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.
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!
Because a man tends to be stronger, faster, and more athletic than a woman of the same weight. It won’t work for football, track, or soccer.
It would work for marathons though. Figure that out
You sure? I cannot find records adjusted to weight, but the male record is ~2:01h and the female 2:17h
Edit: Why is there a cake next to my name? It cannot be that I am on lemmy for a whole year already? Fuck.
Yeah, you should have an egg next to your name :P
why an egg? Would it be to represent the disorientation of suddenly realizing you have been on Lemmy for a whole year? Like how an animal may be disorientated when seeing the light of the world for the first time.
Menemen is a delicious Turkish breakfast dish made of eggs, tomato, paprika and some other stuff. I think that was the allusion.
Yep
Testosterone also increases red blood cell count, so even male endurance athletes have an advantage. Look at Tigst Assefa who holds the women’s World record for a marathon at 2:11, she’s 120 lbs, the top 5 male marathon runners are all at 120 lbs too and run 10 minutes faster.
Shouldn’t a woman and a man with the same height, weight, and body-muscle percentage be basically identical in terms of athleticism or am I wrong?
Nope, testosterone is a hell of a drug. There is a reason women dope with it.
More of a hormone, really
All a drug is a chemical substance when administered to a living organism, produces a biological effect.
Hormones are just naturally produced chemical substance. As soon as you dope with it is becomes a drug.
You are wrong, unfortunately. It sure would be a lot easier if our biology worked that way.
Skeletal structure and muscle connection make a huge difference in leverage and speed.
To add to other replies I also think that its much harder for women to develop muscles. (Just what I think I observed, coukd be wrong)
“Explosive upper body strength” specifically. Men have wider shoulders and more chest/back/shoulder muscles.
Women have to work twice as hard for half the results.
Get rid of gendered sports. Next, legalize steroids for women; keep them illegal for men. Solves part of the problem, but I have no idea how trans people would fit into this scenario, though.
Why is everyone downvoting? This is a joke… right?
I’d hope so, and yet…
soccer
“Male” soccer is not restricted to men. Both genders are allowed. There are only men because they outperform women.
edit: Although FIFA forbids women from access to the main World Cup. Also the statement above is true generally, but not everywhere.
The NFL isn’t male only either. Not supporting anything but agreeing that some sports are segregated by performance
Even at lower levels of football women are typically only kickers.
Which is awesome and I hope we see one in the NFL one day! That said the reason for that is that kicker is the only position on the field that doesn’t require you be a genetic marvel. Most men and women that are born are not the size needed to play O-Line, most people that are that big are also not athletic enough(or didn’t have access to the tools to improve to that level).
I’d love to see a woman on the line or at qb or wide receiver. It’s just unlikely to happen before the sport is outlawed or I die
ok cool what about the op’s thoughts?
He addresses them with that statement. There are plenty of women that are in similar weight classes as men but you don’t see any in male sports.
Even though male sports does not have a gender requirement. This is essentially an indirect way of saying that there are biological differences between male and female that go beyond weight.
There are various differences you could point out. Males have lower body fat %, which means more muscle. Their bones are shaped differently and are more dense. Men tend to be more aggressive and competitive. Men tend to have stronger bones, joints, tendons, and ligaments.
Men have more red blood cells, their hearts are bigger so they can pump more blood, and greater lung volume relative to body mass. So even a male and women same weight and height the man will be able to circulate oxygen more quickly.
There are many more examples if you go do some reading.
One of the differences may not be huge by themselves. But when you take the differences above and combine them, it creates a situation where in almost all sports, men play virtually unopposed by women.
Look up the Serena Williams interview. She’s undoubtedly the best female player in the world. She doesn’t stand a chance against a the 203rd best tennis male player.
This difference even applies to areas like chess. The highest ranking a woman ever got was 6th in the world, Judith Pulgar. Amazing player, but out of the 2500 or so grandmasters in the world, 42 are women.
Some of these differences can be explained by women around the world not being encouraged to play chess, but that does not explain all.
There are large biological differences when you look at the population in a statistical sense. And when you look at the most extreme samples from the edge of the normal distribution… that’s where the best athletes / chess players are going to come from.
The chess one isnt quite right. There’s been experiments where if a woman player didn’t know her opponent was a man she would perform better. It’s called stereotype threat phenomenon.
It also happens when a male player knowingly goes up against someone higher in the league than himself and he performs below his own standard average.
Basically people in general psyche themselves out of their best performance when going against someone they perceive to be better than them whether that’s factual or not. Confidence and undermining confidence can change a whole lot about how a person does in any given game or task.
You think that accounts for the differences? 42 of 2500 grandmasters are women because all the women are scared and intimidated of the men?
Maybe this plays some small effect but I doubt it’s statistically significant enough in this context
Like you said, it happens to men playing higher rated men. In order to go up in ranking, you need to play and beat progressively higher rated opponents.
By the very nature of being a high level player, that player would have had to go through that.
It’s a phenomenon that’s been observed across multiple sports, not just between men and women chess players. It’s particularly poignant in men vs women’s chess… because of people repeatedly telling women they are inherently worse than men. Like you are doing right now.
There’s been multiple studies on this. So yes, I side with the data that stereotype threat phenomenon has a significant impact on women’s performance in chess against men.
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”?
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.
also it’s called football dammit :(
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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.
if you get caught doping in the non-doping sports, you’re forced to compete in the decathalon with the juiced up killers
I’m listening…
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?
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.
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Except that isn’t true. Men are more stable due to hip width, their hearts move more blood, their arms and hands are larger/longer, and their lungs hold more air. None of that goes away.
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
When it comes to martial arts, skill does though. That’s why I got my ass handed to me by a 16 y/o girl who is much smaller than me.
Skill matters. But you get enormous leverage by simply being longer limbed and larger.
Practice a bit and you’ll be beating up 16 year old girls in no time. But even at their peak, women martial artists will struggle with mid-level male peers because they lack the raw physical features that move another body.
It’s the difference between a person firing a pistol and a rifle. Marksmanship only gets you so far. Then you really just need a longer barrel.
With enough practice you could even beat up 17 year old girls!
Stretch Goal
PSA: The preferred term is “transgender people”, not “transgendered people”.
Thanks for the heads up.
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
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.
highschool
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.
The recent issue with transgender people in sports is manufactured as a tool to spread trans hate. It’s a non issue that preys on Americans’s sense of fairness.
I’m still a fan of just removing all the rules around drugs and bodies. Let’s see what 21st century science can do!
It would be a kinda fun league to watch, but I dont want to hear about athletes dying because they took obscene amounts of steroids to be the best.
I want to say that because understanding of steroids and sports medicine they could be done in a way to prevent that for many sports. But o also know that would require rigorously enforced regulation which athletes would then try to game, which would probably lead to more deaths on the field.
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.
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.
