So, I fully support trans people competing with cisgender people in sport. I also think there's loads of sports where you could gender desegregate it - basically all the sports that don't rely on strength and size.
So I said that bit, but then I also said that if you desegregated sports like swimming, football, rugby, etc etc, then you would never see a woman in a top team or on the podium at the Olympics ever again. Is that not factual? Even Ledecky, who is a ridiculously good swimmer, would not even make the men's swimming final at the Olympics.
I think you could desegregate sports at lower levels too - I've seen it done and experienced it. I was in a middle tier team in cricket with a bunch of dinguses, and the sometimes Women's A Team players would join our matches. They were as capable or better than the blokes most of the time. However, these women went on to play internationally, on TV, picking up contracts and stuff by playing against other women. If it was desegregated she'd be playing with shmucks like me who never even really liked cricket.
Am I wrong?
One solution to this is to simply abolish competitive sports. Intramural only, no score keeping, absolutely no record keeping whatsoever. Only playing for fun is allowed.
Just throwing that out there.
Yeah let's just abolish with one stroke something that millions depend on for employment, and that even more care about and have cared about since forever, because we can just do that, right?
You can play for fun, not everyone sees it that way though lol
Literally not one downside for the vast majority of people. Genetic freaks like Michael Phelps won't be aggrandized and held up as role models even though none of us could reach the same level.
You wanna watch a game you just go down to the local ball park and chill.
I'm an F1 fan but I fully accept that it's abolition is necessary.
Literally not one downside for the vast majority of people
No downside for anyone except for the people who are in any way whatsoever affected by or care about any of this.
By what, not having their little treat of spectacle? Under communism, everyone's needs are met. Where does elitist competitive athletics fit into this model?
By what, not having their little treat of spectacle?
You realize there's literally millions of people extremely dedicated in competing against other high level athletes and many times more people who are very invested in these sports, and that this will never change just because you decided to "abolish" it, right?
Like it doesn't really even matter that you have this opinion since it will never even come close to materializing into anything and no one relevant to the subject will ever take it seriously but I still don't understand why you hold it.
Under communism, everyone’s needs are met. Where does elitist competitive athletics fit into this model?
I have no idea what one sentence has to do with the other or what you think "elitist" means. Competitive sports aren't (in general) "elitist", they are elite, this is not the same thing and I still don't see what it has to do with communism.
Well I'm thinking like post-revolution, so that's why the communism.
What happens post revolution that somehow makes people go "you know what? Competitive sports? Dumb. I'll just drop it all because the only reason I ever cared about competing for the best performance/watching sports was capitalism I guess"?
If anything the opposite happened in almost every place post revolution lol
Well clearly nothing does!
I'm just saying, it would avoid having to sort out the issues described in the OP.
How would it resolve any of the issues? The issue does not exist for those who don't care to compete or otherwise don't care anyways, it only exists for those who do, and for those people eliminating the competition doesn't solve their issue, it creates a bigger one, which is "now I don't have the thing I care about". It's like saying that the problem of whether you or your sister gets to play first is solved by throwing your console out of the window, it's not exactly a solution, it's a larger problem.
I had a response typed to the other user but they had the grace to bow out and I'm gonna emulate that behavior because they were right this is getting very reddit debatebro-y!
Rich white men bidding over athletic men of color.
The parallels are glaringly obvious.
:rat-salute:
The same exercise in dehumanizing people has simply been given a new form of legitimacy.
You're right. It's like the uyghyur stuff really. Too easy to be boxed into the wrong corner.
Ideally, most sports should be stratified by weight or height.
The world's strongest 5'4 swimmer will straight up never be able to compete with someone with the stature of Michael Phelps.
I suspect that wrestling a similarly sized woman would be more of a challenge than wrestling someone a weight class or two down.
How significant are disparities in strength when controlling for weight? I'm not sure it's all that much especially if you factor out women's greater fat distribution into boobs & butts.
Men are still stronger in the same weight class. It's still a significant enough disparity to impact a ton of sports. Look at weightlifting for example. Even in the same weight classes, men lift significantly more.
It's a site for shitposting and it's interesting to see everyone's different opinions.
basically all the sports that don’t rely on strength and size.
Most of the Olympic sports rely on these things, that is the issue. You have shooting, long distance sports and equestrians which are already not segregated, and I guess gymnastics although that is a bit different in how it is rated etc. I think a good idea would be to add more sports better suited to women's bodies.
And I agree, I feel like a lot of people who really want desegregated sports haven't talked to many female athletes, because it really is not a very popular idea obviously. Of course there is a lot of grey area but generally desegregating them would be worse than not doing that, so it's just not a good solution.
It's also kind of silly how everyone super invested in this argument with all sorts of hot takes about it has basically no stake in this and does not compete or even knows anyone who competes in sports professionally. I don't understand why people would think they can just ignore the opinion of people who are somehow affected by this when they come up with all sorts of weird ideas about massive changes in competitive sports.
Personally as someone who gives no fucks about sports and little about competition anyway, I've never seen much of a worry for "oh no what if it's unfair?". Like ok ok, I don't care about sports so obviously I'm going to defer to people who do but shouldn't we just all be aiming to have fun at the end of it?
Like you even see this obsession that like local Middle School sports teams where people are just crazy over whether or not they win or lose. Like come on, just enjoy it bros.
Edit: Let me tell you a story about some of my dogs when I was a kid. So we had two small dogs and we ended up taking a bigger dog for a friend for about a year or so. the dogs would like to play fight and wrestle and they eventually realized the big dog had an advantage because of her size. Do you know what the dogs did? Well the big dog she started playing lower to the ground rolling on her back and just generally being softer in it.
Meanwhile I have a friend who told me about how hard the men slam the balls at her local sports balls game even though they know the women and older players struggle to match up. They're focused on winning instead of letting their opponents rally back and forth.
So a DOG of all things understood that it's about everyone having fun. Why can't people?
I know nothing about this debate I will say two things and I'm wondering your and others thoughts on it.
Weightlifting is divided by weight class which allows smaller athletes to perform. Is it possible to divide sports based on something like this rather than gender? Something that is more tied to how well an athlete will perform than gender? Or is gender really that telling as to how an athlete will perform?
The paralympics is divided by functional ability. Maybe all sports should be divided how the paralympics is divided? Again, and I'm not sure, is gender really the most telling characteristic in how well someone will perform in a sport, or are there more telling characteristics and sport can be divided based on those characteristics rather than gender?
It's a pretty simple issue when you think about it. Men aren't magically more capable than women, there are a variety of things that men are more likely to have which make them, on average, more capable than women at certain tasks. So, isolate those particular traits and segregate by them. If height is the biggest factor in a certain sport, for example, then, sure, segregating by sex will get you one side that is generally shorter and one side that is generally taller, but segregating directly by height is a far more logical and simple approach.
Pound for pound men are still stronger. You'd have to field men in higher weight classes.
But someone is always the stronger individual. Unless the sport is specifically weight lifting it then comes down to skill level. I’m a pretty good fighter, 6’2” about 210lbs, but I wouldn’t favor myself over a top ranked women’s straw weight just because I know they have the skills to mitigate my size and strength and would probably choke me tf out given the chance. Raw physicality can take you a distance in competition but talent doesn’t defeat skill level. idk this is a thought experiment I don’t pay too much mind to because it’s so outside the realm of current possibility, but I’ve been subbed by a woman too many times in training to just dismiss out of hand the idea that women can be competitive with men in high level sports
Chess is segregated by ELO, one could imagine the same sort of thing if segregation is “necessary “ for the good of a sport or whatever. Others have already mentioned weight/height classes, but performance-based metrics are routinely used already and they’re probably a better way to do it. Even when I played sports as a kid, there was sometimes division based on how skilled the players were.
This is pretty much Heath Davies' position in 'Beyond Trans: Does Gender Even Matter?' which is a good if fairly liberal and legalistic analysis of whether gender is important to public spaces and then he actually comes up with alternatives to currently gendered institutions. His section on sports is basically to have divisions by testosterone level (and other performance enhancing hormones) but it gets a bit more nuanced.
I think I caught a mixed gender relay in swimming during the olympics. The difference between the men and women was stark. Even so it was a fun event to watch that was competitive. Maybe introducing more mixed sporting events such as tennis doubles into other sporting events is a good way to integrate women and trans athletes.
I don’t think you’re being a misogynist at all tbh. Women wouldn’t be able to have careers if it was completely desegregated.
When I went on estrogen I lost approximately 30 or 40% of my muscle. What you're saying does hold merit, but that doesn't change the realities of biology. The fastest sprinter will never be someone with estrogen > testosterone
https://conversations.indy100.com/nncaa-basketball-tiktok-sedona-prince-
There are disparities that exist in facilities and coaching for sure.
There are several amateur and professional women fighters in my gym. They all have the same coaches and facilities. There is mixed sparring but only at 40%-50% effort. There is no mixed sparring at any level higher than that. The women would probably get hurt and sparring to get injured is stupid. This doesn’t take away from the women’s accomplishments at all though.
from your premises it follows
however professionalised super competitive sport is a social ill. sport ought to be local, low-stakes and as accessible as possible for everyone---that includes not segregating it by gender
Don't you think some of the fun is in the competitive nature. I mean, I used to willingly drop to lower teams because the atmosphere was more relaxed and fun, but if the team has been selected randomly and not for competitive then you're just gonna get the big monster kids dunking on the weaker ones. So then you've gotta sort it by ability, which takes us back to square one.
admittedly its a diffuse cultural attitude we want to create more than a specific rules regime :shrug-outta-hecks:
yeah, i engage in sports utopianism, and i think thats okay.
Honestly, I don't see anything wrong with your argument.
In a lot of sports of where women and men compete separately, the women are at a disadvantage. Now, as an example, if a woman wanted to to play in the NBA and was able to get on a team, more power to her.
Theres been a couple women who made it into the major league baseball, but then they never got picked for game day
Women are allowed to compete in the NBA dude. None of the major league sports (NBA, NFL, MLB, NHL) are actually "mens leagues". Women are allowed try out and play. There just haven't been any women who can play well enough to make a roster at that level. The physical disadvantages between men and women are massive at the highest levels of sports.
I realize that women can play in major league sports and those leagues are not just for men. It's just that it is very rare for women to be in them.
We should make it like the classifications in the Tour de France. Desegregate competition, but award prizes based on gender/age/weight class.
Yes, that means you might not see women coming first in a final, but the person who wins the Tour de France often isn't first on the final leg either.
