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 😱💸
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.
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.
Everyone would die of heart attacks. I'm glad no one is trying this, the death rate would be through the roof.
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
PSA: The preferred term is “transgender people”, not “transgendered people”.
Thanks for the heads up.
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
The purpose is to oppress the queers, logical compromises are not welcome.
Ding ding ding, we have a winner.
(edit to be completely clear: being queer myself, this is not something I am celebrating, just pointing out that you have the correct answer)
Unfortunately that’s just not true. There are a ton of people who use this as an excuse to oppress, and fuck them. But pound for pound, a person assigned male at birth is still going to have competitive advantage over someone assigned female at birth.
I don’t love the way this study words the problem, but I’ll quote it here: “Male physiology cannot be reformatted by estrogen therapy in transwoman athletes because testosterone has driven permanent effects through early life exposure.”[1]
I really wish it were as simple as it feels like it should be: trans men have the testosterone levels to compete with cis men, and the same for trans women and cis women. It’s really not that simple though, and pretending like the only barrier is hate won’t help things.
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?
Martial arts already has weight classes and gender on top. Weight doesn't cover gender differences
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 could see this working better than the current system and would undermine bigots argument about an unfair advantage. Though there are people that think being transgender gives people an advantage in chess somehow.
Women (and trans women) naturally carry a higher body fat percentage than men (Incl trans men) a "male" athlete can more safely and more easily carry a lower body fat % and therefore more muscle per kilo. So the weight classes wouldnt be able to be 1:1 if you wanted a level playing field.
There is still the inherent biological advantage in being born male and going through male puberty and developing a male muscular/skeletal system before transitioning. Very difficult to rule around every nuance of this though.
This is exactly right and what many people fail to understand. In studies, even after 3+ years of hormone therapy, trans-women still have significantly more muscle tissue than CIS women.
And that's without looking at cardiovascular differences, or even as subtle as glycogen storage.
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.
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.
When I was thinking about it, I came to the conclusion that sports that don't require confrontation should just evolve and give up on the competitiveness. Swimming, javelin, whatever shouldn't have the winner be the best out of every contestant, we should celebrate each and everyone's force of will to better themselves first. We already have that with high jumping, where individual performance is rated Vs their height goal.
Give up competitiveness in sports where it isn't needed, and you no longer have people melting down because someone has more muscular mass, or a different gender than expected.
Give up competitiveness in sports and you return to a celebration of the human body and it's physical prowess, instead of childishly fighting for who's best.
Obviously this doesn't work in football, or sports with direct confrontation, that i haven't found a solution yet, maybe during the next shower ?
Weight is the wrong criteria to use. Why not just have it classed by skill level. Enforce equity in school sports by mandating that a meaningful distribution of skill-based leagues are funded. This seems like a very simple solution to me that would address gender-based inequities in general as well as improve sports overall.
Because even matching skill levels, males have greater strength, endurance, cardiovascular capacity, etc, ad nauseam. They have greater glycogen stores, which means they can perform longer, and they recover faster.
Growth plates are different, bone density is different. Muscle density and structure is different.
Just look at the high school boys soccer team that tromped an Olympic women's soccer team.
Women have faster reaction times. They have a different/higher pain threshold. They can bear young.
This is just fundamental biology. Frankly it's baffling to hear your nonsensical arguments.
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.
Testosterone level AND weight. Wait til they find out what happens when you're on hormone blockers.
I say fuck it and let everyone compete together. Ain't no reason men and women couldn't compete with each other in baseball, basketball, hockey, tennis, golf, etc. Even if you believed men are capable of being bigger and supporting more muscle, there's tons of sports where that isn't going to be the most useful thing to win.
How would you know this gender or that gender is better anyway unless you actually let everyone compete together, regardless of what's in their pants or their heart?
Male sports typically don't have a gender requirement. Women just can't compete. This is why women's leagues were created. So they can compete with people around similar physical potential.
Look at chess for example. Anyone can compete in the world open, but you'll see 98~99% men. So, they make a woman's league.
Women have the option of playing in both. This is the same for most sports.
Notably Judit Polgár, probably the strongest female chess player, never competed for the Women's World Championship and only rarely played in women-specific events.
Nah fuck that shit. MMA integrated weight classes and that's sucked. Sumo is the only true martial art, straight up, not even pulling your leg right now
Edit: Yeah, I mean, men are "stronger" pound for pound or whatever, but, we kind of, are idiots when it comes to thinking of sports, if we just suddenly think all sports are about explosive type 1 muscles, or muscular structure, or whatever. That's dumb, that's a brainlet comparison and a brainlet appeal, I would say. If you gain leverage in one direction, you lose it in another. If you gain a bunch of type one muscle fibers, you become a chimpanzee, but also, you gas really, really quickly, and humans are endurance predators that maximize that endurance with fine motor control even in what might be considered gross motor action. Everyone has this conception of sports as being these kinds of, oh, instant action gratification machines, where you just watch some guy get hit in the face really hard, or get tackled, and your monkey brain goes coco mode, and so obviously explosive strength is gonna be good for these displays, so, men are better at sports.
This is not the case. Or at least, not entirely. Sports is more like a long-form storytelling vehicle with many different characters and mindless teams to it. Women can fulfill that role just as easily as men can, in many of the same contexts. If we have sports that are bad for co-ed play, then I would say, we have sports that perhaps need refining.
Which everyone thinks is somehow like, a horrible thing to do, oh no, the sports, they're too sacred, we gotta find the best of the best, but sports have always been and remain subject to change and a ton of different shitty rulesets that everyone always hates. Basketball now, apparently, rewards a bunch of aggressive highlight-reel kinds of play, and apparently the older game used to be more defensive, I say apparently because I dunno. I know nascar has had the opposite trending for quite some time with limiter plates meant to protect drivers and the audience more at the cost of more spectacular crashes and pileups for which the sport might gain more casual viewership. And also not be boring as fuck driving in a circle for like three hours. That's not a sport getting better or worse, that's just some arbitrary cultural shift, a decision made, realistically, because of internal cost-benefit analysis at the behest of a corporation which runs the major league.
We might have the same capacity to integrate sports into a co-ed kind of a deal, if we had the will to do so, but I think the truth of the matter is just that nobody really gives a shit about equality, except for when you bring it up.
Me, I'm a fan of sumo, because fuck weight classes. I wanna see david beat goliath. To me, that's a more compelling casual narrative that can easily be built into a sport. Fairness is highly overrrated, and also doesn't exist, or else every match might as well just be random chance, or end in a draw. Michael phelps is some genetic freak or whatever. Go cry me a river, and then he can swim across it and back. Give me an abstract goal like "get ball through hope" or "throw guy out of ring" and then I don't need any more to it, I'm right there with you.
For team sports you can assign a point value to each player and force the team to deploy a maximum total value, like for armies in WH40K
A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The best ones are thoughts that many people can relate to and they find something funny or interesting in regular stuff.