this actually all start? Where is this underlying assumption based? Well, the modern version of this song starts with something called “The Cult of True Womanhood,” as the American Remix of a hot original.

The Cult of True Womanhood

Man, I feel like being a woman in the 1820s had to super suck even more than it does right now. Historian Barbara Welter identified four “cardinal virtues” defining true women: piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity. Women’s true sphere was the home, and blah blah blah. You can read all about that here.

Look, the point is that Welter identified how this ideology made a new case for the fragility of women in a modern, industrial era, and that ideology influenced not just generations of feminist thinkers but a whole lot of men too who were super happy (see previous section) to ride that horse as far as it would go. After all, the frailty of women had to be protected, right? We had social darwinism letting us pretend this drivel was scientifically derived and honest, right?

Except for this weird thing where this only seemed to apply to white, middle and upper class women. Working class women, Black women like Sojourner Truth, and immigrant women need not apply for these virtues because they were needed to do work. Being frail was an ideal afforded for those wealthy enough to nurture it and marked through magazines like Godey’s Lady’s Book and religious literature (don’t worry I’ll get to the religious angle here in a minute).

Edward Clarke joined hands with Barbara Welter in unholy dehumanizing ideological matrimony to form a new, and very exciting, twist on an old classic that starts with Aristotle, explodes with the church, and needs science to validate it in the modern era.

Aristotle and Freud probably would have gotten along, given that they both essentially believed women were deviated and deformed from men but I’m sure they’d have had their difference. Ol’ Aristotle had plenty of company in his bullshit, but I’m not gonna blame all the Greeks of the time — some Greek women were notorious for their ability to kick asses — ask the Spartans — but Aristotle’s Athens was a different story — and somehow this shit survived long enough to make it into Christian Theology.

Aristotle’s nonsense would be revived after academics in the 12th-15th centuries saw his works on a greatest hits late night infomercial and went “We should write a cover of this.” But not before the Christians had a go.

The Christians… Again.

I have to tell you, I’m getting really tired of tracing back human rights violations and finding they more or less start in the fucking church. It’s getting really boring that everything is either THE CHURCH or Tuberculosis (hat tip to John Green) in history. Sometimes both.

Let’s go back to Tertullian in good ol’ 160-ish CE. This good fella was all like “Hey, original sin is Eve’s fault and because of that women are all to blame and more susceptible to moral failings. Also vaginas are the devil’s gateway.” Al Pacino entirely agrees, btw.

Then fucking Augustine of Hippo is like “Hey that’s a cool idea but I mean you can’t expect much from a fucking rib, right?” And thus began the idea that women were secondary to men because they were made from ribs. Which I would argue makes us both superior and tasty, but I guess Christians hated bbq back then, too.

What you’re going to find as we move into the modern era is that everyone is starting with the conclusion that women are frail, deviant things and working backwards.

A New Twist on an Old Classic

The Victorian Era moved women from being irrational, carnal, and tasty to a madonna style rebrand of women being too spiritual, pure, and moral for the world — and therefore fragile. You were still supposed to keep women home and away from stuff, of course, but the difference was between “I have to keep my stupid cat from killing and sleeping with everything” to “I must protect my porcelain doll from the world” levels. And the more modern you get the more both of these ideas existed side by side. But hey that’s just the cultural background story. Let’s talk about SPORT.

Cause like, ok yeah, our stupid girl brains can do math but that doesn’t mean our weak girl muscles can do sports… right?

Right?

Insert a Funny John Madden Headline Here.

For women’s sports we go back to biological determinism, which again is based on those underlying intellectual threads I’ve been yammering about for the last 1200 words. Do keep up.

Dudes were absolutely so sure that women were inferior that they created entire fields of study just to prove it. Paul Broca (probably derived from the greek for Broke Asshole) spent a lot of time trying to prove women’s brains couldn’t do big stuff. He was, of course, wrong as the data would later point out when the artificial sky holding down women academically was slowly removed.

This is a line of thought called “Biological Determinism” that follows a playbook that’s been run through more times than early Christians thought Eve had been. It goes a little something like this Famous/Prestigious institution > “Objective” methodology + confirmation of existing prejudice = “proof” of inferiority. That pattern replayed through medicine, law, science, and more and every single frigging time once the false truths were revealed and done away with the gaps disappeared and women were not just equal but in some cases over performing their male peers.

The only true area that remains completely enshrined is athletics. Surely, SURELY it’s true this time.

Welp.

Let’s go to 1983, a fascinating time period where a major study analyzing 82 quantified olympic events found that the gender gap in world records had stabilized at a mean difference of 10%. Proof, right? Well, you know what else stabilized around then? Structural improvements in women’s athletic access and cultural standing. Title IX was written in 1972 and that shit is STILL not fully implemented universally. They just stopped making improvements and assumed the ceiling had been reached and that the social variables had already been eliminated.

Oh but strangely enough, that gap varies by event. The range could be anywhere from 5.5% in freestyle swimming to nearly 20% in the long jump. A gap entirely explainable by biology would be much more consistent if it were simply a constant determined by hormones and mass. This means other factors are at play, and those don’t get explored because of the underlying prejudice.

Not only does it vary, it’s still shrinking in areas where the social factors are changing to make the sports more palatable to women.

But those women are still operating under the false sky: a sky that starts at puberty.

Bias Thy Name is Puberty

Interestingly, before puberty the athletic performance of all genders is roughly equal. There’s no reason to believe girls should perform worse than boys before then, but a curious thing starts to happen at puberty. Hormones aren’t the only thing that sets in: so does social training. And social training and conditioning varies dramatically for each recognized gender.

Young girls are steered heavily away from physical activity towards grace and social activities turning entire generations of would be athletes into wouldn’t be athletes. Young boys are categorically encouraged into sports and athletics activity, competition, and aggression. These variables are not isolated in any study you can name today. They are treated as much as a truth as “the sky is blue.”

And we have reason to believe that sky is quite possibly not blue.

When We Test the Sky, It Cracks and They Fix It

Every time women participate in athletic competition, the assumptions fail and the gap narrows further and further until they start banning women who are reaching heights they should not have reached.

Let me take you to the Olympics of 1928, where only five events were permitted for women in track and field. We will zoom in on the 800m race as 9 women lined up for the first time in these circumstances. All 9 women finished the race. Six of those nine women had broken the world records. After the race, they sat down for a breather and that’s where the trouble started.

John Tunis, so named because we should have tuned-him-out, wrote a lovely little story in the New York Evening Post talking about how 5 women had dropped out and the other 5 were exhausted. In short, he lied. William Shirer — yes, that William Shirer, who would go on to write The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich — wrote in the Chicago Tribune that five women collapsed and Florence Macdonald “fell onto the grass unconscious.” The NY Times declared the event “too great a call on the female strength.” But nobody could possibly outdo Notre Dame football coach Knute Rockne, writing for the Pittsburgh Press, saying that it was “not a very edifying spectacle to see a group of fine girls running themselves into a state of exhaustion.”

So, the event was banned. Can’t have women, like… breathe and stuff, you know? It didn’t return until 1960. The IOC’s own medical and scientific director, Richard Budgett, has since acknowledged that “the fake facts, the medical profession’s anxiety were linked to the supposed danger of long-distance races for women. We know that everyone can collapse exhausted. If it happens during the race, that is cause for concern; but if it’s at the end, that’s perfectly normal after a huge effort. It was a misinterpretation of the vulnerability of women by the medical profession.”

I want you to hold onto that idea of supposed danger. We’re gonna come back to that shit.

But we need to hit on another change during this time period: testing. When women manage to reach escape velocity and touch the false sky, they are considered aberrant in some way. In 1966, all female athletes were required to undergo a gynecological examination and then were subjected to visual inspections. The athletes described these as “traumatic and degrading.”

That was supplanted by genetic testing to get a “femininity certificate” they had to carry to competitions. Gender testing never caught any male imposters trying to play at sports but they did find plenty of women with intersex conditions they didn’t even know they had. Weirdly, María José Martínez-Patiño in Spain (1985) was dismissed for having androgen insensitivity… which means she had less functional testosterone than other women.

This sort of testing is now rearing its head again whenever women challenge our preexisting notions of what they should look like (victorian daintiness) and act like (pure and demure) to achieve success comparable to men.

A New Hope

First, let’s talk about more recent sports: ultra endurance running, swimming, and more. These sports lack the significant cultural baggage of their peers because they’re newer. And, strangely, women tend to equal or outperform men and when participation in these events is equalized the gap in performance tends to disappear entirely as a statistical artifact.

A 2024 study of ultra-marathoners found that when the numbers of men and women competing equalize, the differences become negligible but there is a significant performance gap as long as those numbers are not equalized. The study explicitly states that “direct comparisons remain problematic until participation numbers equalize.” This means that the gap in performance does, indeed, seem to respond to social factors as much or more than physical ones.

This is also where a new sky is being formed. The new theory goes something like this: “Of course women can perform in this because they have physical advantages in this sort of environment like fatigue resistance, substrate efficiency, and lower energy requirements.” But the thing is wherever those advantages may be found physiologically you can also find factors that “unequivocally impinge on performance” like lower oxygen capacity, increase GI distress and sex hormones affecting injury risk.

And regardless of how you want to think of it, this means the old sky is cracking. The old story is that women weren’t nearly as athletically capable as men and once you remove the social baggage and equalize things, we have to start looking for biologically deterministic reasons for that to be so. Patch the false sky at all costs.

And the more it equalizes the more we find out the “best athlete” is often a woman. Hat tip to Jasmin Paris for crushing the men’s record on the Montane Spine Race — 268 miles through winter — by 12 friggin hours. While stopping to express breast milk.

But hey. The Spartans, Amazons, and even Vikings were ahead of the game on this shit. They treated women as important and capable in areas like defending their cities. And as a consequence their women were, simply, more physically capable than the women of Athens where different social mores had taken hold.

When a certain unnamed French Colonel faced the Amazons in battle he reported “They are stronger than men… they fear nothing.” French Military reports described them as the most feared warriors in all of West Africa. These ladies could only be defeated by more advanced weaponry.

There was, simply, no precedent for these women being told they weren’t capable. And so they were. As historian Pamela Toler put it: “There was absolutely nobody there to tell them that they shouldn’t be involved in combat.”

Photo by Zachary Kadolph on Unsplash

Learned Helplessness is a Real Fucking Thing and It Sucks and I wish This Headline Was Better.

There is decades of research demonstrating that you can make women worse at things just by simply telling them they’re worse. The performance gap is, to be blunt, a self fulfilling prophecy at least in part.

Gentile et al. in 2018 conducted a meta-analysis of studies on gender stereotype threat in physical performance and found a medium effect size. Demonstrating that simply threatening women with stereotypes was enough to degrade their athletic output.

But don’t trust that alone, 2014 had a fun little experiment by Hively & El-Alayli, “You Throw Like a Girl” that demonstrated when tasks were framed in gendered ways by simply telling them women usually weren’t good at that task… they got worse. Shocker.

A 2024 BMC Psychology study on 120 girls’ standing long jump performance found that girls performed worse when tested by a male examiner (implicit stereotype activation) but when girls were encouraged to question the stereotype they performed at the same levels as the control group. Chalabaev et al. in 2013 found that girls who rejected stereotypes of their athleticism simply performed better than those who didn’t.

And in 2025, Heidrich, Cardozo, & Chiviacowsky published a systematic review spanning 30 years and covering 65 studies that confirms the pattern: stereotype threat measurably impairs motor performance and learning.

The Central Governor

This brings us to Tim Noakes, who proposed in ’97 that the brain acts as a central governor subconsciously regulating exercise and performance. It’s a fascinating read, but let me break it down for you a bit to save you time:

The idea is that the brain limits exercise by reducing your ability to use your full muscular capacity to protect you from damaging yourself. Fatigue, then, is not truly a muscular response but a “brain derived emotion” to regulate your behavior. The brain sets this intensity based on early experience and your expectations. This hypothesis is unproven, mind you, but it’s still worth exploring in this situation and keeping in mind as we continue talking about our False Sky on Women.

The Central Governor and Learned Helplessness pair nicely and seem supported. Martin Seligman’s research on this subject is fascinating as fuck and demonstrated that organisms subjected to inescapable adverse conditions learn to stop trying even when escape is clearly possible.

Women are surrounded, every day, with media telling them they are less physically capable than their peers and are guided from birth to death in that belief.

But you might be surprised to learn that modern training methods and sports science are all built around, and for, men. I mean you probably shouldn’t be surprised I’ve been telling you that this entire time. You know what I mean. But you might be a little more surprised to learn that the NIH only began requiring sex as a biological variable in research design in 2016 for athletics. We have no idea what women would be capable of with athletics training and support designed for them because we were so sure it wouldn’t matter we never asked the question.

The Question We Have Asked

We have asked questions though. Oh boy have we. Let’s talk about trans women injuring other women in sports, to significant media attention.

All sports have their injuries, to be sure, but how many concussions have you seen on the news regarding women’s volleyball? I’m willing to bet you didn’t know that 214,302 female athletes were treated for volleyball-related injuries between 2012 and 2021. Of those, concussions represented around 5-7.5% of the injuries, earning the prestigious title of the most concussions that weren’t football related. Of those, 0.57% came from ball to head contact. But I bet you heard the president mention one such injury in 2025 talking about protecting women’s sports because a trans person might be involved.

One injury. Out of 214,302. That’s approximately 0.00047% of volleyball injuries involving a trans woman — and the injury itself was never even verified by independent sources. But please, Mr. Ped… President. Do go on about protecting women just like when they couldn’t bear the strain of running 800m. You’re part of a long line of men just making shit up a century later.

Speaking of men making shit up, I’ll close this article with one final story:

She Hulk Is Real Hulk

Remember Angela Cavallo, way back from the start of this long article? She wasn’t the first. Before 1962, Jack Kirby watched a different woman do the same damn thing — lift a car off her child — and it blew his mind so hard he created the Hulk. In a 1990 interview with The Comics Journal, Kirby described it: “This woman in desperation lifted the rear end of the car. It suddenly came to me that in desperation we can all do that — we can knock down walls, we can go berserk.” He went further: “This woman proved to me that the ordinary person in desperate circumstances can transcend himself and do things that he wouldn’t ordinarily do.”

Two women, two decades apart, same impossible strength. The most out of control, berserk, freakishly strong hero in all of comic books started with a woman — and always has been. The Hulk is male. The real-life Hulk was a mother. Twice.

Now, let’s stop breaking ceilings for all women and start shattering those false skies.