In the 13th episode of season four of “Futurama” entitled “Bend Her,” our space heroes go to the 3004 Olympics. The character bender, a robot built for the purpose of bending girders, thinks that he should be able to easily defeat the robots competing in the “Bending” competition. He believes this until he actually sees these professional athletes bending girers he could never hope to, and it makes him feel epressed and inadequate. Until he sees the female division, with fembots struggling to bend clothes hangars and the like. So, he formulates an idea: he puts ona  scarf, claims to be a fembot named “Coilette” from the land of Robonia. He easily dominates the various competitions, and is feeling on top of the world until he discovers that he’ll need to undergo gender testing to prove he’s a fembot and not a manbot. In order to pass, he undergoes soeme quick reconstructive “surgery” and has his male oil replaced with female oil.

At the time, this seemed a silly, fanciful sci-fi plot line. Clearly the stuff of fiction.

But then…

In short: athletes in male bodies who identify as female are by law allowed to compete in female sports against athletes in female bodies. And simply put, in most sports male bodies dominate female bodies. So if a transgender girl competes, everyone knows that she is going to win. This disheartens the biological females. If there are two transgender athletes, it take a girl who might have come in first and pushes her to third; a girl who would have come in third and moved on to the next level now comes in fifth and is now out of the competition.

You have to wonder what the long term effect of this will be. Male athletes who are mediocre against other males will come in first by a substantial margin against females, so the Benders of the sporting world will doubtless take advantage of this. Female athletes will see themselves being pushed out. And when you have *no* chance… what’s the point in bothering to compete?

So I wonder if girls sports will simply go away, either through disgust and disappointment by the biologically female athletes who know there’s no point (and the parents and other spectators who are there to watch *girls* compete against *girls* and are turned off by what they’re seeing), or by simply going “co-ed.” Because if the transgender female athletes are the new standard in performance, and their performance is not fundamentally lower than biological male performance, the reason for having separate male and female divisions goes away.

Transgender MMA Fighter Breaks Skull of Her Female Opponent.

To me the solution seems obvious: a transgender division. Bio-males vs bio-males, bio-females against bio-females, everyone else against everyone else. Unfair? Maybe, but life’s unfair. The rational goal isn’t to make life fair for everyone, because you can’t. The rational goal is to make life as fair as you can for the most you can. And making life fair for the 98% or so and less fair for the 2% makes more sense than the other way around.