With the recent issues of transgender people in sports, why don’t we move some sports over to a weight-class system?
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.
I think because guys are pound for pound stronger than girls. I've read stories on Reddit years ago by girls who are wrestlers or fighters and get into a playful tussle with some random guy and they describe it as terrifying.
On average, but there's outliers.
Like, there are women out there with higher testorone than the average man, and crazy is a huge factor.
I played rugby in college and we hung out with the women's team and drunk coed wrestling was definitely a common thing.
Every once and a while a non rugby player would think it was just an excuse to roll around with a hot chick, and they would get absolutely demolished. Like I'm not talking about underestimating the woman and losing quickly due to technical skill. Just getting absolutely manhandled by a girl without the socially ingrained fear of violence and pain. Like, I was one of the biggest guys on the men's team and had wrestling experience, I still lost to some of them. Women almost a foot shorter and that I had more than 50 pounds on. Because they really wanted that W and kept trying till they got it.
Hell, for two years we had coed practice including full speed tackling and scrimmages. Top end speed was usually the only clear difference, and even then the fastest five players on the field was never all guys.
There was a story on Reddit from a soldier, his squad ended up in a fight with rugby players in a bar in Australia and after the fight they had a drink together and when a soldier told the players they were pretty brave to start fighting people in the army, they replied "the only people we fear is women who play rugby because they're completely crazy".
No, that doesn't happen, the adrenal glands and ovaries do not produce enough t to reach even very low male levels, testosterone for the most part is produced in the testicules which cis women do not have. that much testosterone would transition a woman into a man, they would grow beard and get a deeper voice, that's how HRT works for FtMs.
Plenty of people with XY chromosomes can't grow facial and have a high pitched voice well into their 20s or even after
And plenty of people with XX chromosomes shave/wax/bleach facial hair and have deep voices.
Hormones aren't binary, there's a bunch of different hormones that can be in a lot of different ranges
And that's not even getting into the other options besides XX/XY
Stop trying to make everyone conform to your binary views on gender.
She's not talking about gender he's talking about sex. Someone born with testicles with XY chromosomes is always going to produce more testosterone than someone born with ovaries with XX chromosomes - assuming both sexual organs are functioning as expected.
Sorry this is bothering me a bit but if by "He" you meant me, I use she/her pronouns I'll put It in my bio :)
Changed it. I always assume people online are male for some reason. I didn't read your username
Thanks! 💜
These people are very fact-resistant, I wouldn't bother.
Oh, nice to know that girl who beat me (in the same weight class) at wrestling was cuz her sexual organs weren't working properly.
We're talking about testosterone in blood not wrestling abilities. A 300lb woman will beat an 110lb man in wrestling. Doesn't mean she has higher T.
Amazing how one can dismiss another's personal experience by simply insisting a different scenario happened.
What personal experience am I dismissing? Please explain. I'm talking about human anatomy. The organ that produces testosterone are the testicles. Ovaries produce a token amount.
We are talking about T % in blood. Not personal experiences.
Bro, don't pretend you know what a woman's T levels are if you never met them.
A whole bunch of shit while ignoring all the contex...
I'm talking about 18-22 year olds and the women are on the women's rugby team comparing them to men who have never needed to shave and their voice hasn't cracked.
If you think every 18-22 year old guys has been thru puberty...
That's as ridiculous as not understanding that hight T women would be attracted to high level athletics and then overly represented in elite athletes.
What you are doing is the equivalent of someone who stops paying attention to science in sixth grade but believes they're an expert at 47.
You got the cliff notes version and think people should address you as Doctor.
Shits a lot more complicated than you think.
A high T woman is 70 ng/dL and that already is starting to imply some sort of adrenal tumor or polycystic ovary syndrome. The normal range is a lot closer to 20~30
A low T man is ~250 ng/dL and average is around 400~500 ng/dL
A woman will not have T levels similar to men because they don't have testicles. Even the highest T females compared to lowest T men.
The only time this would be true is in 1 in 10 million cases. If that's your whole argument, then OK. It is theoretically possible if the woman has an adrenal tumor and the man is effectively castrated.
But for virtually all other cases this simply cannot happen due to human physiology.
What do you not understand about 18-22?
Which, if you haven't noticed, is still the age range of a lot of Olympians and elite athletes.
Hell, some sports average under 18.
It's like you didn't even read my comment. You're just fucking insisting everything fits in your nice little division of two piles and no one else can exist.
It's the same line of thinking as transphobes...
And I have no desire to ever interact with people stuck in that thinking. And immediately regret trying to help you understand the finer points.
No I don't understand what you mean about 18-22. What difference does that make?
18-22 is a fully sexually mature adult. The testicles and ovaries are already functional by 14 in overwhelming majority of the population.
And yes I'm putting everything into two piles. Either you have testicles or you don't. If you have functioning testicles, you will always have more T than someone who doesn't.
No it's not? You're saying things that don't make sense, if you're assigned female at birth you have ovaries (assuming no intersex condition) if you're assigned male at birth you have testicules (assuming same thing)
The ovaries produce estrogen (in three different forms E2 is the most important) And progesterone. The testicules produce testosterone and testosterone can decay into dihydrotestosterone (DHT)
If an individual has more estrogen they will have a female phenotype (essentially they will look like a woman have breasts soft skin etc...)
If an individual has more Testosterone and DHT they will have a male phenotype. ( More strength, stronger jaw, more body hair, going bald in a lot of cases)
I'm a Trans woman, the point of hormone replacement therapy is to take my testosterone away and give me estrogen instead, after a while (and possibly some surgeries for bone structure) I'll look like a woman, because that's what hormones do. In the same vein since I don't have T in my blood anymore I am losing strength, and my body hair is getting thinner (although if it could hurry up a bit!) there's nothing transphobic about acknowledging that happens, it's literally the desired effect!
If you're still confused about NB people just know that some do take cross sex hormones to achieve a more androgynous look.
The perfect deal if they're into that
They'd be better off wrestling a bear
Plus, bears already have an open weight class independent of gender! Now we're making real PROGRESS
I remember Serena Williams making a comment that the men can just hit harder and faster. So even a sport like tennis men just have an advantage.
Having watched some badass girls wrestle dudes and win it’s an up hill battle. Women are typically stronger then men at a young age like single digit age but one puberty hits it’s all off the table.
Now shooting(archery/firearms) I have seen girls out preform men and it’s a fair sport of accuracy. Also in motor sports women can be competitive there and also have an advantage of being smaller and lighter. Every 100 lbs is a 1/10th a second
Yeah, there was an exhibition match between Serena and Venus and the 203rd ranked male player.
Hot take: Sports are not that important, and it's not the end of the world if someone in the other team is "physically better" than you.
Sports should be just played for fun and for making exercise, not as a profession. And the whole sports industry should be taken down all together. Make all sports amateur and just for the fun of it and suddenly it really doesn't mather who is on your team or in the other team.
But how will all those people survive with out their million dollar salaries????
Not to mention how many sports betting sites will go out of business 😱💸
Were they not taking bets on college games?
College betting is the wild wild west
Man when I was hooked on online betting I made an immense wager on the outcome of a soccer game I wasn't even able to watch. It was Omsk vs Tomsk, and I think I won it despite knowing nothing about soccer. Of course I was deeply in the red once I stopped such irresponsible behaviour
I think the harder question is how advertisers will convince underdeveloped schlubs that they call ball with Micheal Jordan if they just wear the right kind of shoes.
You mean like Oscar Pistorius shoes? I think it would be really creative and extremely entertaining to watch. Better than this shit they're blasting out to a disengaged populace these days
You are crazy if you believe all olympics athletes are millionaires.
That I don't. But look up wages for the American football and basketball players and coaches.
Unpaid college athletes have entered the chat
The salary of their coaches alone could probably pay the whole team a decent wage.
What convinces you of that?
Most sport is played by amateurs and for fun. It is still no fun to play against someone who is way stronger/weaker than you, of course!
"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.
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
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956797620924051
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.
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.
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
TLC is name I have not heard on a long time. Did they really use the term "biological gender"?
Bro they had a lot of wild shit back in the day. I remember that term specifically because they couldn't use the word "sex" on the program and had to bend over backwards using every other possible phrase.
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.
also it's called football dammit :(
Not true. Some countries allow it on a national level, but many do not. I believe The Netherlands allows it, but only at lower competition levels.
I think FIFA forbids it entirely, but I'm not entirely sure.
You are right, it's not allowed in the FIFA World Cup. I didn't know.
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.
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.
I'm listening...
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?
Everyone would die of heart attacks. I'm glad no one is trying this, the death rate would be through the roof.
You're wrong, they are trying it. Search for the Enhanced Games
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumo
sumo wrestlers life expectancy is 15 years shorter than an average japanese, they were already doing that
That's not due to performance enhancing drugs and body mods though, right? That's due to diet and associated lifestyle.
Although I think I still see your point; some sports not only encourage but require the top echelon of the sport to sacrifice their long-term health for the sake of a competitive edge. I'd use sumo as a cautionary tale as to why it's a bad idea, rather than proof that athletes are willing to make that sacrifice.
It sounds fun at first but imagine the amount of heart attacks and other horrible Mengele level fuckups.
#mengeledidnothingwrong
wait, that's the right hashtag isn't it?
put a \ in front of the # to 'escape' out the # so it isn't treated like a #heading font
Well, on the other hand, medicine learned a lot... /s
It reminds me of that Onion episode with the shape shifters.
Finally, a sports I would watch
That has always been an excellent idea. Russia, China and the US&A - then maybe some weird shit comes out of India or Korea or somewhere, that would be nifty
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?
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.
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.
or why don't we just keep everything as is because it's not a big fucking deal despite what bigots say
if you really wanted to "fix" or "save" womens sport, just start by fucking paying them the same as men and giving women's sport the same attention on tv
You know how the market economy works?
You are the market economy.
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
Nobody's making the obvious suggestion to chemically sterilise all athletes.
The Castrati League has entered the stadium!
I know... i know...castrato were young boys castrated to keep their singing voices high.. . but words can be updated and language fluid... right?
Castrato is just Italian for castrated or neutered, even used with animals albeit mostly used referring to males. Sometimes it's even used figuratively. It would still work perfectly with your example, I think
PSA: The preferred term is “transgender people”, not “transgendered people”.
https://glaad.org/reference/trans-terms/
Thanks for the heads up.
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.
Is still well below the professional leagues/elite levels... To discount high schoolers is a bit absurd to make your point. Many boys don't even hit puberty until high school which is kind of core to the whole discussion.
I wasn't discounting anyone. I wasn't even offering a solution. Simply an anecdote.
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.
Fuck that. You wanna go nuts on steroids then shoot up meth and cocaine before a race, go ahead. We'll put defibrillators every 10m around the track. Catch that dragon, sports person.
I'd pay to see a feild full of tweakers, put a massive rock on one of those dog race things place random weapons around the track
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.
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 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.
Testosterone level AND weight. Wait til they find out what happens when you're on hormone blockers.
Low T league and high T league.
Maybe a middle T league?
I'm sure we can work it out.
I love it. We're here to watch people play games after all, there should always be a way to work it out.
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 could see this working better than the current system and would undermine bigots argument about an unfair advantage. Though there are people that think being transgender gives people an advantage in chess somehow.
Women (and trans women) naturally carry a higher body fat percentage than men (Incl trans men) a "male" athlete can more safely and more easily carry a lower body fat % and therefore more muscle per kilo. So the weight classes wouldnt be able to be 1:1 if you wanted a level playing field.
There is still the inherent biological advantage in being born male and going through male puberty and developing a male muscular/skeletal system before transitioning. Very difficult to rule around every nuance of this though.
This is exactly right and what many people fail to understand. In studies, even after 3+ years of hormone therapy, trans-women still have significantly more muscle tissue than CIS women.
And that's without looking at cardiovascular differences, or even as subtle as glycogen storage.
I mean, the average person is obeese these days...
Transitioning is a huge dedication to making their appearance fit with their identity, it just seems common sense for them to take more pride in their new appearance
Testosterone is literally a PED.
Its why trans women can compete at a decent level, they'll still rarely be at the absolute top of their sport.
They have to have their testosterone and other hormones monitored and held to average levels. That will always put them at a disadvantage at elite levels versus women who don't have the same requirement.
Which is completely solved by access to puberty blockers before transitioning.
I did see some article claim that hip to knee ratio didn't translate to athletic performance, and it was so ridiculous I even downloaded the linked PDF that said it was a study, and it was just a pamphlet repeating the exact same claim with no further source.
I mean, there's a clear correlation already with women's sports already. Lots of runners peak early and have worse times by graduating highschool. But it's literally physics. Wider hips just means less efficient running.
Your last sentence made me search up women's chess... and it exists! That sound like a bold assumption or assertion that women are dumber in chess... Like what? I don't know why chess has to be gender divided. Maybe it exist to increase representation of women in it but the idea seems stupid. Maybe they have to split it for trans too if its already divided for cis women.
https://theconversation.com/whats-behind-the-gender-imbalance-in-top-level-chess-150637
It sounds so but the gap is still too large to say it. The "stereotype threat" shown here should not really affect every one of theese female players. For most other feilds, women can easily take upto 30-40% participation
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
I'm sure this would lead to injuries, but some soccer team putting out one goliath and a bunch of rule-qualifiers does sound really funny.
The purpose is to oppress the queers, logical compromises are not welcome.
Unfortunately that’s just not true. There are a ton of people who use this as an excuse to oppress, and fuck them. But pound for pound, a person assigned male at birth is still going to have competitive advantage over someone assigned female at birth.
I don’t love the way this study words the problem, but I’ll quote it here: “Male physiology cannot be reformatted by estrogen therapy in transwoman athletes because testosterone has driven permanent effects through early life exposure.”[1]
I really wish it were as simple as it feels like it should be: trans men have the testosterone levels to compete with cis men, and the same for trans women and cis women. It’s really not that simple though, and pretending like the only barrier is hate won’t help things.
1 - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9331831/
I could train as hard as possible, for years, and I promise you I couldn't beat a single woman in the WNBA on a 1 on 1 game. I think it is important to remember, that yes, statically, men have an advantage, but each individual is unique. I think it would make more sense 1. Remove the profit motive from sports. 2. Have leagues based on skill, not gender. Of course, that will never happen. Match making in video games is a clear example of how it can work. If I was really into any competitive game, every time I played I'd be playing against people that were roughly equal to me. I suppose that is harder to do in team sports though, especially when there is money involved for the players.
Yes each individual is unique. But when you pick the top athletes in the world, you're not picking a random subset of the population. You're picking the most extreme examples from the edge of the bell curve.
At these levels, even a 3% difference in ability can mean the difference between 1st place and 600th. And the differences between men and women are much more pronounced than 3%.
Just do some research and look at the differences. Serena Williams, best woman tennis player, got absolutely dominated by 203rd male tennis player.
American women's soccer team got dominated by a high school boy's team. It just isn't there. I know people want to believe all sexes and genders are equal and they should be. But just because they are equal under the law or should receive equal treatment doesn't mean they are the same
Yeah, but we both know that's because you're a short-ass weakling, be honest.
That was my point.
Sorry dude, I found being unnecessarily rude to a total stranger amusing, but I agree with your point.
Im not disagreeing that there is valid science that can sort this out.
I am saying that the most powerful forces at play are those who just want to fuck with transgender athletes.
Ding ding ding, we have a winner.
(edit to be completely clear: being queer myself, this is not something I am celebrating, just pointing out that you have the correct answer)
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.
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."
BMI
Muscle mas doesn't equal weight.
Even then there will still be physical differences. Higher testosterone levels increase the strength of individual muscle fibers and cause the body to produce more red blood cells. Muscle in males is stronger per pound and fed more oxygen.
Judo has both
Wait, judo has mixed-gender brackets?
Just merge men's and women's sports, nobody watches 'em anyway
So like women's biathlon using men's 100m dash as targets ? Women's race walking V men's discus ?
I would watch THAT
There’s a big issue with using weight classes in team sports: player weights vary dramatically. Take the NFL for example. Setting aside the enormous differences in weight between linemen (offensive and defensive) and all other position players, there are also huge weight differences within a given position. For example, quarterback Jared Lorenzen was 6’4” and weighed 275 lbs whereas Russell Wilson is 5’11” and weighs 211 lbs. That’s a huge weight difference!
You can find similar weight differences across players in other leagues (NHL, NBA, and MLB). Weights don’t really correlate with overall skill level though they do somewhat correlate with position and skill set (and height of course).
How would you classify by weight in team sports? You might think to do it by position but none of the leagues require a player to remain at a single position for their career. Players can and do switch positions, and many even do so multiple times during a game. Sports like NBA basketball don’t even have any particular rules about what a player at any given position is allowed/not allowed to do, so the positions on team rosters are more like a suggestion than a requirement.
For team sports, don't all firefighters have to go through the some physical stress test to show they can all operate on the same basic level? Maybe there is that minimum physicality test and if you can pass it, male or female, you become NFL eligible - maybe it's a combine thing? You can then have since that are more of less fit and capable, as with firefighters, but they've all met that standardized minimum to start. How does that not solve this?
For broader need, maybe you could just start with the majority of the Olympics being co-ed and weight class?
In that scenario, I think people may need to be ready to accept that there could still be a "natural" separation in performance by sex to start as even strong athletes may still be socialized to play differently. Give it a generation or so though and I think the weight class thing could normalize competition level as birth-assigned boys and girls grow up playing with each other on the same fields.
All of this is fine when we're talking F > M transition. There would be no competitive advantage and I'm pretty sure, pretty much no-one would be able to make it professionally going this route.
The problem is M > F taking part in female sports. No amount of treatment or hormones would ever completely take away the massive physical advantage this person would have. It simply isn't fair to cis women.
I just don't think I agree with this though, and maybe we'll just stop at a fundamental disagreement.
Again...
pairing different general body types in weight classes where applicable
as well as the potential for that general physicality test to set a minimum for a league.
plus time to normalize true co-ed competition where folks grow up knowing nothing else but normal and aren't stigmatized for developing their body to fit a given sport's ideal need.
The third one probably asks the most of current society (though that's a sad comment on society) in having to accept the appearance of someone actively acting against currently socialized standards of attractiveness associated with assigned sex. But if we could trying embrace those three, my personal hypothesis is that things would level much more than most expect.
The true and only reason that we don't do this, is that it would label those bottom third or so of males that fear they would be labeled as "less capable than a girl!". Whereas now, even the worst players on the high school football team can usually get on the team and wear a jersey around campus, regardless of if they ever actually get into games. That kid's bigoted parent will fight to be sure "their son's spot" is not earned by a more capable birth assigned female.
I feel like it'd probably be better to group based on performance. I don't see why this wouldn't work for pretty much all 1v1/FFA/small-team sports/games.
Forget weight limits.....I think baseball is the perfect place to start.
I've watched baseball for 30 years. I don't like change. I understood the need for an automanic runner on 2nd during the covid years. It made sense for the context of it's time. That time has ended, and so should that rule. I hate the pitch clock. For me, baseball is sometimes not even about the game. Some men have a hard time admitting to others, or even to themselves that they enjoy the company of other men. But the truth is, we wouldn't hang out every weekend, get drunk, and watch sports together if we truely didn't care for each other. So even though you know your buddy cares about you, and you care about him, there still needs to be a game on. Now you're trying to make the game shorter? I am not a fan. I will happily watch a double header with the boys. We want MORE sports, not LESS.
I'm also not a fan of the sensitivity of how balks are called now. Balks used to be so rare, that I had to be explained at age 19 what just happened when I saw one. This after watching baseball for 9 year already. These days it seems like EVERY game has a balk. Sometimes it's just a twitch of the leg, with no pitching gesture. In NO WAY can some of these balks be realistically interpreted as an intentional fake out pitch movement.
As you can see, I'm a grumpy old set in my ways grey haired curmudgeon. However, even I wouldn't even mind at all if women played with men. If they can hit a 97 mph fastball, and beat out the throw to home, why WOULDN'T you want them on their team?
The first one to break that barrier would be just as iconic as Jackie Robinson. At least you would THINK so. The reality of the situation is, women HAVE played on official MLB teams. The fact that I don't remember their names or their decades that they played is only testiment to how unfairly they were viewed. If MLB wants to promote diversity, and progressive views, we get Jackie Robinson and Larry Dolby. When the MLB wants to kill the idea, you never hear a word about it officially from them. Instead you only hear about it on youtube videos about obscure MLB facts.
The point is, on a regular basis, I would still support competitive women playing on every team. There are some truely crappy players in the MLB (looking at you, Bartolo Colon), and if they get replaced with better playing women, then the MLB as a whole is stronger for it.
...........that being said, women and men should NOT play hockey together. It just wouldn't be right.
American ninja warrior has had more and more women making it farther and farther in the competition every year. There are still handicaps in place to make sure at least some women make it to the finals but after that there are no handicaps. At this point, even if they removed all the handicaps there would still be women that reach the finals, just not as many. It's been very interesting to watch.
The announcers still try to hype up the women's achievements but at this point most of the big barriers have been broken. They've had to resort to stuff like, "if she gets a buzzer here she'll be only the second mom to get a buzzer in qualifying!". It's kind of silly at this point.
As a casual baseball fan I like the pitch clock, keeps things moving along aha.
I actually think coed would be more interesting. You could have a female pitcher for the women and a male pitcher for the men.
It would add another depth of strategy about which positions are played by which players.
I say fuck it and let everyone compete together. Ain't no reason men and women couldn't compete with each other in baseball, basketball, hockey, tennis, golf, etc. Even if you believed men are capable of being bigger and supporting more muscle, there's tons of sports where that isn't going to be the most useful thing to win.
How would you know this gender or that gender is better anyway unless you actually let everyone compete together, regardless of what's in their pants or their heart?
Male sports typically don't have a gender requirement. Women just can't compete. This is why women's leagues were created. So they can compete with people around similar physical potential.
Look at chess for example. Anyone can compete in the world open, but you'll see 98~99% men. So, they make a woman's league.
Women have the option of playing in both. This is the same for most sports.
Notably Judit Polgár, probably the strongest female chess player, never competed for the Women's World Championship and only rarely played in women-specific events.
Using chess as an example after saying women wouldn't be able to compete makes it seem like you believe men and women aren't even on even ground with intelligence and that's absolute fucking bullshit.
Men and women are the same intelligence on average. There are more men at the extremes of the distribution curve for certain attributes, though. And when you are talking about chess players, you are taking a sample of the ends of the distribution curve.
There's also evidence that chess ability and visiospatial cognitive ability are positively correlated with chess ability. Men tend to perform better than woman on average. (Stuff like rotating imaginary 3d shapes for example)
This may be partially why we only see 42 out of 2500 worldwide grandmasters being women. Men may only perform 2.5~4% better, but when you're talking about the extremes (best chess players in world) that small % means a lot.
Tldr: It's not because they aren't on equal intelligence. Women for example score better on verbal cognition tests.
And on average men and women have the same IQ
Is any of this true? Or is it just post-hoc, evo-psych bullshit taken from the era of scientific racism to justify the results men see after gatekeeping their very special hobby.
Oh, hi, wikipedia.
Every claim I've made can be double checked by going on Google scholar or libgen. You'll find multiple studies and recent studies.
And the ones I've made can be double-checked by taking a sociology class.
If I am to be charitable, I think you're just glazing over the elephant in the room. When a little girl is told "they're not as able," they're not as likely to continue. If only 13% of players are women at all, then yeah, duh, they won't be represented in the grandmasters.
Women make up roughly 15% of USCF members yet they only make up roughly 1.5% of grandmasters.
That means they are underrepresented by about an order of magnitude. Women on average are about 200 ELO lower than men. It’s a very large difference and there has been research done to figure out why.
There are no real conclusive findings (as with much of this type of sociological research) but we have evidence for various different reasons. One, women are not encouraged to play chess at the same level that men are. Similar reason that more men go into Computer Science or Physics. It’s not a built in biological difference, but a cultural one.
Another one is that women are younger by 11 years on average, so their ratings haven’t peaked yet. So we should see this gap close in the coming decades. There are also various other inequities between men and women (like for example stereotype threat).
So that explains at least some of the gap. What I’m trying to say is that beyond these factors, there is also a biological difference that results in men being overrepresented in the top chess players. Notice I’m not saying average chess players, but specifically the best in the world (the grandmasters).
Why?
Well, there’s evidence for something called the "greater male variability hypothesis”. Think of every person sitting somewhere on a normal distribution. Pick a trait like aggressiveness or competitiveness.
There are the extremes on both sides of the bell curve. On the left, super passive and on the right super aggressive. Most people clump at the mean, in the center of the bell curve.
There’s evidence that more women cluster around the mean relative to men. Men are overrepresented at the extremes of the bell curve, even though the average is the same as women. Only by a little bit, but it’s statistically significant. That means that if you took a sample of all the super-aggressive and super-passive people, the majority would be men.
When you look at top chess players, they are more likely to have extreme attributes (being ultra-competitive for example helps you get better at chess).
This same effect is also theorized to be why we see that vast majority of prisoners are male. Vast majority of homeless, etc. Because extreme attributes tend to either be really good or really bad.
So that’s one biological difference. The other is the visospatial intelligence. Men tend to score better on visospatial tests when compared to women. This effect is already visible by 2 or 3 months of age, so it’s unlikely to be some sort of cultural effect.
Visiospatial cognitive ability is positively correlated with chess ability. Another biological difference between men and women that likely has some non-zero effect on chess ability.
So why are women underrepresented in grandmasters when compared to males? There is evidence for both
a) external social factors
and
b) innate biological factors
Nobody knows what % of the difference is due to a) or b). We just know there is some non-zero effect for both.
I encourage you to fact check every claim I’ve made. Don’t just look for one research paper that confirms your argument. Each claim I’ve made I’ve seen multiple studies on. There are studies that will say the opposite, but look at it in aggregate. Look at metaanalysis studies.
Ever left your computer and went out to play some sports?
I am a bit surprised that so many pro trans people seem to pick up the bait of the right and make these over the top suggestions like abolishing womens sports. Certainly proposing stuff like this will help the trans cause a lot and not make them look crazy at all.
I have played sports my whole life. Mostly in mixed gender leagues.
I am a bit surprised to see so much sexism in this thread from people who seriously think men and women can not compete at the same level in things where physical strength isn't the be all end all of the sport.
Like basketball, tennis and hockey, right.
The only typical US sport I don't really participate in is football. Hockey and tennis are my top two favorites.
We're not talking hobbyists. We're talking top level athletes. Men aren't just stronger. There are dozens if not hundreds of items they outperform women on.
The sports where women can actually compete with men are rare. For example marksmanship or long-distance marathon. Virtually every sport men have distinct and significant advantages.
Men have larger hearts, more lung volume per body mass, more red blood cells, more clotting factors which means they recover quicker and have a higher pain tolerance.
Testosterone allows for more rapid muscle gain as well as better recovery. So two people training the same exercises an identical amount of time, the man would have gained significantly more muscle mass and strength.
Men have higher blood pressure, which means they feel fatigue less than women. Men don't lose iron to menstruation, which means there's more iron for oxygen circulation in the blood.
These items basically make it so men are much better at almost all sports.
For example soccer. The US Women's national team lost to a team of high school age boys.
Men can kick harder, sprint faster, run longer, train longer & they gain more from training & they recover faster from training so they can do it more, they feel less pain so they can stay at max exertion longer, they can convert oxygen into energy faster so they can sustain all of this more than women,
Etc
There's a reason we have women's leagues. If we didn't have it, women wouldn't get to compete at a high level.
At a lower level, like hobbyist or local leagues the story may be different. There's more variance among the general population than amongst top athletes.
Serena Williams, #1 woman tennis player, can't hold a candle to the 203rd best man. Look up her interview about it. She's under no illusions about this
My man never heard of co-ed.
Co-ed. Had to look it up. "Male and female students being taught together in the same school". My mind is blown.
I believe that would make it so basically no women can compete at the highest levels.
The classic kung fu paradox. We can't compete, because this technique is so powerful it would kill the opponent! That's why they perform so well in MMA. /s
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.
Ok but you see, that was part of the plan all along!
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.
We could also get rid of fun, I guess.
Only clink-clang work from now on.
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.
Sumo's actually a crock of shit, they predicted it in Freakonomics and it was revealed a few years later, I was living in Japan at the time and found it very trippy. I still like watching fat men in nappies with waxed hairstyles throwing salt around a clay circle then trying to push each other out of it though.
Sumo is faker than WWE
Yeah see that's why I can't ever take anyone's opinion on it seriously, because they just say shit like this. It's like, only a step away from "oh Americans should be good at sumo because Americans are all fat right and you just need to be fat and they wear diapers right?". Which itself is about two steps away from just like, "Haha look at the funny fat men and how fat they are, what freaks for being fat.", which is an incredibly depressing sentiment. It's like calling baseball boring. I mean yeah, it is, but obviously, baseball fans will hate it if you say that, because it being boring as fuck is kind of the point of the sport. If you watch the matches you can tell pretty easily that most of them aren't faked.
Nah, man, it's a grappling art with a pretty large amount of universal applicability and no real weight classes, more similar to the conventional folk wrestling styles that many different cultures have. Mongolian jacket wrestling, mud wrestling, lots of European countries even have folk wrestling styles that they don't care about too much anymore. It's more similar to Judo, or something, and most people don't question the efficacy or reality of Judo. American folk wrestling became rough-and-tumble fighting, and also became carnie circus shit right after the civil war, and then spread around everywhere until the Japanese decided to just kind of make it real with shooto and basically start MMA as we know it today, arguably with some interference from Brazilian Vale Tudo guys. The UFC's involvement mostly being tenuous carnie shit. Go watch like the first three or four UFC's, it's basically garbage.
The more complicated download on the match fixing that came about in sumo is that 14 wrestlers were convicted, some stable masters. The sport as a whole, as with many sports in Japan, has a bunch of Yakuza involvement and toxic hazing and other bullshit. There's already a Wikipedia link on it. Hakusho just got massively demoted like last year because some jackass in his stable was found to be hazing newcomers and haranguing people for money. I dunno, somehow I'm not gonna call all boxing rigged just because every now and again they find out that some high profile match was rigged due to the nature of the sport's overarching regulatory structure.
Obviously there's technique to it, it wouldn't have survived as a competitive martial art otherwise. But the Japanese watch sumo for cultural reasons rather than because of their passion for the technique. It has a place in modern culture that links Japanese people to their deep-seated traditions. It's like someone uninterested in sport knowing who's playing on a given weekend, so they can comment on it as a neutral topic of discussion while getting their hair cut.
Doesn't mean that it's not a crock of shit. And I'm not saying boxing isn't exactly the same either. Sumo is just more of a traditional practice akin to ritual than it is to actual sport or martial art. But I don't know why I'm bothering to reply, since apparently none of this matters to you because your opening sentence demonstrates you don't know how to structure an argument without alienating your interlocutor.
I would love to see a 4 foot nothing, lean mass of muscle absolutely wreck a 680lb stereotypical sumo body like it was nothing.
Dunno, you might wanna just watch UFC 1. If you're really high level you might wanna watch nog vs sapp, though. Best one I've seen that's actually at that level, even though the weight disparity might not be so extreme as you desire outside of like, basically carnie shitfights like eddie hall fighting twins.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
UFC 1.
nog vs sapp
eddie hall fighting twins.
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I think they should have classes limited by hormone level and just let people supplement to equality.
Having the same hormone levels now isn't the same as "grew up with testosterone all their lives so all their physical connective tissues were built in a different way, but that's okay because they've cut their testosterone levels recently."
There's longstanding structural differences in the human body if you've had Testosterone all your life.
Thank you for this question and this reply, as I have wondered the same thing about testosterone levels and never thought of this part of the issue.
Sure, but things like steroids and HGH obviously work so supplementing to a standard level should allow closer competition.
Okay... so how much steroids should a cis woman have to take to match a trans women?
To the same level as male/trans athletes in the same class?
"How much weight should a woman put on to compete in the welterweight class against a trans athlete?"
You've missed the point... There is NO amount of drugs that can equate the function of male puberty for a female. No matter how much steroids you give them. There is no "equal" hormone levels to get equality.
I get that, but it will probably get closer than classing people by weight.
The issue isn't gender. Gender is a social construct. The issue is sex. Female sports were always intended to be for female athletes. Female athletes who choose to play female sports to have a more level playing field and to play against other female athletes find it unfair to be forced to play against male athletes playing female sports. Trans women are women but they aren't female.
Nah, that's simply not true if you look at the actual data about how well trans athletes perform.
What's not true? That trans women aren't female? That's undeniably true. That female atheletes who choose to play female sports to have a more even playing field and to play against other female atheletes find being forced to play against male atheletes unfair? That's undeniably true as well. That female sports were intented for female atheletes? That's undeniably true. That gender is a social construct? I mean...that's a central pillar of the platform so we have to agree that that's true.
Your beliefs don't change reality and simply waving your hand in the air and declaring undeniable truths to be untrue does NOT make them untrue.
That cis women playing against trans women is unfair. As said above, the actual data proves that this is not the case. Of course it's undeniably true that reactionary dudes (and maybe even women) feel like things are unfair, but the actual facts invalidate that feeling.
The discretized, simplified middle school biology you're invoking here is simply not a precise enough model to depict reality.
Trans women aren't “male” from a muscle development perspective, as they don't have a male hormone profile lol.
Go back and point to ANYWHERE that I said that it was unfair for trans women atheletes to play against female atheletes. I'll wait...
No? I didn't say that. You made that up. What I said was that female atheletes who choose to play female sports to have a more level playing field and to play against other female athelets feel that it's unfrair to be forced to play against male atheletes playing female sports.
THAT is absolutely undeniably true.
Female atheletes understandably feel that it is unfair to have male atheletes breaking female atheletic records by such margins that no female athelete will ever be able to break them.
What are you even talking about, then? "The problem is sex, but it isn't sex actually"?
If trans women can play in women's leagues just fine (after hormonal treatment I think is the typical rule), what is "females don't want to play with males" supposed to mean?
Is it just the hormonal treatment? You have to understand how confusing it is to phrase this point that way.
It's only confusing to you because it doesn't fit into your narrative and your carefuly rehearsed arguements don't work.
My friend,
Explain to me how I am supposed to resolve these.
If you're not anti trans athletes, then whatever, but come on.
Trans women are women but they aren't female. Gender is a social construct. Sex is not. You can choose to be a woman but that doesn't make you female.
Female atheletes understandably feel that it is unfair to have male atheletes breaking female athletic records. I mean...that's pretty obvious, isn't it?
I'm trying to explain to you why a female athelete who chose to play a female sport to have a more level playing field and to play against other female atheletes might feel that is is unfair to be forced to play against a male athelete and why they might feel that it is unfair to have a male athelete break a female athletics record by such a margin that no female athelete could ever hope fo break it again.
This is not a difficult concept. Gender is a social construct but we're not talking about gender. We're talking about male and female. A male can decide to identify as a woman but she can never be female. A female can decide to identify as a man but he can never be male. You can be equally socially but you will always be different sexually. That's just reality.
You want to live as a woman and be called a woman I'm totally on board with that. You just can't force people to believe that you've magically changed sexes because you haven't.
You can want against all want for it to be different but it isn't and it never will be.
I am not transphobic. Not by the longest of shots and labelling anyone who doesn't buy into the group think as a transphobe completely devalues anything else you might say. I absolutely believe in social equality but trans women and females will never be the same thing.
Watch out, man. The bees are starting to pollinate your mind. You should probably take another shower.
This post was reported for transphobia. Specifics weren't given. It seems like you use the term "female" to mean someone that was assigned female at birth. I'm not sure if language is changing in this area and I certainly don't know technical definitions. Female does seemed to be used as a gender identity as well. For example the opening paragraph here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans_woman
I think many cultures are learning how to be more welcoming to people from all walks of life, which is great, and conversations like this one are good for discussing some of the nuance.
Please keep things civil and assume the best of other's intentions. We are all learning. We are all human.
Edit: spelling
I meant "female" in the context of biological sex as opposed to the social construct of gender as in, "woman" which may be a person who is either male or female. I am FAR from a transphobe and using the word and the reporting system on Lemmy as a bludgeon to try to silence anyone who doesn't buy into the extremist group think utterly devalues anything else that the extremists say. One of my oldest friends is a trans woman. She would VERY much disagree that I am a transphobe. My lesbian daughter whose trans and non-binary friends I interact with every day would also very much disagree.
I would like to counter report this as a false report by an extremist pushing a political agenda and trying to silence anyone who has different ideas than them.
It sounds like you have a lot of experiences that others could learn from, but you will likely push people away if you attack them directly (calling them extremist) rather than only attacking their positions. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem
One tactic that I like is asking them questions that lead them to point out the flaws in their own arguments. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socratic_method
Would you be more or less likely to learn from someone that calls you an extremist?
Sorry...I didn't answer these parts of your comment.
They have a carefully rehearsed circular logical set of arguments that are self-confirming. I can explain and explain and explain but it doesn't confirm their bias so they just keep going around in circles. I don't expect to reach them but I may help someone who isn't so closed minded to understand.
My daughter goes to pride festivals every year as a vendor in the market. Last year was hopping. This year was dead. My wife and I wondered if all the pushing to force biological males into the places that biological females fought for decades to get wasn't turning a lot of people off. That would be extremely sad since the LGBTQ+ community has worked so hard to get to where it is now.
I have Asperger's so I don't care what people call me (other than calling me a transphobe or antisemite with the new definitions written by the extremists.) If they're making a cogent argument I will generally respond in kind.
I have a lot of experience and I am very LGBTQ+ friendly. I only label as extremists those who push beyond the bounds of, "Everyone has rights, gender is a social construct and you can identify as whatever you want" into denying that male and female are things or claiming that identifying as a woman somehow magically makes you female. The whole, "You can't question what we believe or you're a transphobe" is EXACTLY the same as, "You can't question the actions of the state of Israel or you're an antisemite." It's utter nonsense. Those are both examples of extremism.
Just create a trans league. Trans men and trans women all in the same league. Id watch that shit, it would make money. So why don't we have this yet?
Segregated sports based on a demographic like that isn't as trans affirming as you would think... My gut reaction as a trans person is about the same aversion I imagine a person of color would experience if a white person tried to put forward a "People of Color sport league".
Ditching us all into a new category like we're quarantined in sport away from other athletes because we're implicitly not cis... Isn't something I would appreciate.
The unfortunate reality is that men are much better at women at sports. This is why we have women leagues. There are pronounced biological differences that would essentially prevent women from competing if everything was one league.
MTF trans, because they were born male, have all of these advantages. They can take hormone blockers / estrogen pills and that reduces some of the advantage. But not all.
So it results in a MTF trans being a) weaker than males and b) stronger than females
What other solution except a trans league would be just to all parties involved?
Hormones aren't binary though, some men are born with higher T levels than others. And some women have bigger bones than some men. If leveling the "hormone" advantage is desired, then drug test all participants and rank them that way.
Virtually all men with functioning testicles have higher T than all women. This is because testicles produce T at 10-50x the rate of ovaries.
Men going through puberty see permanent changes to the body. You cannot undo this. It gives MTF permanent advantages compared to women.
They are stronger than women on average even after years of being on estrogen.
As for the variance naturally seen, you're right. But consider this
Who ends up becoming a top athlete? The very best, right? So they are already near the top of the bell curve. So when you compare athletes, you're not pulling random samples from the entire population.
You're pulling a random sample from the people with highest T, densest bones, highest rate of fast twitch muscles, etc.
The male maximum and the female maximum is vastly different. This is why we see such a massive difference in performance.
Presence of hormones currently in the blood does not entirely measure this.
Yeah, isn't that the point? I mean you are talking averages but OP is talking about how to handle the outliers (trans folk).
All athletes tend to be outliers, regardless of gender. A small % difference in ability is the difference between 1st place and 300th
Which is why Serena Williams, the #1 female tennis player, loses dramatically to the 203rd male tennis player.
If the 203rd male tennis player became trans, he would instantly become the world's #1 female player overnight.
I have pointed out to people before that trans women athletes in practice tend to not outperform all women in the sport. The data we have puts them as no more competitive as women with naturally high testosterone and depending on sport can actually be at a disadvantage...
But there's another underlying assumption. You assume your athlete went through masculinizing puberty first and then a female puberty second. If you skip that first step then you don't see major differences of frame, weight distribution or muscle mass.
Where this stings is that laws are forcing people to go through that first puberty regardless of the wishes of the paitent, the patients families, the paitents doctors and the concensus of the medical associations of those doctors... And then the government sits back and demonizes those people based on their physicality as a logistical social problem for the rest of their lives and ostracizes them based on this logic.
Athletes squew young. If you allowed through trans athletes who went through the transition process young enough or looked at sport with trans populations and statistically assessed whether any excessive advantage was afforded and allow in those instances where none was found you could solve for any statistical stand out issues within a decade...
But no, we are having this inane conversation because it suits some government parties to make people feel that trans people are a threat or a problem that must be stopped and that there is zero reasonable inclusion policies.
This is why my personal opinion is we should allow trans athletes if they didn't go through male puberty. If they did, sorry you're out. If they didn't, it's OK.
And you're right not all mtf athletes are going to end up at the top echelon but given enough time statistically speaking they will be drastically overrepresented.
Edit: also the data is quite clear trans women are stronger, have more lung capacity, etc even 5+ years into hormone therapy. Iirc I even saw 10+ years on a paper once
But the ones that went through male puberty. I think this is why we should try and find gender dysphoria earlier and treat b4 puberty. It's much more effective the younger you start
Of course issue is you don't want to be too broad with diagnosis because of false positives and the conservatives going nuts. So it's a difficult thing to do. Maybe we will identify what causes gender dysphoria some day and that will help
I think it's a lot more black and white being trans than people realize and I have my own pet theories about what gender euphoria /dysphoria is that I observe as being two independent factors.
Half of the problem I think in reaching people is that the vast majority of cis people don't have an observed internal gender preference. We are trying to build empathy with something we as trans people assume they have too - but maybe only a small minority of cis people experience it. I don't think we actually understand cis people, we just assume a bunch of things about them using trans people as a false opposite.
Thing is... If I am correct, the assumed massive earth shaking regret of what would happen if a cis person went through gender reassignment... Is they might just adapt and be fine.
That's like .001% of athletes and everyone would hate it.
Makes me wonder how many trans people you think there are lol
Let's just say it's a good thing that everything that would make money, does not exist in society.
because lots of (most?) trans people don't want to be "trans", they want to fit in with the gender they know they are, and being labeled as not a real man or woman in the normal sports leagues, but a trans man or woman in the trans league, is insulting.
If you wanna get answers from a community that’s been training in 1000x earths gravity to fight anti-trans rhetoric, ask this in hexbear.
When I was thinking about it, I came to the conclusion that sports that don't require confrontation should just evolve and give up on the competitiveness. Swimming, javelin, whatever shouldn't have the winner be the best out of every contestant, we should celebrate each and everyone's force of will to better themselves first. We already have that with high jumping, where individual performance is rated Vs their height goal.
Give up competitiveness in sports where it isn't needed, and you no longer have people melting down because someone has more muscular mass, or a different gender than expected.
Give up competitiveness in sports and you return to a celebration of the human body and it's physical prowess, instead of childishly fighting for who's best.
Obviously this doesn't work in football, or sports with direct confrontation, that i haven't found a solution yet, maybe during the next shower ?
Good shower mate
Not good enough looking at the votes haha
Sports with direct confrontation, hell, even any sport, don't need fairness to be good. I'd say that fairness actually destroys enjoyment of a sport, a lot of the time. Now, sometimes that can not be the case, as a totally even set match can be impressive to watch just based on how the kind of, pachinko machine pays out, right. Depending on your definition of fairness, once we attain fairness, all that's keeping the match from becoming a draw every time is pure random chance. You have to define random chance as not being sort of, antithetical to fairness.
Watching the high-level pachinko machine can still be fascinating, can still be entertaining. But overall, the fairness is actually an inhibition to sport, a lot of the time. People want a david vs goliath moment, if you ask them. I would just as well give that to them, easily, right, like, no question in my mind. Obviously there's a balance to be had, but, that's the job of commissioners, to come up with that shit after the fact, or in relation to viewership numbers.