Washington University Law Review Volume 95 Issue 5 2018 Against Women's Sports Nancy Leong University of Denver Sturm College of Law Follow this and additional works at: https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/law_lawreview Part of the Civil Rights and Discrimination Commons, Constitutional Law Commons, Entertainment, Arts, and Sports Law Commons, Law and Gender Commons, and the Sexuality and the Law Commons Recommended Citation Nancy Leong, Against Women's Sports, 95 WASH. U. L. REV. 1251 (2018). Available at: https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/law_lawreview/vol95/iss5/13 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Law School at Washington University Open Scholarship. It has been accepted for inclusion in Washington University Law Review by an authorized administrator of Washington University Open Scholarship. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. AGAINST WOMEN’S SPORTS NANCY LEONG* ABSTRACT This Article challenges the longstanding assumption that sports should be segregated by sex. Imposing sex segregation on sports is problematic for many reasons. Sex segregation reflects and reinforces a binary view of both sex and gender unsupported by science. It communicates that women are physically unable to compete against men, even though research indicates considerable variation among individual athletes and different sports, and further reveals that attributes other than sex are often more important determinants of athletic ability. It reinforces unfounded gender stereotypes that harm both women and men. And sex segregation uncritically prioritizes athletic activities involving strengths typically associated with male bodies, without requiring us to ask why we view these strengths as the most important in the first place.