Separating Sports by Sex Doesn’t Make Sense
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Show me a scientific survey that proves the average girl is just as strong and athletic as the average boy. If you can't, then you're doing a disservice to the girls by putting them into a genderless field that disadvantages them by ignoring reality.
Just look at world records in track and field by gender. Usain Bolt is almost a full second faster in the 100 meter than any woman *ever*. 18 and under males in high school competitions routinely beat women all time world records.
It's obvious that there are very few women that can compete successfully in a genderless athletic arena. So in what way would eliminating gender in sports be fair or beneficial to women? The net effect would be to deny them the opportunity to compete against their most obvious, logical and natural peers.
Absent some sort of gender based quota system, genderless athletics would deny a lot of women the opportunity to participate at all. Is this really the goal?
Tom Brady is the ultimate example of being thoroughly unexceptional physically yet transcending his sport via mental acumen. But even for normal players it’s possible to have a wide range of roles and body types working together: hockey can have small guys and big guys play together and somehow they each contribute in their own way.
You mention the idea of “most obvious, logical and natural peers”, but from a first principles perspective that would immediately lead one to find peers who produce similar outputs during play regardless of inputs. Or should we make basketball teams solely of the tallest kids in a school regardless of their level of athleticism because that seems more logical?
Ultimately it seems like there’s a lot of confirmation bias going on that propagates the status quo and discards consistent counterexamples as black swans. I can easily imagine a different world where people can compete at the level they feel is the right intensity/skill/etc for themselves (or as judged by others via fair tryouts). Boys already do this with house/travel or intramural/club/varsity and no one worries that the ones who aren’t genetic lottery winners are going to get pummeled or embarrassed or whatever. You would just need to field as many teams as there as interested players, regardless of sex, and you’d have the same level of opportunity for everyone.
Badminton anyone? Oh, wait ... men have an advantage there too because they can jump higher.
Boys already do this with house/travel or intramural/club/varsity and no one worries that the ones who aren’t genetic lottery winners are going to get pummeled or embarrassed or whatever.
For a multitude of reasons, most teams beyond grade school have tryouts with limits on team size. They are not open to just anyone who shows up. Most who aren't genetic lottery winners never try out and if they do, they never make the team in most cases. The parents are the first level of responsibility for this.
Most parents understand it's pointless at best and counterproductive at worst to enroll your kid in a sport that he lacks the ability to be competitive in.
You would just need to field as many teams as there as interested players, regardless of sex, and you’d have the same level of opportunity for everyone.
So college football for example will be open to anyone "interested"?
How about someone who is paraplegic? Can he make the team too just because he's "interested"?
Who pays for the expense of all this dead weight on the teams?
Clearly this is impractical bunk that is never going to happen in reality. "Sport for all" is meaningless and empty and will most likely result in "sport for none".
Apologies if my 0-minute edit was too slow (I always find minor issues in my comments after submission; the HN comment box is not optimized for readability), but I immediately added "or as judged by others via fair tryouts". But even without the tryouts qualifier, I feel that was _heavily implied_ by my emphasis on skill-level/competitiveness over all else. Tryouts very frequently are open to anyone who shows up, and many house/intramural programs don't have tryouts at all and are just lottery-assigned.
> Most parents know it's pointless to enroll your kid in a sport that he lacks the ability to be competitive in
By volume, house and intramural teams (when they exist) necessarily make up the bulk of teams at each of their respective levels: a college may have 2 varsity soccer teams but 40 intramural teams. Are you discounting the value of sports for non-elite players? Should their parents have told them to give it up long ago because they weren't going to the show? Statistically 0% of people play pro sports, so it really doesn't seem like they are the ones we should be worrying about when it comes to these discussions. People talk about the value of sports for building work ethic, team skills, etc, and that is by far the major reason people care about youth sports policies in general. And truly 0% of women play in top leagues like the NFL or NBA already, so your concern of "deny[ing] a lot of women the opportunity to participate at all" at that level is already reality; how could any different system possibly be worse for them?
> So college football for example will be open to anyone interested?
College/pro football is full of stories of famous walk-ons who showed up unannounced and proved they were good enough. I suppose they should've known better as well, for not fitting into the "obvious, logical and natural" progression of having been a recruited Texas high school star since on average they weren't going to be good enough. Similar are the basketball players who transition to tight end and star despite _having never played football before_. Skill/competitiveness is the only thing that matters in the end.
> How about someone who is paraplegic? Can he make the team too?
Can he pass the tryout? Would you have told Shaquem Griffin that you're cutting him because on paper a linebacker missing a hand couldn't possibly be good enough? Jason Pierre-Paul didn't seem to have a problem finding a spot for his Super Bowl ring despite his missing fingers. Again, skill/competitiveness is the only thing that matters.
> Who pays for the expense of all this dead weight on the teams?
When I said as many teams as necessary, I was trying to point out that if you went from 2 sex-divided varsity teams to one combined varsity team there would definitely be less opportunity for everyone because there would be fewer inter-mural teams overall. But just like English pro soccer can have EPL, EFL, etc, colleges could figure out a similar multi-tiered system (some teams/sports already have "second teams", JV in high school, A/B/C travel leagues, and similar). Same number of teams should cost the same, no? And outside of the varsity college sports (which are hugely distorted financially for lots of reasons), players are the ones paying anyway.
> Implementing "sport for all" will most likely result in "sport for none".
Charitably this is defeatist, but uncharitably it feels like blowing everything up is better than diversity. Some men would definitely not make a team they previously would've as they get displaced by more skilled/competitive women, especially in early teen years when girls get taller and stronger sooner than most boys. I'd happily wager that such mixed competition would result in the development of even more equal competition because playing at higher levels is the best way to improve yourself (like when a kid gets to play up an age-level and skyrockets ahead of their age-group peers). I fail to see how this could be bad in any way: it will continue to elevate elite athletes through the ranks while also providing the same opportunity for the non-elites to play their apparently-unfulfilling games, just with slightly different team make-ups. But with the major improvement that we wouldn't be signaling to half of the population that they are de-facto second-class athletes.
*We* don't have to signal anything --- mother nature has already taken care of that for the most part. And nothing *we* can do will hide the full reality of it.
Well, the examples in the article were people who were told they couldn't compete in a sport, because of their gender (i.e. women can't wrestle) not combining seperate gender categories within a sport, so I think they're arguing against women being denied the opportunity to participate at all.
I do not understand why this is something that must be proven.
> It's obvious that there are very few women that can compete successfully in a genderless athletic arena.
Respectfully, is it? Or do we assume this to be the case?