No more men’s and women’s league, no more “gender eligibility” requirements, a common dresscode, same standards and rules for all.
Edit: since it looks like people missing the word let: the suggestion isn’t to force desegregation. It’s to allow it or even make it the default. Someone else made a good suggestion: segregate by attributes specific to the sport. In boxing it’s weight class, in basketball it could be height, in biking it could even be doped and non doped. Sex and gender need not be the very first thing to segregate by.
Someone sharper than I am came up with the suggestion of categorising people in a similar way to how it’s done by disability in the Paralympics. As to what those categories should be and whether it’s practical, let alone possible is another thing entirely.
Basically turn the “categorisation by disability” on its head and make it “categorisation by ability”.
Would you have a link to that? It sounds like an interesting concept.
No, men and women are not physically equal.
Why does that matter? Men also have divisions and leagues. Team in the top leagues will destroy the leagues at the bottom.
why does it matter?
Should we stop splitting sports by gender?
It’s inherently boring to watch sports competitions between unequally capable people, and there is a natural difference in that that can be clearly attributed to gender.
I admire your thought of equality but we need to talk about the differences in physique in genders as well if we wanna discuss this.
Don’t dismiss this claim, scientifically debunk it or share why not and how you come to this conclusion.
Of course people are differently capable, that why we have divisions, leagues, weight classes, and so on, even in the same sex. Why would that change when they all compete together?
Because putting them together in most physical sports would push women out of the highest echelons of that sport. Just look up what female MMA fighters and female tennis players have to say. They literally can’t keep up with men. Serena Williams and her sister boasted that they’d beat any man outside the top 200, Braasch (then #203) took the challenge and on the day of the challenge played a round of golf drank 2 low ABV beers before easily beating both sisters
Probably the most detrimental thing you can do for women in sports is to get rid of the women’s league. Most “men’s” categories are already open for women, so you should ask women why they don’t want to partake. The answer is what female athletes already say, they’d get absolutely dumpstered before they even get close to the top. Of course the less physically demanding the closer men and women will be, but for most sports the physical differences make women’s leagues necessary.
“Hey! Do you want to watch division 7 soccer? They have a woman on the team!”
Hardly inspirational to girls everywhere. Whereas whenever I’ve caught the Canadian women’s soccer team, it’s usually at a pretty full arena with lots of girls teams there stoked to watch. I would never take that away from them.
Why do you assume they’ll be in the 7th division? And do you assume it will be the case for all sports?
Which sports do you watch both men and women play?
Soccer is the one I do most frequently. My local men’s MLS team would walk through the Canadian women’s team. The men can just kick it much farther and harder, run faster, take dangerous shots from farther out and that’s not to mention the physicality. And the Canadian women’s team is one of the top 10 or so in the world. (And MLS is several steps down from any of the serious leagues from which most national men’s teams are drawn.)
Not even going to look at a more physical sport like hockey.
I already posted comparing men and women’s times at the Olympics, but to reiterate, the gold winning woman came in slower than the bare minimum men’s time to qualify to run at the Olympics, in the 10k race, literally every one of the racers beat the women’s world record… (stats you saw but conveniently did not respond to.)
Does that answer your question?
Does that answer your question?
No, it doesn’t answer if it’ll be the same for all sports. As others have pointed out archery, shooting, curling, and other sports have men an women competing either separate or together and women can compete at the same level.
As for football, yes, there’s a good chance there’ll be stark differences, but as I pointed out in another comment, not every sport is about raw strength. And, competing against stronger opponents can also raise your ceiling. How far is of course yet to be seen because we don’t have mixed leagues.
And again, the suggestion isn’t “NO MORE SEGREGATION EVER” it’s “should we let them compete against each other”. That means there’ll be a mixed and segregated league. Maybe even, as somebody else suggested, the segregations wouldn’t always be immediately by sex or gender, but by attributes that make sense in that sport e.g weight, muscle mass, height, skill, and so on.
No, it’s not attributed to gender. It is attributed to sex. Sorry to be pedantic but we live in a world where that distinction is very important for education purposes.
Men and men aren’t physically equal. Maybe basketball should have a rule that everyone in the team has to be the same height. Can’t have anyone with a physical advantage over anyone else.
What do you think would happen if the best NBA team played the best WNBA team? I think the men would win.
What do you think would happen if professional basketball was mixed? I’d imagine the teams would be 90% men.
Also, if track and field records are any indication, men are strong and faster. Separate divisions are more fair.
Venus and Serena got their asses handed to them in their prime by the ranked 203 male tennis player.
https://www.theguardian.com/observer/osm/story/0,,543962,00.html
The women’s US National team lost to a regional U15 boys team.
Physiology, males are bigger, faster, and stronger. It is not fair to women to put them in the same contest as males in any sport that requires those 3 things puts women at a massive disadvantage and would lead to fewer opportunities for female athletes to succeed.
Depends on how it’s organized. In a open team, it would definitely suck. In one of my sports, Ultimate, coed divisions or leagues are pretty popular. Generally the gender ratio is 4-3 with the offensive team deciding to play 3 or 4 women for that point.
Ultimate is under appreciated
Why? It’s not like men and women are equal biologically.
Read my edit. Also, not every sport is about strength. Additionally, the are other ways to split than just by sex and gender.
Yes, let’s have a bunch of blokes beating the shit out of women in boxing. What could possibly go wrong?
I remember the Brit Awards scrapping gendered awards and putting everyone in the same category. The problem was, the only ones nominated turned out to all be men.
Combat sports already have weight classes, it’s not like you’d be putting a man up against a woman he has 30 cm and 50 kg over. If you’ve got people of similar size and ability, it doesn’t seem to me like their sex or gender matters. They all went in there expecting to both hit and get hit.
So if a woman was in the same weight class as Mike Tyson, you think they should be allowed to fight each other? And you think this would be a good look?
These hamfisted attempts at equality are actually the complete opposite.
Is it a worse look than what Tyson did to any of his real opponents because of the history of male violence against women, or is there something else you’re getting at? And is whether or not it looks good what should be the driving force being decision making in sports?
, it doesn’t seem to me like their sex or gender matters
Oh, but it does. There are major physical differences between men and women, even if they’re the same weight. Men have greater muscle & bone density. A man of similar physical fitness of the same weight as a woman will be considerably stronger. There wouldn’t even be a competition. It would just be a man beating the shit out of a woman. Nobody wants to see that, despite our desires for equality.
Team sports: touchy/feely becomes legal?
Individual sports: the men win nearly all.
Edit:
I agree with the argument that it would get boring to watch.
I have seen a boxing fight between a 100kg man and a 60kg woman, where she had much better skills. You could think it should be interesting, but it wasn’t. It was soo boring. He kept her at a distance most of the time, and he could take her hits easily. She escaped his clumsy attacks all the time. Summary: it is soo important to find reasonable matches.
You should probably look up the effects of testosterone. Namely upper body strength and bone density. Women are weaker than men.
Not all men. You think you can compete against any woman out there and win? Also, do you think every sport is about strength?
do you think every sport is about strength?
A lot has been written about why chess has separate tournaments for men and women despite physical strength not being a consideration for the game. Presumably, similar logic holds true for other non-physical-strength based games. I’d recommend you to look it up yourself, but the TL;DR (with some potential inaccuracies since it’s been some time since I read it all) is as follows.
Historically women weren’t even allowed to participate in chess tournaments because men considered them to be inferior and incapable of thinking as well as a man could. It was considered “ungentlemanly” to defeat a woman who “obviously” couldn’t keep up with men. This led to a cycle of women not even learning the game because why bother, eh?
Now the thing about games like chess is that you can definitely learn it at any age and master it. BUT - doing so at a very young age tends to give people a huge edge over someone who started later (all else being equal - memory, effort etc etc). So, the same person starting at age 4 who’d probably be level 9000 Goku by the time they are 23 might never get to that level if they only start at age 35.
So, when women were allowed to participate in chess tournaments, there were very few of them who had started at the right age and could hold their own. This led to a need for a women’s tournament to grow the sport.
How does that grow the sport? A little girl watching a woman on tv after winning a tournament might get inspired to pick it up. The girl might be able to point at the other women and tell her parents that she deserves to play chess too and that it’s not just for boys.
These gendered leagues also give a “safe space” for women to participate in communities where people of different genders interacting is frowned upon. Etc etc etc.
Please do fact check me by looking up things on your own though – it has been years since I went down this rabbit hole.
Thank you for the response!
I definitely agree that role models are important and that starting early is the key in chess. I can’t remember the names, but it was tested by a researcher on his own daughters: he trained them in chess very early on they all became grand masters. In fact, the list of known chess grandmasters has 42 women on it.
Women are mentally capable of playing chess at the highest level if given the opportunity to do so.
So yes, giving them a space to compete against each other can serve as a “safe” space, it doesn’t mean that it should be the only place they compete, nor that they are incapable of holding their own against other genders.
The question isn’t either “should all sports force no segratation”, but “should all sports let everybody compete together”.
I definitely agree that
I recommend to make yourself familiar with the concept of some things being true even if you don’t agree to them.
There are even things that still remain after nobody believes in them anymore (that is one definition of ‘reality’).
A lot of sports don’t have a men’s tournament per se. It’s “women only” and “everyone allowed”. So women can almost always go participate in a “men’s” cricket match or whatever but they’re at such a severe disadvantage physically that they can’t get too far.
The only way to statistically (dis)prove all this is to repeat [this] (https://www.tennisnow.com/Blogs/NET-POSTS/November-2017-(1)/The-Man-Who-Beat-Venus-and-Serena-Back-to-Back.aspx) with a large enough sample set.
Even in “sports” like chess, darts and pool virtually every single world class player is a male. It’s not just about strenght.
I’d really love sources on that since I don’t follow those sports. Are they mixed?
But in chess, there are a definitely female grand masters (whatever that means). Pool had the famous “black widow” player. Who even plays darts? I only know of one fat Brit who has dominated against other men. No idea if women even play.
You can look up the leaderboards of any of the mentioned sports. It’s not that there’s not any women in there but it’s still virtually all male.
Then there are plenty of examples of top level female athletes losing to males nobody has never even heard of.
Venus and Serena Williams lost to 203rd ranked male tennis player
FC Dallas under-15 boys squad beat the U.S. Women’s National Team in a scrimmage
Yeah, also weight categories in fighting sports are body shaming
The thing people do no appreciate about professional and Olympic level sports is just how far the male athletes are beyond the athletic ability of the average man.
There seems to be a notion that just because someone is a male they get to compete at the highest level of sports. This is simply not the case. The vast majority of male athletes will never even come close to reaching a professional level. Even an above average male college athlete has a snowball’s chance in hell of making it in a league like the NFL.
When we are talking about women competing with these men, we aren’t talking about competing against men with average or even above average ability (professional female athletes would mop the floor with men in the 60% percentile) we are talking about competing against the top .000001% of male athletes.
Women not only have a biological disadvantage, they have a population size disadvantage. Far more boys and men compete in sports and games. I don’t care what game or sport you are competiting in, if you have population A containing 100 randomly selected competitors and population B containing 1000 competitors, you don’t have to be a statistician to figure out that your #1 competitor and probably your entire top 10 are going to come from population B.
OK, I’ll just add an edit to the description, but for you too: the suggestion isn’t to force desegregation. It’s to allow it. Someone else made a better suggestion: segregate by attributes specific to the sport. In boxing it’s weight class, in basketball it could be height, in biking it could even be doped and non doped. Sex and gender need not be the very first thing to segregate by.
Finally, the option to compete together should still be the default, IMO. Some people probably would like to join a mixed team, but simply can’t because it isn’t allowed. For example if basketball were segregated by height, some shorter players would maybe like to play in the mixed team regardless (maybe they hit a skill ceiling in their league, maybe they don’t like the idea of segregation, etc.).
No. Competitions should be fair. Play mixed-sex if you want though.
Shouldn’t sports have categories based on abilities? I see people be like “trans women are stronger than cis women cause, idk, testosterone or something” and I just think, y’know, if that’s a problem, why aren’t categories based on strength or abilities or whatever?
No.
Yes
Care to expand?
I have, in other comments and the description of the thread too. Anything specific you would like to know?
It would make most sports incredibly boring to watch, as well as frustrating for many athletes. Boring sport means less money, which would also mean less teams overall.
Why would it be boring?
“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face”
–Mike Tyson
Can you imagine Mike Tyson fighting Ronda Rousey? No, I think it’s a pretty solid idea to keep most sports segregated.
They wouldn’t be in the same weight class -_-
The only sport that is a predominantly physical exercise (so excluding things like snooker, darts, archery etc) where women could compete competitively against men at an equivilent level in their sport (league 1 men vs league 1 women) would be ultra marathons. Most other sports is so mis-matched you’d end up with some random amateur bloke against an elite woman.
Basically if you’ve gone through male puberty you are vastly different physically from someone who hasn’t.
It’s their choice, but I’m just saying now, for most sports it would hurt.
Would make more sense with, say, ping pong, extreme ironing, or nascar than something like football, wrestling, or hockey.
