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.
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 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.
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.
That would just be men’s sports, which in fairness is all most people seem to care about anyway…
Not every sport. Dressage is already a sport where there is just one category. Synchronous swimming is also one, but only women competed this year.
Okay so two obscure sports that require a ton of money to participate in?
I think that by default sports should have a single league for everyone, unless data shows that some physical attribute has an undue impact on performance. Then leagues should be split by that attribute.
That attribute should not be immediately assumed to be sex. Often I feel like sex is being used as a proxy for something else, partially correlated; such as weight or height.
a common dresscode, same standards and rules for all
Yes.
Well said. I often think that discrimination in general is actually based on errors in what’s known as feature selection in ML.
Humans observe the world, notice certain patterns (such as between weight and sex), but then unconsciously perform dimensionality reduction to simplify their mental model of the world. Our software is unfortunately buggy.There’s also the question of training dataset. If you always see people of certain sex in specific roles, you might conclude that’s the way it’s supposed to be.
There’s a commonly shared but apocryphal story about models recognizing cloudy skies instead of tanks because of the data they were trained on. https://gwern.net/tankI think that by default sports should have a single league for everyone, unless data shows that some physical attribute has an undue impact on performance. Then leagues should be split by that attribute.
Yes, precisely what I mean. I wasn’t suggesting that all sports be forced to be exclusively mixed, yet somehow that’s what people understood the question as.
Eh I’m so for just stopping sports. It at least spending all that wasted money on something meaningful, like feeding hungry people.
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.
Not if you value women participating in sports.
Why? Weight classes, leauges, and divisions won’t help?
This has been explained elsewhere.
And they commented on that comment too, stating that it’s an unknowable mystery.
The fastest a woman has ever run the 100m dash is 10.49 seconds.
The Olympic qualifying time, that all runners needed to beat to even complete in men’s 100m dash this year was 10.00 seconds.
If we didn’t have a women’s division, there couldn’t be women in sports.
Yes, that’s a sport where segregation makes sense. But the suggestion isn’t to force desegregation, it’s to to let all genders compete against each other.
We call it the “Mens” category, but for all intents and purposes it is the same as an “open to all genders” category.
Female athletes don’t compete in it because they’re physically not strong enough to even qualify to compete in it at the world level. The gender they identify as or were assigned at birth is irrelevant. There’s no genetic testing requirement to compete at the men’s level.
In almost every sport, the world record performance from a women isn’t even good enough to meet the minimum bar for quality to compete in the men’s competitions at the world level.
Even sports like diving where you’re judged more than measured, the male athletes strength makes it possible for them to do things the female athletes simply can’t.
There was a time when they only was open to all competition, adding a protected women’s only category was to make it fair for women. And then we started calling the open category the men’s category.
We could call it the open category and the low-T category instead, and it would have the exact same participants in each.
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.
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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.
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.
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
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.
Sports should be segmented out by testosterone levels.
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.
Problem is that some sports are really unfair towards one of the sexes (and it’s not always men who have the advantage). I definitely think it should be mixed for sports where there’s no advantage.
Relevant recent YT short about archery: https://youtube.com/shorts/oCi_IawIFQA
I don’t see that as a problem. For example boxing or weightlifting would probably have the top 10-100 being all men, but have more variety (trans, men, and women) below that. They could all compete together though.
You could still be the top man/woman/trans, but there would be a clear total ranking. For example one would see that the top female tennis player would rank 100th in the total ranking. It wouldn’t take away from her achievements and allow her to play against men at the same level.
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But it does kind of diminish the women’s sports.
Consider say, the 100 meter sprint. The winning women’s times at the Olympics were all so far behind the men that literally none of the winning times would have even qualified to be at the Olympics! (Mens min qualifying time is under 10 seconds, Alfred won gold at 10.72 seconds, Jefferson took bronze at 10.92.) At the other end of the scale, for the 10,000 meter race, the last placing male ran it in just over 29 minutes which was 5 seconds faster than the Olympic women’s record for the same distance and was a full minute and a half faster than the gold winning woman.
Similarly for a lot of team sports you’d be relegating teams with women on them to a much lower league because at the top of the table, raw physical strength plays a role.
Splitting up by sex means we can watch and appreciate the best women play their sport at the highest level and celebrate them. Or almost every Olympic sport would just be guy guy guy.
In Finland we have lower physical requirements for women to get into the police academy. I think it’s safe to say that with equal requirements we wouldn’t have a single female police officer in the entire country.
I’d expect a similar thing to happen in sports. When it comes to physical strenght men have a massive advantage over women. It would be the women who this screws over.
Does Finland not have divisions, leagues, and classes in male sports? You don’t think that an all male team in the last division can compete against an all female team in the top division? You don’t think there are some sports where women are on equal footing where strength is not an advantage (archery, shooting, diving, etc.)? You don’t think there is overlap in some sports?
Which sports are popular and have the support to be more economically viable?
Of them, how far away from the top seeds do you get before it can no longer be done professionally?
If unisex (I know, it’s a bizzare word) sports leagues were how it was done, do you think more or less women (including trans-women) would be able to be professional athletes?
Most if not all of the highest divisions would be men only. The highest ranking females would be competing against some minor league men on games that nobody would be interested in even watching.
Obviously there would be some number of genetic outliars but that wouldn’t change the overall trend.
That is your assumption. You cannot know that across all sports. It would most certainly be true for sports limited or focused on physical strength, but beyond that, there’s no way to know for certain.
If you’ve played any sport, you’ll know that brute strength isn’t the sole determining factor for success. Technique is very important too. Tactics cannot be ignored either. In football for example, just play “try to get the ball” in a square where one chases the ball. You might be the fastest player on the team but never catch the ball even against players who don’t move.
Also, competing against stronger opponents is how people learn and “level up”. You learn how to deal with different, faster, slower, more technical, stronger, even more intelligent opponents. Again, if you’ve ever played sports (or just games), you’ll know what it feels like to think you’re the best, then get decimated by an opponent, but in doing so realize what you were doing wrong - especially when competing against that opponent multiple times. Women and men might have a higher ceiling than they think, but unless they compete against each other continuously, they won’t know.
Sure. I can’t know the outcome for sure but I’d be stunned if the trend ended up being male players being humiliated by women. I just cannot imagine this being the case. I have nothing against it per se but I have a strong feeling it would come at the expense of women.
My only personal experience on this is sparring against a purple belt female in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu while I was still a complete novice myself. She put up a good fight but she didn’t stand a chance. Granted I was also bigger and stronger than her. On the other hand, sparring against a smaller but more experienced male I stood no chance myself. He’d beat me every single time without an exception.
No, because the women would be at an unfair physical disadvantage in most sports.
I watched the speed rock climbing (sorry, don’t know the official name) during the Olympics. The fastest woman was amazing, she flew up the wall in about 6.75 seconds, and beat her nearest competitor by over a second to win the gold. The fastest man was nearly 2 seconds faster again with his competitors not far behind. If the women competed with the men, the female gold medal winner wouldn’t even be on the podium.
You say that but women’s tennis didn’t exist until a woman beat all the men and won a tournament.
That’s not what happened.
He did say “in most sports”, not all. More specifically, sports where physical strength is an advantage (ie, weight lifting, rock climbing, football, soccer, wrestling, etc).
Women and men would be equal in sports like billiards, ping pong, badminton, gymnastics, ice skate, and even tennis.
and even tennis.
Tennis?! Not even Serena Williams believes that:
“Andy Murray has been joking about myself and him playing a match. I’m like, ‘Seriously? Are you kidding me?’ Men’s tennis and women’s tennis are two completely different sports,” Serena Williams said. “If I were to play him, I’d lose 6-0, 6-0 within 10 minutes. Men are a lot faster, they serve and hit harder. It’s a different game.”
Exception that proves the rule? That’s pretty awesome though.
IDK, men already dominate so much of the world, why not make space for women’s sports.
But imo it should be more like the weight classes in wrestling and less like the binary mens/women’s thing with different rules.
Like why are men’s and women’s gymnastics so different. Why can’t the person do the event they want to compete in?
That has always bothered me. I feel they should be doing The same activities.
