Obviously this won’t work for all sports, but things like football, track, soccer, it would allow for de-gendered team, even allowing athletes with the skills but not the genetically-endowed physical attributes to have a place to play.
Note: I know very little about sports and being on a sports team, so please point out anything that doesn’t make sense.
Yes, splitting teams by sex/gender has never made sense, instead it should be by physical attributes that may or may not happen to align with sex, but irrespective of if they do.
Below the elite level, relative skill differences can be large enough that a skilled cis women can outcompete a lesser skilled cis men. And that’s where 99% of sports are played so these rules/laws just serve to make cis men not feel threatened by potentially losing in a softball game to a woman.
At the more elite levels, though, the skill gaps are much smaller, and being faster or stronger are the difference. Most WNBA players can’t dunk, most NBA players can. Elite men run 100M a full second faster than elite women. At those levels, men have a distinct physical advantage.
There have been some studies indicating trans women still have higher lung capacity than cis women, more strength etc, but there’s still some uncertainty because the number of studies are limited, and there’s even one study that indicated cis women may have an advantage over trans women.
But considering the laws currently being passed, they aren’t targeting elite athletes, and are instead targeting kids, and not out of the spirit of competition, but out of hate.
Well said.
I grew up playing soccer on a coed team. At a certain age you could be picked or tryout for a more advanced league. Up until highschool we were devided by skill not gender and I have no problem admitting there were more than a few girls that were much more skilled than I was.
What sports would it work in? Do you think people will care about the best tennis player that weighs 140 pounds? The best 240 pound soccer players? The fastest 130 pound swimmer? No one wants to watch any of that. It barely works for boxing.
All that aside from the fact that you’re still pretty much ruining competitive sports for most cis women by doing it. The reason there’s a female “insert sport here” competitive league to begin with is so many women have a reason to compete and can win. A 150 pound trained male athlete will still wipe the floor with a 150 pound female athlete. It’s far, far, from just a weight thing. The Williams sisters were the best female tennis players the world knew, and they went out and proved they couldn’t beat a man that was ranked over 200th. The world champion austrailian female soccer team couldn’t beat a boys highschool team. The fastest woman to ever run the 1500m did it in 3:49. A 5’ 9" guy did it in 3:26.
Weight and size is only a little portion of physical differences.
If there’s so many Trans athletes, why don’t they just have a category of their own?
If there’s so many Trans athletes, why don’t they just have a category of their own?
Because there aren’t, and this whole thing is much ado about nothing.
But hey, it keeps the morons distracted and voting, so that’s a plus.
deleted by creator
Except that isn’t true. Men are more stable due to hip width, their hearts move more blood, their arms and hands are larger/longer, and their lungs hold more air. None of that goes away.
It isn’t that there’s tons of trans athletes… It’s that even at fairly low levels of sport there are currently more options available to people with disabilities to participate then there are of people of intersex and trans backgrounds. In a lot of cases tracking performances of trans athletes they aren’t dominating. There’s stories of transfem athletes who regularly sit around getting 15th place but after coming in first one time the entire sporting becomes hostile to trans people.
In civil rights discussions there’s a concept of rights of participation. The concept being that being barred from social, political or recreational spheres creates outsized harms on the ability to make the advantageous connections others are given free access to and creates classes of segregation.
There’s also a catch 22 situation. If someone opts to go through a trans puberty instead of a natal one there is no meaningful difference to speak of between the physicality of trans athletes and cis ones. If forced to stay inside their original sex segregated sport not only are trans people being being told in no uncertain terms that society does not accept their new status regardless of parity, they essentially become isolated inside the sporting body. Either you have someone whose body is feminine placed in a sport with only cis males to be compared to or you have a masculine body placed inside a group with all cis women and both will be framed out of being taken at all seriously inside the entire body of that sport. A lot of trans people can’t participate in sport not because they aim to be picked for any of the social leg ups excellence in sport provides… But for any of the regular benefits of just participating.
It creates a fair sting to have a government force your choice of initial puberty that neither you or your doctors and parents thought was a good idea… and then sit back and watch the rest of society constantly punish and isolate you for going through that puberty by then treating you as a logistical social problem for the rest of your life.
soccer
“Male” soccer is not restricted to men. Both genders are allowed. There are only men because they outperform women.
edit: Although FIFA forbids women from access to the main World Cup. Also the statement above is true generally, but not everywhere.
The NFL isn’t male only either. Not supporting anything but agreeing that some sports are segregated by performance
Even at lower levels of football women are typically only kickers.
Which is awesome and I hope we see one in the NFL one day! That said the reason for that is that kicker is the only position on the field that doesn’t require you be a genetic marvel. Most men and women that are born are not the size needed to play O-Line, most people that are that big are also not athletic enough(or didn’t have access to the tools to improve to that level).
I’d love to see a woman on the line or at qb or wide receiver. It’s just unlikely to happen before the sport is outlawed or I die
ok cool what about the op’s thoughts?
He addresses them with that statement. There are plenty of women that are in similar weight classes as men but you don’t see any in male sports.
Even though male sports does not have a gender requirement. This is essentially an indirect way of saying that there are biological differences between male and female that go beyond weight.
There are various differences you could point out. Males have lower body fat %, which means more muscle. Their bones are shaped differently and are more dense. Men tend to be more aggressive and competitive. Men tend to have stronger bones, joints, tendons, and ligaments.
Men have more red blood cells, their hearts are bigger so they can pump more blood, and greater lung volume relative to body mass. So even a male and women same weight and height the man will be able to circulate oxygen more quickly.
There are many more examples if you go do some reading.
One of the differences may not be huge by themselves. But when you take the differences above and combine them, it creates a situation where in almost all sports, men play virtually unopposed by women.
Look up the Serena Williams interview. She’s undoubtedly the best female player in the world. She doesn’t stand a chance against a the 203rd best tennis male player.
This difference even applies to areas like chess. The highest ranking a woman ever got was 6th in the world, Judith Pulgar. Amazing player, but out of the 2500 or so grandmasters in the world, 42 are women.
Some of these differences can be explained by women around the world not being encouraged to play chess, but that does not explain all.
There are large biological differences when you look at the population in a statistical sense. And when you look at the most extreme samples from the edge of the normal distribution… that’s where the best athletes / chess players are going to come from.
The chess one isnt quite right. There’s been experiments where if a woman player didn’t know her opponent was a man she would perform better. It’s called stereotype threat phenomenon.
It also happens when a male player knowingly goes up against someone higher in the league than himself and he performs below his own standard average.
Basically people in general psyche themselves out of their best performance when going against someone they perceive to be better than them whether that’s factual or not. Confidence and undermining confidence can change a whole lot about how a person does in any given game or task.
You think that accounts for the differences? 42 of 2500 grandmasters are women because all the women are scared and intimidated of the men?
Maybe this plays some small effect but I doubt it’s statistically significant enough in this context
Like you said, it happens to men playing higher rated men. In order to go up in ranking, you need to play and beat progressively higher rated opponents.
By the very nature of being a high level player, that player would have had to go through that.
It’s a phenomenon that’s been observed across multiple sports, not just between men and women chess players. It’s particularly poignant in men vs women’s chess… because of people repeatedly telling women they are inherently worse than men. Like you are doing right now.
There’s been multiple studies on this. So yes, I side with the data that stereotype threat phenomenon has a significant impact on women’s performance in chess against men.
The bigger difference imo is the brain development due to hormones in the womb. Old TLC program had a whole section on this suggesting it’s why STEM fields are generally male dominated. Turns out hormones that determine biological gender also very much effect the development of the brain, and the male chemicals tend to develop the spatial reasoning part of the brain faster/more thoroughly than those who get don’t get the male chemicals and stay female. This average higher spatial reasoning capacity creates an advantage in tasks or objectives where complex visualizations are necessary, like visualizing chess moves in your head.
It’s not some massive, overwhelming difference, but it’s enough to tilt the table. Play out that average enough and you have 42 women out of 2500 chess grandmasters
Show me. Link me a couple.
I don’t think this effect can account for more than a small fraction of the difference. Let’s look at the research. I couldn’t find anything from a quick search but maybe I’m using wrong terms.
There’s an effect on both sides.
Contrary to what people assume, aggressive chess is a good strategy.
Due to a lot of factors I don’t really want to get into, most chess players think men are naturally better than women.
So a woman who thinks she’s playing a man is immediately on the defense, and a man who thinks he’s playing a woman starts out very aggressively.
Which means a man and woman of equal skill, the man will likely win.
It’s called stereotype difference and it’s not just chess related.
I don’t know why people always pick chess because there’s no physical difference while ignoring the mind games we even play on ourselves in those situations.
Just people completely ignorant of what they’re talking about and grasping at straws to find something that agrees with them
Chess? What percent of woman players are GMs and what percent of male players are GMs? Because it sounds like sampling bias.
Women make up roughly 15% of US Chess Federation members. They make up roughly 1.5% of grandmasters.
That’s an order of magnitude difference.
Here’s a podcast about a study
https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/mens-chess-superiority-explained-08-12-29/
Normally I’d just link studies…
But I feel like if you’re this opinionated about things we figured out long ago, maybe listening would help more than reading.
Because it wouldn’t have taken much for you to Google this at some point and realize we’ve been studying this for decades, and maybe, just maybe, science is better than your assumptions.
There are a lot of factors in play, and you seem to think it’s because of…
What exactly?
Like it seems like you’re just arguing women are bad at chess?
I’ve read multiple papers on this topic. I’m a 2000 rated player and have tutored girls in chess. This is an interest of mine.
There is a very large gap in performance. The research overall implies a complex variety of factors. This includes what you mentioned, along with other inequities. It also includes the fact that women players are roughly 11 years younger on average and therefore haven’t peaked yet, which will account for some.
But there is evidence that there is also an innate biological difference. Men score better on visuospatial intelligence tests when compared to women. Chess, especially at a high level, involves a lot of this type of thinking.
I’m not arguing that women are bad at chess. Humans are individuals and there are varying levels of players in both genders.
Just that if you look at the extremes (which the top chess players will be) you’re going to see a higher level of males even if we fixed all of the inequities currently influencing the gender gap in chess.
We don’t know if the 10x difference is 5% due to biology or 50% due to biology. But we know it’s a non zero number
Essentially I used it as an example in the wider context of why we have women’s leagues and men’s league in sports.
PSA: The preferred term is “transgender people”, not “transgendered people”.
Thanks for the heads up.
Just make an “open class” where any identification, body mods, and performance enhancing drugs are unregulated. The best athletes that science can create.
Ah yes, the Enhanced Games brought to you be Peter Theil and a dozen of the worst tech bros you haven’t heard of yet.
Part of the problem is that pro sports is already full of illicit doping. Another big part of the problem is that athletic exceptionalism is as much about winning the genetic lottery, getting lucky with no injuries at the peak of your career, and having the luxury of sponsorship/rich parents at an early age as it is doing lots of drugs.
The only real benefit you get out of an Enhanced Games exhibition is to sell dipshit frat bros the same promise Wheaties and Nike and GMC have been selling for decades - use our brand of steroid and you’ll be a world champion, too. And frankly, that market is already kinda flooded.
wait why not pump rich kids full of drugs? I don’t see a loss here
aren’t they already? isn’t that one of the pros of being rich?
I take your anti-corporate point. However, I believe pro-doping would totally work if it was a gladiatorial bloodbath decathalon within the olympics itself. And if you get caught doping in the non-doping sports, you’re forced to compete in the decathalon with the juiced up killers. Jousting, Barenuckle boxing, Pride rules MMA, Hell in a Cell, no rules water polo, shit like that.
if you get caught doping in the non-doping sports, you’re forced to compete in the decathalon with the juiced up killers
I’m listening…
Everyone would die of heart attacks. I’m glad no one is trying this, the death rate would be through the roof.
It sounds fun at first but imagine the amount of heart attacks and other horrible Mengele level fuckups.
It reminds me of that Onion episode with the shape shifters.
Martial arts already has weight classes and gender on top. Weight doesn’t cover gender differences
And for most people it is hard to acknowledge that there is a biological difference to the body of male and female. Same rights to everyone doesnt imply same bodytype for everyone
The problem isn’t that people don’t understand that, the problem is that there are people who don’t fit into the binary distinction
The recent issue with transgender people in sports is manufactured as a tool to spread trans hate. It’s a non issue that preys on Americans’s sense of fairness.
I’m still a fan of just removing all the rules around drugs and bodies. Let’s see what 21st century science can do!
It would be a kinda fun league to watch, but I dont want to hear about athletes dying because they took obscene amounts of steroids to be the best.
I want to say that because understanding of steroids and sports medicine they could be done in a way to prevent that for many sports. But o also know that would require rigorously enforced regulation which athletes would then try to game, which would probably lead to more deaths on the field.
We already have racers dying regularly in Isle of Man TT. Blood sports never died, they evolved. Why not sprinkle some steroids over it.
I imagine it would be like The Fast and The Furious where he presses the nitrous button till the screws/bolts all come out and the car falls apart very quickly.
At a minimum men are born with more muscle fibres and process energy a little more effectively. Puberty is not a factor.
If we could wave a magic wand and make transitions change the multitude of differences it’d be great but the science isn’t there yet. We’re left with reality.
Weight classes won’t cut it unfortunately.
Lean muscle per kg of body weight is significantly higher for men.
I feel like weight class doesn’t do it. Women have higher body fat %. Is a welterweight woman athletically equivalent to a welterweight man? I don’t think so.
Then go by muscle % x body weight or something.
I think all athletes should be forced to use large amounts of testosterone to even the playing field. Let’s see what the human body is really capable of
I’ve talked for years with friends of mine about MLB+Steroids+Aluminum Bats. I want to see someone hit two 700ft homers in a night.
For team sports you can assign a point value to each player and force the team to deploy a maximum total value, like for armies in WH40K
Weight is the wrong criteria to use. Why not just have it classed by skill level. Enforce equity in school sports by mandating that a meaningful distribution of skill-based leagues are funded. This seems like a very simple solution to me that would address gender-based inequities in general as well as improve sports overall.
Because even matching skill levels, males have greater strength, endurance, cardiovascular capacity, etc, ad nauseam. They have greater glycogen stores, which means they can perform longer, and they recover faster.
Growth plates are different, bone density is different. Muscle density and structure is different.
Just look at the high school boys soccer team that tromped an Olympic women’s soccer team.
Women have faster reaction times. They have a different/higher pain threshold. They can bear young.
This is just fundamental biology. Frankly it’s baffling to hear your nonsensical arguments.
I literally cannot understand the argument that you’re making. People with different physiological characteristics are not going to have the same skill levels. Nothing you listed argues against my proposal. All the physiological advantages that you listed are fine. Some females may be better than some males at some tasks and vice versa. Why not let them compete against each other. Seems like creating a larger pool of competitive athletes would improve any sport. Carving out leagues that cater to different capability levels would open opportunities for more people. I’m proposing that we have more, better, more competitive and exciting sports. What exactly are you objecting to?
Oh the pride and joy I will experience when I finally get to be champion in the “Pretty shit” skill level running competition! Especially if I manage to defeat my handicapped neighbor, that prick keeps boasting about how he’s been training hard every day for the past 10 years! I’m not sure you understand what competitive sports are about …
We already basically do this with things like the differentiation between Varsity and JV. Not sure why this is such an offensive concept to some of you (just kidding, I’m pretty sure I understand exactly why y’all are offended). If competition is what is great about sports, then excluding some competitive participants because of arbitrary physiological characteristics actively diminishes the sport. But perhaps competition isn’t actually what some of you think is great about sports. I suspect that what some of you actually value about sports is to experience a kind of masterbatory high of seeing someone you can identify with, in shallow ways, achieving things that you yourself cannot.
I think it’s clear that in this context, “skill” is being used to mean “achievement.”
Ok but what if… We just got rid of sports.
Bad idea. We need games so we don’t raid each other’s monkey groups.
E Sports. Liquid bread and electronic circus.
Modern problems require modern solutions.
Sounds awfully unhealthy. I wouldn’t be in favor of that. I like swimming.
Ok but you see, that was part of the plan all along!
Nah fuck that shit. MMA integrated weight classes and that’s sucked. Sumo is the only true martial art, straight up, not even pulling your leg right now
Edit: Yeah, I mean, men are “stronger” pound for pound or whatever, but, we kind of, are idiots when it comes to thinking of sports, if we just suddenly think all sports are about explosive type 1 muscles, or muscular structure, or whatever. That’s dumb, that’s a brainlet comparison and a brainlet appeal, I would say. If you gain leverage in one direction, you lose it in another. If you gain a bunch of type one muscle fibers, you become a chimpanzee, but also, you gas really, really quickly, and humans are endurance predators that maximize that endurance with fine motor control even in what might be considered gross motor action. Everyone has this conception of sports as being these kinds of, oh, instant action gratification machines, where you just watch some guy get hit in the face really hard, or get tackled, and your monkey brain goes coco mode, and so obviously explosive strength is gonna be good for these displays, so, men are better at sports.
This is not the case. Or at least, not entirely. Sports is more like a long-form storytelling vehicle with many different characters and mindless teams to it. Women can fulfill that role just as easily as men can, in many of the same contexts. If we have sports that are bad for co-ed play, then I would say, we have sports that perhaps need refining.
Which everyone thinks is somehow like, a horrible thing to do, oh no, the sports, they’re too sacred, we gotta find the best of the best, but sports have always been and remain subject to change and a ton of different shitty rulesets that everyone always hates. Basketball now, apparently, rewards a bunch of aggressive highlight-reel kinds of play, and apparently the older game used to be more defensive, I say apparently because I dunno. I know nascar has had the opposite trending for quite some time with limiter plates meant to protect drivers and the audience more at the cost of more spectacular crashes and pileups for which the sport might gain more casual viewership. And also not be boring as fuck driving in a circle for like three hours. That’s not a sport getting better or worse, that’s just some arbitrary cultural shift, a decision made, realistically, because of internal cost-benefit analysis at the behest of a corporation which runs the major league.
We might have the same capacity to integrate sports into a co-ed kind of a deal, if we had the will to do so, but I think the truth of the matter is just that nobody really gives a shit about equality, except for when you bring it up.
Me, I’m a fan of sumo, because fuck weight classes. I wanna see david beat goliath. To me, that’s a more compelling casual narrative that can easily be built into a sport. Fairness is highly overrrated, and also doesn’t exist, or else every match might as well just be random chance, or end in a draw. Michael phelps is some genetic freak or whatever. Go cry me a river, and then he can swim across it and back. Give me an abstract goal like “get ball through hope” or “throw guy out of ring” and then I don’t need any more to it, I’m right there with you.
