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.
On average, but there’s outliers.
Like, there are women out there with higher testorone than the average man, and crazy is a huge factor.
I played rugby in college and we hung out with the women’s team and drunk coed wrestling was definitely a common thing.
Every once and a while a non rugby player would think it was just an excuse to roll around with a hot chick, and they would get absolutely demolished. Like I’m not talking about underestimating the woman and losing quickly due to technical skill. Just getting absolutely manhandled by a girl without the socially ingrained fear of violence and pain. Like, I was one of the biggest guys on the men’s team and had wrestling experience, I still lost to some of them. Women almost a foot shorter and that I had more than 50 pounds on. Because they really wanted that W and kept trying till they got it.
Hell, for two years we had coed practice including full speed tackling and scrimmages. Top end speed was usually the only clear difference, and even then the fastest five players on the field was never all guys.
There was a story on Reddit from a soldier, his squad ended up in a fight with rugby players in a bar in Australia and after the fight they had a drink together and when a soldier told the players they were pretty brave to start fighting people in the army, they replied “the only people we fear is women who play rugby because they’re completely crazy”.
Like, there are women out there with higher testorone than the average man
No, that doesn’t happen, the adrenal glands and ovaries do not produce enough t to reach even very low male levels, testosterone for the most part is produced in the testicules which cis women do not have. that much testosterone would transition a woman into a man, they would grow beard and get a deeper voice, that’s how HRT works for FtMs.
they would grow beard and get a deeper voice, that’s how HRT works for FtMs.
Plenty of people with XY chromosomes can’t grow facial and have a high pitched voice well into their 20s or even after
And plenty of people with XX chromosomes shave/wax/bleach facial hair and have deep voices.
Hormones aren’t binary, there’s a bunch of different hormones that can be in a lot of different ranges
And that’s not even getting into the other options besides XX/XY
Stop trying to make everyone conform to your binary views on gender.
She’s not talking about gender he’s talking about sex. Someone born with testicles with XY chromosomes is always going to produce more testosterone than someone born with ovaries with XX chromosomes - assuming both sexual organs are functioning as expected.
Sorry this is bothering me a bit but if by “He” you meant me, I use she/her pronouns I’ll put It in my bio :)
Changed it. I always assume people online are male for some reason. I didn’t read your username
Thanks! 💜
These people are very fact-resistant, I wouldn’t bother.
Oh, nice to know that girl who beat me (in the same weight class) at wrestling was cuz her sexual organs weren’t working properly.
We’re talking about testosterone in blood not wrestling abilities. A 300lb woman will beat an 110lb man in wrestling. Doesn’t mean she has higher T.
Amazing how one can dismiss another’s personal experience by simply insisting a different scenario happened.
assuming
A whole bunch of shit while ignoring all the contex…
I’m talking about 18-22 year olds and the women are on the women’s rugby team comparing them to men who have never needed to shave and their voice hasn’t cracked.
If you think every 18-22 year old guys has been thru puberty…
That’s as ridiculous as not understanding that hight T women would be attracted to high level athletics and then overly represented in elite athletes.
What you are doing is the equivalent of someone who stops paying attention to science in sixth grade but believes they’re an expert at 47.
You got the cliff notes version and think people should address you as Doctor.
Shits a lot more complicated than you think.
A high T woman is 70 ng/dL and that already is starting to imply some sort of adrenal tumor or polycystic ovary syndrome. The normal range is a lot closer to 20~30
A low T man is ~250 ng/dL and average is around 400~500 ng/dL
A woman will not have T levels similar to men because they don’t have testicles. Even the highest T females compared to lowest T men.
The only time this would be true is in 1 in 10 million cases. If that’s your whole argument, then OK. It is theoretically possible if the woman has an adrenal tumor and the man is effectively castrated.
But for virtually all other cases this simply cannot happen due to human physiology.
What do you not understand about 18-22?
Which, if you haven’t noticed, is still the age range of a lot of Olympians and elite athletes.
Hell, some sports average under 18.
It’s like you didn’t even read my comment. You’re just fucking insisting everything fits in your nice little division of two piles and no one else can exist.
It’s the same line of thinking as transphobes…
And I have no desire to ever interact with people stuck in that thinking. And immediately regret trying to help you understand the finer points.
Every once and a while a non rugby player would think it was just an excuse to roll around with a hot chick, and they would get absolutely demolished. Just getting absolutely manhandled by a girl
The perfect deal if they’re into that
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.
There’s an effect on both sides.
Contrary to what people assume, aggressive chess is a good strategy.
Due to a lot of factors I don’t really want to get into, most chess players think men are naturally better than women.
So a woman who thinks she’s playing a man is immediately on the defense, and a man who thinks he’s playing a woman starts out very aggressively.
Which means a man and woman of equal skill, the man will likely win.
It’s called stereotype difference and it’s not just chess related.
I don’t know why people always pick chess because there’s no physical difference while ignoring the mind games we even play on ourselves in those situations.
Just people completely ignorant of what they’re talking about and grasping at straws to find something that agrees with them
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.
Here’s a podcast about a study
https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/mens-chess-superiority-explained-08-12-29/
Normally I’d just link studies…
But I feel like if you’re this opinionated about things we figured out long ago, maybe listening would help more than reading.
Because it wouldn’t have taken much for you to Google this at some point and realize we’ve been studying this for decades, and maybe, just maybe, science is better than your assumptions.
There are a lot of factors in play, and you seem to think it’s because of…
What exactly?
Like it seems like you’re just arguing women are bad at chess?
I’ve read multiple papers on this topic. I’m a 2000 rated player and have tutored girls in chess. This is an interest of mine.
There is a very large gap in performance. The research overall implies a complex variety of factors. This includes what you mentioned, along with other inequities. It also includes the fact that women players are roughly 11 years younger on average and therefore haven’t peaked yet, which will account for some.
But there is evidence that there is also an innate biological difference. Men score better on visuospatial intelligence tests when compared to women. Chess, especially at a high level, involves a lot of this type of thinking.
I’m not arguing that women are bad at chess. Humans are individuals and there are varying levels of players in both genders.
Just that if you look at the extremes (which the top chess players will be) you’re going to see a higher level of males even if we fixed all of the inequities currently influencing the gender gap in chess.
We don’t know if the 10x difference is 5% due to biology or 50% due to biology. But we know it’s a non zero number
Essentially I used it as an example in the wider context of why we have women’s leagues and men’s league in sports.
also it’s called football dammit :(
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First England made football.
But they never set the rules, every English school had their own rules, so you went by “home teams rules”.
The biggest difference was if you could.pick the ball up like in Rugby (the school). To clarify during scheduling, that became known as “rugby football”.
It didn’t make sense to call non hand football “football” so it became “soccer football”.
Eventually they both dropped the redundant football. Then for some weird ass reason I still don’t understand, England made soccer just football and then centuries later gets mad at anyone still using the name “soccer” that they invented for the sport.
To be fair, the English invented English, so they kinda called most things in that language what it’s called…
The soccer/football argument is a little silly. It’s been called football in the UK, and many parts of the world for the better part of a full century. Call it soccer if you want, many counties have their own translation for football, or they use a different word when they have their own version of football that they like.
No one is trying to make England call it soccer again…
But the places that use soccer are the places settled by the British when they still called it soccer.
So it doesn’t make sense why the modern Brits who don’t remember soccer are so mad when we call soccer football just soccer like we literally always have.
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
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
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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
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
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
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.
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“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, and dead bodies to the kitchen.” Mutant League Football.
That’s a blast from the past. They should remake that game.
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.
At a minimum men are born with more muscle fibres and process energy a little more effectively. Puberty is not a factor.
If we could wave a magic wand and make transitions change the multitude of differences it’d be great but the science isn’t there yet. We’re left with reality.
Weight classes won’t cut it unfortunately.
Lean muscle per kg of body weight is significantly higher for men.
