Do you really think it’s fair for a full blown man to fight women in the ring just because he identifies as a woman? Women will get very seriously hurt or possibly killed fighting someone assigned male sex at birth. I have no problem letting them do anything that doesn’t hurt others, but this is a case where I think we need to be more sensible.
If it’s about who might get hurt, maybe we should divide things up by something other than gender. I know plenty of women who could do a ton of damage with their fists and they aren’t even boxers.
It’s one thing to work within the limits of your physique to become stronger, better, etc. It’s another thing to have a totally different physique that gives you a starting point higher than can be achieved naturally by anyone else.
So many sports are entirely about the physique you inherited though. Yes there is some technique to swimming and obviously you have to train hard. But these are just prerequisites, not differentiators. If we start saying that winning because of your physique is no victory, then really half of the events become meaningless. To a large extent, the Olympics does measure inherited traits and I think we ought to recognize that that is its point. If you think back all those centuries, it was very obviously the point to prove that your people are genetically superior to their people.
So put those women in a higher class. There are plenty of women with “masculine” physiques… or are you going to claim Brittney Griner is also not a woman?
Boxing has weight classes. As do most other martial arts.
The problem is not a 50kg men fighting a 70kg women in terms of injuries and power imbalance. And in that set up the women most likely wins. The problem is the typical situation of a 80-100 kg men smacking down on a 50-60kg women. And that is the image the demagogues try to conjure.
So if your full blown men is a 60kg feather to be able to compete against another 60kg women, the whole trope falls apart.
A man with the same body weight as a woman would still inherently have more upper body strength and higher ability to gain it as that’s just how men are built vs women. It’s still not a fair way of setting intersex classes.
I mean if they’re doing the exact same rigor and type of training, eating the exact same diet, have had the exact same level of boxing experience and fought the exact same opponents at the same skill level, then yes there would be an advantage to whoever is assigned male
Do you really think it’s fair for a full blown man to fight women in the ring just because he identifies as a woman?
Can you cite an example of this?
No I can’t because there’s no data to go off of. I’m honestly unclear as to whether it’s a valid issue or not. Even in this case where the data we have seems to indicate there’s an issue, the data doesn’t seem entirely trustable. Anyone claiming complete certainty in this environment with no evidence is clearly just blindly pushing an agenda in bad faith.
It seems odd that you’ve based multiple comments here on that example then, I think.
