The largest college sports governing body in the country made the change following President Trump’s executive order banning trans girls from girls’ school sports.
The largest college sports governing body in the country made the change following President Trump’s executive order banning trans girls from girls’ school sports.
While I personally believe trans athletes should be allowed to compete in any league of their choice or at least the league most closely matching the gender they present as, there is a part of me that would also like open-gendered sports in general. I have a theory that the “women are weaker, and would get crushed in leagues with men” is misogyny seeing only disadvantages and none of the advantages women athletes have (more complete brain development during their prime athletic years, etc.) If you are actually concerned about injury, then go by weight class, which could help save smaller men from severe injury as well.
I do also wonder just how much keeping sports gendered is just done to protect male egos from being styled on by women.
Those advantages of women they have compared to men are literally nothing compared to the advantages men have. Here is an example where sisters Williams tried to beat ~350 man in world rankings and it just didn’t go well: https://www.tennisnow.com/Blogs/NET-POSTS/November-2017-(1)/The-Man-Who-Beat-Venus-and-Serena-Back-to-Back.aspx
Same for other sports. I used to to skiing and in junior leagues, men were seconds ahead of women on the same track.
“I hit shots that would have been winners on the women’s Tour and he got to them easily,” Serena said afterward.
“In the end I won, but neither myself, nor Venus or Serena took the game too seriously—we were just having a bit of fun.”
The dude was smoking Marlboroughs in between sets and the girls were on World TV to prove they could take on the guys. Anyone who says their is no difference is delusional
Bro I’m all for inclusivity and all that, but when a couple chicks tried to join the football team it did not go well at all for them. I’ll give them credit they did try, but one of then going up for a snap at wide receiver only to get drilled when they caught it stopped that want to play real quick for most em. But, she wanted to try and got mad at other guys for being to soft on the other chicks. She surely got way more than she wanted.
We did have a couple chicks stay on to be fair. One kicker so that’s whatever, but also a linewoman. She definitely gave it her all, but even at her best she was no where near varsity level. But like, she easily would jabe mauled any other chick at school. But put her against one of the big boys and there was absolutely no match.
So not going by weight at all then.
Look, I get that there are limits on how many teams you can feasibly have, but there are also plenty of smaller dudes who never play sports because they’d also get mauled. It’s also not a huge mental leap to think that maybe some coaches/administrators might deliberately try to get the girls to give up and be “out of their hair.” Not saying that happened in your anecdote, it may have genuinely been a well-meaning attempt at inclusivity by everyone involved. But it’s also not super relevant if there wasn’t also an attempt to balance it by weight - something that has already been shown to lower injury rates and severity for existing players if we would do it.
Do you think there are weight classes in football?
We definitely did not put them up with varsity or anything unless they specifically asked for it. The kicker and linewoman would take their hits and move on.
I genuinely had respect for both of them. Hell I tried teaching the linewoman everything I knew to help her, but even after 3 years she still couldn’t make varsity even though the drive and want was there.
So I guess yeah, they did keep her in her weight class by keeping her on JV all through my time there. Everybody wanted her to succeed, just there was a natural difference between what she and us guys could do.
We never intentionally tried to make her feel differently, but nobody ever had to point out there was a massive difference.
Most of my original point was that there should be weight classes. I’m well aware there aren’t currently. Perhaps I didn’t make that point clearly enough.
Thank you for doing your part to try to make them feel welcome and trying to help them succeed.