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.
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?
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.
Let’s just say it’s a good thing that everything that would make money, does not exist in society.
because lots of (most?) trans people don’t want to be “trans”, they want to fit in with the gender they know they are, and being labeled as not a real man or woman in the normal sports leagues, but a trans man or woman in the trans league, is insulting.
That’s like .001% of athletes and everyone would hate it.
Makes me wonder how many trans people you think there are lol
How many trans people are actually competing?
Are they dominating in the sports they’re competing?
Are their testosterone level similar to their competitors?
I am sincerely asking because I don’t care enough to look it up myself.
The issue is so few trans people are competing that there isn’t enough data to make any claims.
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.
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!
But how will all those people survive with out their million dollar salaries???
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
Not to mention how many sports betting sites will go out of business 😱💸
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.
I feel like it’d probably be better to group based on performance. I don’t see why this wouldn’t work for pretty much all 1v1/FFA/small-team sports/games.
I think all athletes should be forced to use large amounts of testosterone to even the playing field. Let’s see what the human body is really capable of
I’ve talked for years with friends of mine about MLB+Steroids+Aluminum Bats. I want to see someone hit two 700ft homers in a night.
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
I’m sure this would lead to injuries, but some soccer team putting out one goliath and a bunch of rule-qualifiers does sound really funny.
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?
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.
PSA: The preferred term is “transgender people”, not “transgendered people”.
Thanks for the heads up.
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.
Your last sentence made me search up women’s chess… and it exists! That sound like a bold assumption or assertion that women are dumber in chess… Like what? I don’t know why chess has to be gender divided. Maybe it exist to increase representation of women in it but the idea seems stupid. Maybe they have to split it for trans too if its already divided for cis women.
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.
Testosterone is literally a PED.
Its why trans women can compete at a decent level, they’ll still rarely be at the absolute top of their sport.
They have to have their testosterone and other hormones monitored and held to average levels. That will always put them at a disadvantage at elite levels versus women who don’t have the same requirement.
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
Which is completely solved by access to puberty blockers before transitioning.
I did see some article claim that hip to knee ratio didn’t translate to athletic performance, and it was so ridiculous I even downloaded the linked PDF that said it was a study, and it was just a pamphlet repeating the exact same claim with no further source.
I mean, there’s a clear correlation already with women’s sports already. Lots of runners peak early and have worse times by graduating highschool. But it’s literally physics. Wider hips just means less efficient running.
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 mean, the average person is obeese these days…
Transitioning is a huge dedication to making their appearance fit with their identity, it just seems common sense for them to take more pride in their new appearance
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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”.
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 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?
What sports would it work in? Do you think people will care about the best tennis player that weighs 140 pounds? The best 240 pound soccer players? The fastest 130 pound swimmer? No one wants to watch any of that. It barely works for boxing.
All that aside from the fact that you’re still pretty much ruining competitive sports for most cis women by doing it. The reason there’s a female “insert sport here” competitive league to begin with is so many women have a reason to compete and can win. A 150 pound trained athlete will still wipe the floor with a 150 pound female athlete. It’s far, far, from just a weight thing. The Williams sisters were the best female tennis players the world knew, and they went out and proved they couldn’t beat a man that was ranked over 200th. The world champion austrailian female soccer team couldn’t beat a boys highschool team. The fastest woman to ever run the 1500m did it in 3:49. A 5’ 9" guy did it in 3:26.
Weight and size is only a little portion of physical differences.
If there’s so many Trans athletes, why don’t they just have a category of their own?
It isn’t that there’s tons of trans athletes… It’s that even at fairly low levels of sport there are currently more options available to people with disabilities to participate then there are of people of intersex and trans backgrounds. In a lot of cases tracking performances of trans athletes they aren’t dominating. There’s stories of transfem athletes who regularly sit around getting 15th place but after coming in first one time the entire sporting becomes hostile to trans people.
In civil rights discussions there’s a concept of rights of participation. The concept being that being barred from social, political or recreational spheres creates outsized harms on the ability to make the advantageous connections others are given free access to and creates classes of segregation.
There’s also a catch 22 situation. If someone opts to go through a trans puberty instead of a natal one there is no meaningful difference to speak of between the physicality of trans athletes and cis ones. If forced to stay inside their original sex segregated sport not only are trans people being being told in no uncertain terms that society does not accept their new status regardless of parity, they essentially become isolated inside the sporting body. Either you have someone whose body is feminine placed in a sport with only cis males to be compared to or you have a masculine body placed inside a group with all cis women and both will be framed out of being taken at all seriously inside the entire body of that sport. A lot of trans people can’t participate in sport not because they aim to be picked for any of the social leg ups excellence in sport provides… But for any of the regular benefits of just participating.
It creates a fair sting to have a government force your choice of initial puberty that neither you or your doctors and parents thought was a good idea… and then sit back and watch the rest of society constantly punish and isolate you for going through that puberty by then treating you as a logistical social problem for the rest of your life.
Honestly, once they’ve gone through HRT, nearly all, if not all the advantages given by their sex are reversed. I’m not sure how well that works for the F>M athletes, but the M>F athletes are the ones where HRT not working properly would be a problem, and they’re the ones that would unbalance things if not properly transitioned.
Except that isn’t true. Men are more stable due to hip width, their hearts move more blood, their arms and hands are larger/longer, and their lungs hold more air. None of that goes away.
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.
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
Forget weight limits…I think baseball is the perfect place to start.
I’ve watched baseball for 30 years. I don’t like change. I understood the need for an automanic runner on 2nd during the covid years. It made sense for the context of it’s time. That time has ended, and so should that rule. I hate the pitch clock. For me, baseball is sometimes not even about the game. Some men have a hard time admitting to others, or even to themselves that they enjoy the company of other men. But the truth is, we wouldn’t hang out every weekend, get drunk, and watch sports together if we truely didn’t care for each other. So even though you know your buddy cares about you, and you care about him, there still needs to be a game on. Now you’re trying to make the game shorter? I am not a fan. I will happily watch a double header with the boys. We want MORE sports, not LESS.
I’m also not a fan of the sensitivity of how balks are called now. Balks used to be so rare, that I had to be explained at age 19 what just happened when I saw one. This after watching baseball for 9 year already. These days it seems like EVERY game has a balk. Sometimes it’s just a twitch of the leg, with no pitching gesture. In NO WAY can some of these balks be realistically interpreted as an intentional fake out pitch movement.
As you can see, I’m a grumpy old set in my ways grey haired curmudgeon. However, even I wouldn’t even mind at all if women played with men. If they can hit a 97 mph fastball, and beat out the throw to home, why WOULDN’T you want them on their team?
The first one to break that barrier would be just as iconic as Jackie Robinson. At least you would THINK so. The reality of the situation is, women HAVE played on official MLB teams. The fact that I don’t remember their names or their decades that they played is only testiment to how unfairly they were viewed. If MLB wants to promote diversity, and progressive views, we get Jackie Robinson and Larry Dolby. When the MLB wants to kill the idea, you never hear a word about it officially from them. Instead you only hear about it on youtube videos about obscure MLB facts.
The point is, on a regular basis, I would still support competitive women playing on every team. There are some truely crappy players in the MLB (looking at you, Bartolo Colon), and if they get replaced with better playing women, then the MLB as a whole is stronger for it.
…that being said, women and men should NOT play hockey together. It just wouldn’t be right.
