You're going to be. Welcome to the waves, Slate's podcast about gender, feminism and sports. Every episode you get a new pair of feminists

to talk about the thing we cannot get off of our minds.

Today you've got me, Shannon Paulus,

a senior editor at Slate covering Science and Health.

And me, Evan Urkhart, a transgender journalist and the community manager for Slate's

Common Pages.

Today we are talking about whether sports and specifically high school sports should be co-ed.

This discussion is inspired by a piece in the Atlantic by Maggie Mertens.

It's titled

Separating Sports by Sex Doesn't Make Sense.

I'm excited to talk about this because I was really

really into sports in high school,

specifically cross country, track and field. I also did a fake

made up third season called Winter Track and I'm still really into running as an adult. I'm training for a marathon right now and running as an adult at the recreational level, you're usually not separated by gender. you know when you sign up for a big

race you do have to like put whether you're male or female on your form but the

Boston Marathon and the London Marathon, as of a couple weeks ago, you can register and indicate your gender as non-binary, which is awesome.

Evan, why did you want to talk about this? This is a topic I can't stop thinking about because as a transgender man I'm really tired of the misconception that being born female makes people weaker or slower or just not as good as people who are assigned male.

I've never really been an athlete, but when I look more at sex differences and what we know about the science and the sociology there, I found that something people can take for granted

that men are stronger and better athletes and women can't really compete is a lot more complicated

than people might think.

Coming up, Evan and I are going to talk about why the differences between men and women's athletic abilities

are smaller than you might think,

...