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.

    • EGG_CREAM@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      3 months ago

      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.

      1 - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9331831/

      • GreyBeard@lemmy.one
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        0
        ·
        3 months ago

        I could train as hard as possible, for years, and I promise you I couldn’t beat a single woman in the WNBA on a 1 on 1 game. I think it is important to remember, that yes, statically, men have an advantage, but each individual is unique. I think it would make more sense 1. Remove the profit motive from sports. 2. Have leagues based on skill, not gender. Of course, that will never happen. Match making in video games is a clear example of how it can work. If I was really into any competitive game, every time I played I’d be playing against people that were roughly equal to me. I suppose that is harder to do in team sports though, especially when there is money involved for the players.

        • Welt@lazysoci.al
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          0
          ·
          3 months ago

          I could train as hard as possible, for years, and I promise you I couldn’t beat a single woman in the WNBA on a 1 on 1 game.

          Yeah, but we both know that’s because you’re a short-ass weakling, be honest.

  • daltotron@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    edit-2
    3 months ago

    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.

    • Welt@lazysoci.al
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      3 months ago

      Sumo’s actually a crock of shit, they predicted it in Freakonomics and it was revealed a few years later, I was living in Japan at the time and found it very trippy. I still like watching fat men in nappies with waxed hairstyles throwing salt around a clay circle then trying to push each other out of it though.

      • daltotron@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        0
        ·
        3 months ago

        I still like watching fat men in nappies with waxed hairstyles throwing salt around a clay circle then trying to push each other out of it though.

        Yeah see that’s why I can’t ever take anyone’s opinion on it seriously, because they just say shit like this. It’s like, only a step away from “oh Americans should be good at sumo because Americans are all fat right and you just need to be fat and they wear diapers right?”. Which itself is about two steps away from just like, “Haha look at the funny fat men and how fat they are, what freaks for being fat.”, which is an incredibly depressing sentiment. It’s like calling baseball boring. I mean yeah, it is, but obviously, baseball fans will hate it if you say that, because it being boring as fuck is kind of the point of the sport. If you watch the matches you can tell pretty easily that most of them aren’t faked.

        Nah, man, it’s a grappling art with a pretty large amount of universal applicability and no real weight classes, more similar to the conventional folk wrestling styles that many different cultures have. Mongolian jacket wrestling, mud wrestling, lots of European countries even have folk wrestling styles that they don’t care about too much anymore. It’s more similar to Judo, or something, and most people don’t question the efficacy or reality of Judo. American folk wrestling became rough-and-tumble fighting, and also became carnie circus shit right after the civil war, and then spread around everywhere until the Japanese decided to just kind of make it real with shooto and basically start MMA as we know it today, arguably with some interference from Brazilian Vale Tudo guys. The UFC’s involvement mostly being tenuous carnie shit. Go watch like the first three or four UFC’s, it’s basically garbage.

        The more complicated download on the match fixing that came about in sumo is that 14 wrestlers were convicted, some stable masters. The sport as a whole, as with many sports in Japan, has a bunch of Yakuza involvement and toxic hazing and other bullshit. There’s already a Wikipedia link on it. Hakusho just got massively demoted like last year because some jackass in his stable was found to be hazing newcomers and haranguing people for money. I dunno, somehow I’m not gonna call all boxing rigged just because every now and again they find out that some high profile match was rigged due to the nature of the sport’s overarching regulatory structure.

        • Welt@lazysoci.al
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          0
          arrow-down
          1
          ·
          3 months ago

          Obviously there’s technique to it, it wouldn’t have survived as a competitive martial art otherwise. But the Japanese watch sumo for cultural reasons rather than because of their passion for the technique. It has a place in modern culture that links Japanese people to their deep-seated traditions. It’s like someone uninterested in sport knowing who’s playing on a given weekend, so they can comment on it as a neutral topic of discussion while getting their hair cut.

          Doesn’t mean that it’s not a crock of shit. And I’m not saying boxing isn’t exactly the same either. Sumo is just more of a traditional practice akin to ritual than it is to actual sport or martial art. But I don’t know why I’m bothering to reply, since apparently none of this matters to you because your opening sentence demonstrates you don’t know how to structure an argument without alienating your interlocutor.

  • xenomor@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    3 months ago

    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.

    • BearOfaTime@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      0
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      3 months ago

      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.

      • xenomor@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        edit-2
        3 months ago

        I literally cannot understand the argument that you’re making. People with different physiological characteristics are not going to have the same skill levels. Nothing you listed argues against my proposal. All the physiological advantages that you listed are fine. Some females may be better than some males at some tasks and vice versa. Why not let them compete against each other. Seems like creating a larger pool of competitive athletes would improve any sport. Carving out leagues that cater to different capability levels would open opportunities for more people. I’m proposing that we have more, better, more competitive and exciting sports. What exactly are you objecting to?

    • givesomefucks@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      3 months ago

      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.

      • Emerald@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        3 months ago

        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

      • Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        edit-2
        3 months ago

        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”.

      • Chloë (she/her)@lemmy.blahaj.zone
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        0
        ·
        3 months ago

        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.

        • givesomefucks@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          0
          ·
          edit-2
          3 months ago

          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.

          • kava@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            0
            ·
            edit-2
            3 months ago

            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.

            • zbyte64@awful.systems
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              1
              ·
              edit-2
              3 months ago

              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.

              • kava@lemmy.world
                link
                fedilink
                arrow-up
                0
                ·
                3 months ago

                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.

                • zbyte64@awful.systems
                  link
                  fedilink
                  arrow-up
                  1
                  ·
                  3 months ago

                  Amazing how one can dismiss another’s personal experience by simply insisting a different scenario happened.

  • doingthestuff@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    0
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    3 months ago

    Just create a trans league. Trans men and trans women all in the same league. Id watch that shit, it would make money. So why don’t we have this yet?

    • Drivebyhaiku@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      3 months ago

      Segregated sports based on a demographic like that isn’t as trans affirming as you would think… My gut reaction as a trans person is about the same aversion I imagine a person of color would experience if a white person tried to put forward a “People of Color sport league”.

      Ditching us all into a new category like we’re quarantined in sport away from other athletes because we’re implicitly not cis… Isn’t something I would appreciate.

      • kava@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        0
        ·
        3 months ago

        The unfortunate reality is that men are much better at women at sports. This is why we have women leagues. There are pronounced biological differences that would essentially prevent women from competing if everything was one league.

        MTF trans, because they were born male, have all of these advantages. They can take hormone blockers / estrogen pills and that reduces some of the advantage. But not all.

        So it results in a MTF trans being a) weaker than males and b) stronger than females

        What other solution except a trans league would be just to all parties involved?

        • zbyte64@awful.systems
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          3 months ago

          Hormones aren’t binary though, some men are born with higher T levels than others. And some women have bigger bones than some men. If leveling the “hormone” advantage is desired, then drug test all participants and rank them that way.

          • kava@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            0
            ·
            3 months ago

            Virtually all men with functioning testicles have higher T than all women. This is because testicles produce T at 10-50x the rate of ovaries.

            Men going through puberty see permanent changes to the body. You cannot undo this. It gives MTF permanent advantages compared to women.

            They are stronger than women on average even after years of being on estrogen.

            As for the variance naturally seen, you’re right. But consider this

            Who ends up becoming a top athlete? The very best, right? So they are already near the top of the bell curve. So when you compare athletes, you’re not pulling random samples from the entire population.

            You’re pulling a random sample from the people with highest T, densest bones, highest rate of fast twitch muscles, etc.

            The male maximum and the female maximum is vastly different. This is why we see such a massive difference in performance.

            Presence of hormones currently in the blood does not entirely measure this.

            • zbyte64@awful.systems
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              0
              ·
              3 months ago

              You’re pulling a random sample from the people with highest T, densest bones, highest rate of fast twitch muscles, etc.

              Yeah, isn’t that the point? I mean you are talking averages but OP is talking about how to handle the outliers (trans folk).

        • Drivebyhaiku@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          0
          ·
          3 months ago

          I have pointed out to people before that trans women athletes in practice tend to not outperform all women in the sport. The data we have puts them as no more competitive as women with naturally high testosterone and depending on sport can actually be at a disadvantage…

          But there’s another underlying assumption. You assume your athlete went through masculinizing puberty first and then a female puberty second. If you skip that first step then you don’t see major differences of frame, weight distribution or muscle mass.

          Where this stings is that laws are forcing people to go through that first puberty regardless of the wishes of the paitent, the patients families, the paitents doctors and the concensus of the medical associations of those doctors… And then the government sits back and demonizes those people based on their physicality as a logistical social problem for the rest of their lives and ostracizes them based on this logic.

          Athletes squew young. If you allowed through trans athletes who went through the transition process young enough or looked at sport with trans populations and statistically assessed whether any excessive advantage was afforded and allow in those instances where none was found you could solve for any statistical stand out issues within a decade…

          But no, we are having this inane conversation because it suits some government parties to make people feel that trans people are a threat or a problem that must be stopped and that there is zero reasonable inclusion policies.

          • kava@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            0
            ·
            edit-2
            3 months ago

            This is why my personal opinion is we should allow trans athletes if they didn’t go through male puberty. If they did, sorry you’re out. If they didn’t, it’s OK.

            And you’re right not all mtf athletes are going to end up at the top echelon but given enough time statistically speaking they will be drastically overrepresented.

            Edit: also the data is quite clear trans women are stronger, have more lung capacity, etc even 5+ years into hormone therapy. Iirc I even saw 10+ years on a paper once

            But the ones that went through male puberty. I think this is why we should try and find gender dysphoria earlier and treat b4 puberty. It’s much more effective the younger you start

            Of course issue is you don’t want to be too broad with diagnosis because of false positives and the conservatives going nuts. So it’s a difficult thing to do. Maybe we will identify what causes gender dysphoria some day and that will help