Though I'd point out that this is probably a Title IX violation unless there's some explicit discrimination to ensure a certain number of girls participate. I can't imagine just grouping by height or weight classes, having mixed gender teams and picking the best players that try out would result in the right level of equality of outcome to not be deemed discriminatory.
Professional sports aren't fair.
The vast majority of the human population, irrespective of sex, could not be professional athletes (or at the very least would have to work way harder to achieve equivalent performance) simply because they are not physiologically suited. We all have different frames with different capacity to build muscle mass, we all have different metabolic processes and hormone profiles. To reach the level of a professional athlete, a person needs to have a degree of natural ability which not everyone has, which means having the right physical attributes. If you don't have those attributes, if you don't have the right genetics, tough shit.
The physiological differences between men and women aren't, as conservatives tend to believe, magic. They are clearly measurable and based on physiological differences which also exist in the population as a whole. There is a very clear difference between the performance of male and female weightlifters at the top level, but it doesn't change the fact that most of us, men included, could train all our lives and never be able to lift the same proportion of our own bodyweight as a female Olympic weightlifter.
If you're interested in making sports fair and accessible, why stop at women, why not accommodate varying physiological features across the entire population?
Weightlifting is indeed a great example of why height and weight alone wouldn't always cut it as a means of creating fair competition categories, because bodybuilding
is divided into weight categories, and men still outperform women. That's because female athletes on average will have a different body composition. But there will be many, many cis men out there (not even mentioning trans women on estrogen whose body composition will be largely identical to a cis woman) who fall into the same category. Having or having once possessed a penis won't magically give those men and transwomen an advantage.
It should not be difficult, with our existing level of physiological knowledge, to create categories for fair competition which are far more accessible and precise than "men" and "women".
Our society has a lot of weird, pseudo-eugenic baggage around professional sports and athletics, because professional sports originated at a time when eugenics was widely believed. It's essentially a kind of human horseracing, we take a bunch of genetic freaks with abnormal physical features or ability and pit them against each other. But what if we didn't do it like that, what if we set out to create a sporting environment in which anyone who is willing to put in the time and effort can take part and compete fairly against people physiologically similar to themselves. I think that would require a large scale reconsideration of why we do sports and athletics, but I ultimately think it would be kinder, healthier and more fun for everyone.
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