In the case of the OP, the strength of the argument to justify denying that boy access to a varsity sport depends on your view. If you feel it is important to keep leagues where access to varsity sports is available to those not at the top of the distribution curve, great, deny him access. If you feel it is absolutely critical that more people in society be allowed to play sports because they would be harmed if we didn’t, then you need to let him play because otherwise he is being harmed. If you don’t care if a boy is being harmed but you care that girls are, how do you justify that?
I really cannot make this any clearer. Creating women’s only leagues is a good idea and I’m 100% in favor of it. If we didn’t, women would be locked out of sports. I simply think it is misguided to justify the creation of these leagues because it is harmful in some way if we don’t. If that were truly the case, we are still harming a lot of people and those advocating that it is imperative for women to have these opportunities needs to explain why it isn’t imperative for the other genetically disadvantaged among us.
We are talking about the “highest levels” at the respective age groups. Varsity sports for high school, inter collegiate teams for college. At those levels, the number of men that can qualify for any significant playtime is small, and it only gets smaller as you get higher up.
How do we get men who fully realize they have no hope of making these top teams to do something? The short answer, for men, is that we tell them “tough luck” and don’t try to get them to do something. We offer what we offer and for those with no chance we simply shrug and say there is only so much we can do. That seems to be okay to tell the majority of boys. Society isn’t collapsing and life goes on so the argument that there is great detriment if we don’t give genetically disadvantaged people access is specious.
You ignore them. You offer what you offer and call it good. You can’t possibly separate out the ones with borderline genetics from those that simply don’t want to work hard enough.
Forget for a minute that gender even exists. When it comes to sports women would be part of the distribution of athletic abilities people have. They are at the tail end of that distribution. Only the top end of that distribution is allowed to play in the varsity and inter-collegiate, highly organized leagues. They get the best fields, training, stadiums and experiences. For everyone else, there are those thousands of leagues across the nation that will accept anyone to play a sport they enjoy. So, except for those top tier percentage people, the rest of the distribution gets exactly what you are advocating is available to everyone. That includes A LOT of men.
In this genderless distribution people realize it would be awesome if we could find ways to let more than just the top percenters have opportunities for higher level sports. But how do you do that without it just meaning you are opening it up to just the next level down in the distribution curve? Fortunately, there is a clear, easy, obvious way we can do that because gender does exist. So we use that. Lots of good comes of that and it allows many an opportunity they wouldn’t otherwise have.
Somewhere in that distribution curve we took a select few and allowed them to play sports. But there are still a ton of people in that curve that never will and never can have those experiences and opportunities. Some are men, some are women. Society is just fine. We aren’t ringing our hands and clutching our pearls because this specific type of genetically disadvantaged people aren’t getting an opportunity to play varsity/inter-collegiate sports. We gave one type of genetically disadvantaged people an opportunity, which, again, I truly support. For the rest of us, we’ll just have to play in our rec leagues and club teams.