We used to separate men and women in sports exactly so this wouldn’t happen. Now, you have no chance unless you are born male.
It's not like humans were made equally. Each body has genetic advantages and disadvantages, and your early childhood nutrition permanently changes your athletic potential too. You can't exactly level the playing field to begin with.
Why don't these sports have brackets instead of gender divides? Is a biological man/woman divide really the most useful distinguisher between athletes?
Professionally, doing what I do for work, I'm also mediocre at best. There are people more intelligent than me, better communicators than me, more ambitious than me, more focused than me. Some of that is genetics too, though harder to tease apart.
So what? We don't know the upper limits of human potential, especially the environmental and epigenetic contributors that keep producing better and better athletes and thinkers. We're not static chess pieces with finite moves, but constantly evolving animals whose body plans keep adapting to new conditions as they arise and work to our advantage.
You can slice and dice a million humans into subgroups and there are always going to be statistical clumps, much of which is genetic. But so what? Why is that such a big deal for concern?
If the goal is to tease out the absolute best, only a no holds barred competition (with or without doping) can reveal that, and the competitors will likely get better over time. Anything else is just a handicap made for spectacle and entertainment, so why does it matter HOW you bracket? Why is the sex bracketing more important than race or weight or height or mental ability or leg strength or whatever other distinguisher? Humans never were equal to begin with.
In the NCAA Division I Women's Championship, she competed in the 100 yard, 200 yard, and 500 yard Freestyle events. She won only the last of those. This makes sense, as pre-transition, the longer freestyle events were her best ones.
