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.
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
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.
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.
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.
soccer
“Male” soccer is not restricted to men. Both genders are allowed. There are only men because they outperform women.
edit: Although FIFA forbids women from access to the main World Cup. Also the statement above is true generally, but not everywhere.
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.
Chess? What percent of woman players are GMs and what percent of male players are GMs? Because it sounds like sampling bias.
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.
