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.
No.
Care to expand?
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?
I have, in other comments and the description of the thread too. Anything specific you would like to know?
Yes
Same dress code, standards and rules absolutely - regardless if competition is split or not.
Same competition definitely for some sports - chess and shooting come to mind.More physical sports - I’m undecided there. I’d support everyone competing together if for example weight categories are introduced. You don’t want people of widely different physical build competing together, it’s not fun either to watch or play.
That’s already how it works. 80kg boxers don’t compete against 100kg boxers, division 1 teams don’t compete against division 5 teams.
It just means that some teams will be mixed. We might even be surprised at how many teams will be mixed.
I don’t want to see a 80kg male boxing against a 80kg female. I already know how that is going to end.
No, you don’t. You haven’t seen it yet. Nor do you know how 100 or 1000 such matches would end.
It’s also fine if you don’t want to see it. No one is going to force you too.
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The latter, obviously. Actually, they should all play naked, for science.
It was good enough for the ancient Greeks
Probably boost viewership a good bit
More environmentally friendly, no micro plastics from the synthetic fabrics
Avoids the inevitable arguments about which teams uniforms are too revealing or look stupid or whatever
One less expense for the smaller/less well-funded teams to worry about, and harder to argue that one team has an advantage because they have better equipment
Probably would scare away some of the prudish religious assholes, good riddance.
Sucks to be you if you play a winter sport though.
I’d be completely on board with that proposal. There are many differentiators in sports that contribute to your success. Your sex might be a very important one but definitely not the only one that matters.
I would group different athletes based on skill level, strength, height or whatever is relevant in that dicipline. Being born with a penis or not shouldn’t matter.
If we say that for a specific kind of sport the level of testosterone is the most important factor to success, than that should be used for the grouping. That way, men with low testorone would be the same ‘league’ as woman with a medium testosterone level and woman with a really high testosterone level would play along men with a medium level of testosterone.
From my perspective, this would not only end all these gender discussions in sports but also make the lower leagues way more interesting and more fair for both genders.
I feel like some function of actual measurements of say hormone levels over a given training period and lifetime would be a better classification systen over pure sex class system.
Most of the time it would result in the same divisions tbh, but outliers would be better accommodated and we get the added bonus of further breaking down gender roles.
No, that is stupid.
What a nonstupid answer. I congratulate you on being so articulate.
Many sports are like that already. The NFL and NBA are not segregated by gender/sex, anyone can play. The WNBA exists and is supplemented by the NBA because women never make it through the tryouts/cuts. Same goes for the NFL, but they didn’t make a WNFL.
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. It wouldn’t be good for women in sport.
Why not?
Im gonna guess.
Sport is a spectacle. At the highest levels of any given sport(usually)
Women, if they cannot compete with men, will simply not exist in the highest levels of that sport.
If women cannot be part of the highest levels of that sport, the sport cant make enough money to create leagues that can convince enough women to put significant amount of systems in place to train and produce the best women capable of playing that sport.
Until we stop caring about only letting/finding/supporting/producing the best of the best, its an incredibly bad idea to ignore the many sport specific disadvantage biology plays in competition
Again, like many others missed, the proposal isn’t “NO MORE SEGREGATION!”. It’s to let people compete against each other regardless of sex. I’d prefer it as a default, but it doesn’t preclude voluntary segregation.
Until we stop caring about only letting/finding/supporting/producing the best of the best, its an incredibly bad idea to ignore the many sport specific disadvantage biology plays in competition
And with this too, I disagree. If you’ve done sports, you’ll know the feeling of thinking you’re the best and then meeting a stronger opponent. For some, it will be demoralising, but for others it’s a stimulus. It also lets you learn more about the sport, what is possible, and in certain sports also develop techniques and tactics against opponents with greater values in different attributes.
Evolution happens faster under pressure and competing against better opponents is the best pressure there is. That’s how you get the best of the best. You get out of your safe zone.
Also, again for you too, the suggestion is not “no more segregation ever”! You can read my edit.
Paralympic rugby has mixed teams with men and women.
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I’m all for removing gender as the first dividing line, but there needs to be some divisions in place.
As an example, in martial sports they are often separated by weight class to balance the fact that a larger, heavier person would have an advantage over a smaller, lighter person.
Without that, basketball would be dominated by the tallest people only, but that means there is no reason for anyone who isn’t tall to even play the game. Break it into height classes and suddenly you meet have a league of skilled, average height players that could be very compelling to watch.
Height classes in basket ball. Hadn’t thought of that. I would suggest that it be optional though, so that people who don’t want to be excluded because of their height get to compete in the “common” league.
Height classes for basketball actually sounds really cool. It’d be interesting to see the different strategies that come into play when people physically can’t reach the ring for example. Or at least I assume it would, I know nothing about basketball but it sounds like it’d be pretty interesting.
As the shortest person in most Basketball games during my childhood, I would have loved this so much! I enjoyed the game very much, but I always had to work twice as hard as my taller friends.
A heavyweight boxer isn’t the same for both sexes. If you mean coupling heavyweight against featherweight of the other gender or something similar to compensate, it could work but would probably be seen as unfair, it would be hard to draw the line on where it’s equivalent.
I do think it would be interesting to have mixed team sports where a certain number of each gender needs to be on each side, but it would probably end up with positions always being relegated to the same sex.
The definitions aren’t the same, but that can be fixed: heavyweight = over 90kg, whichever gender (right now it’s 91kg for men and 79 kg for women). They’d compete against each other in the same weight class by actual weight, not name of class.
You could then have multiple scenarios:
- few women in heavyweight
- no women in heavyweight
- women within the top of 70-75kg (for example)
- no women within the top 70-75kg (for example)
But we won’t know until we try.
The problem is that a man in the same weight class as a women would still wipe the floor with them.
I doubt even a heavy weight women against a featherweight man would be fair. Every category would be dominated by men.
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
Yes absolutely, gender and sex doesn’t define someone but maybe actually do new rules based on certain characteristics of a person instead of sexual reproductive parts.
Fuck all the sexism and transphobic shit people on here too.
Most professional sports in the United States don’t have any policies against women being in the sport. NBA, Football, Baseball, Hockey, etc.
None of them exclude women from playing in the professional leagues. Baseball did briefly in the middle of the 1900s, but that policy was reversed
It’s just that, for these sports, the best women in the game have not yet been better than the worst men in the game. A woman and a man of equal height and weight are still not generally physically equal. Muscle composition and growth, bone structure, etc. mean that on average, women are less strong and less explosive than men, and most popular sports emphasize those attributes.
WNBA teams would often scrimmage against male pick-up basketball players for practice, and they would also often lose. These were just random guys in the area, many of whom didn’t even play often.
The US Women’s National Team played against FC Dallas’s under-15 boys squad and lost 5-2. That USWNT went on to win the Olympics and the women’s World Cup. The Australian women’s team lost to U15 boys 3-0 and again to another U15 boys team 7-0; Arsenal’s woman’s team lost 5-0 to a U15 boys club; the professional squad Athletic Feminino in Spain lost to a U16 boys squad 6-0; and there are many, many more examples.
There is some research on evolutionary theory specifically about the vast differences in upper-body strength: “But even with roughly uniform levels of fitness, the males’ average power during a punching motion was 162% greater than females’, with the least-powerful man still stronger than the most powerful woman. Such a distinction between genders, Carrier says, develops with time and with purpose.”
There are very few sports where this would be feasible, and most if not all those sports are not well-watched and make very little money: shooting, archery, ultra-marathons come first to mind.
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To be fair, about that women’s world cup team, if i recall correctly it was a PR move to play an exhibition match with those kids and they were not trying very hard to win. I don’t think they would truly lose to U-15 if it was, for example, a tournament.
Your overall point has merit but i think that specific example gets overused a bit.
It was hardly a “PR move,” they didn’t publicize it, and it didn’t really get traction until Carli Lloyd “admitted” it on Twitter. I’m sure they were taking it a little easy though. That being said, the Australian women’s team lost to U15 boys 3-0 and again to another U15 boys team 7-0; Arsenal’s woman’s team lost 5-0 to a U15 boys club; the professional squad Athletic Feminino in Spain lost to a U16 boys squad 6-0; and there are many, many more examples.
I actually watch more women’s soccer than men’s, so I’m not denigrating the game or quality of play, but I think you’d agree the above represents a pretty clear trend.
Muscle and bone density is a big differentiator. When I was younger I dated some women who looked very strong. Like, their legs were three times thicker than mine. Yet when it came to actual strength, their legs were a tenth as strong as mine. It was actually kind of shocking how much stronger my legs were than theirs, considering the visual differences. It wasn’t until later in life that I learned about the muscle density differences between men and women, and then it made sense. My legs felt like slabs of iron when you touched them. Their legs, despite looking outstanding, still felt fairly soft. That’s because of the differences in muscle density between biological males and females.
“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 -_-
It doesn’t matter. A man in her weight class would be considerably stronger and faster. That’s just the reality of biology.
