With the recent issues of transgender people in sports, why don’t we move some sports over to a weight-class system?
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.
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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.
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
like abolishing womens sports
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