the discourse around gender segregation in sports drives me nuts
"actually, most sports became segregated because a woman beat a man and the men got mad" cool, do you have a source or are you just regurgitating an anecdote you heard because it makes you feel validated?
"there's no biological or physiological basis for men to perform better than women in any sports" cool, have you ever been seriously involved in any sport of any type? have you ever experienced, say, walking into the gym and outbenching a serious female lifter of the same height and weight on your first day? have you ever experienced wrestling with a woman of a similar height and weight and experience and realising how much *easier* it is to overpower her than it would be one of the guys in your class? Because I've experienced both of those and things like them, many times.
"oh, at school there was this one girl who could beat all the boys with her hands tied behind her back" cool, do you think that a random collection of highschool kids is a representative sample without any outliers? do you understand what an anecdote is?
"oh, but women are taught to eat less and exercise less and stay small and quiet" cool, there's probably some truth in that, broadly speaking. do you think that possibly applies at all to serious athletes, many of whom were scouted when they were knee high to a grasshopper and put into serious training programs designed to maximise their chances of being a competitor?
"they should just segregate by height/weight/ability/etc." cool, do you understand that they already do this? do you realise that women have more essential visceral fat, and a female athlete in peak condition has something like 15-20% bodyfat compared to a male athlete's 8-12%, putting a female athlete at an objective disadvantage compared to a male athlete of equal height and weight? do you understand that the muscles of the upper body are much more testosterone-dependent than the muscles of the lower body? do you understand that no woman has ever been able to perform the iron cross in gymnastics, despite it being a "B-grade" skill in mens gymnastics?
"women only don't win because they're not allowed to compete with the men" cool, do you realise how completely divorced from reality this is? Most sports have the figures as a matter of public record, for christ's sake, you can very easily look at the records and say "hmm, 20 is lower than 22". And if you desegregate sports and force the women to compete with the men, the women who were previously winning their divisionsâeven world champions!âjust start losing, and quit their sport because they'll never be competitive, and then young girls don't get inspired to get into sports and nobody wants to foster their talents, and now you just have no women in sports at all!
idk it just really bugs me. it's not un-feminist to acknowledge these well-documented physical differences, and even if you do take the (absurd) stance that they're entirely due to social factors, desegregating sports would be just about the worst thing that you could do for women in sports.
Itâs kinda nuts how apparently nobody can remember that Title IX was a feminist movement win.
responding to prev tags:
with sports like this, it's still often desirable to segregate, depending on the gender demographics of the sport in question. you want the less-represented gender to have its own league, because that league will be easier on account of it having less competition, which will help attract more competitors of that gender to the sport. note that this should be women's and open (or theoretically men's and open, for a female-dominated sport), not men's and women's; the larger and more competitive league should be open to competitors of all genders.
chess is the best example: there have only been about three women ranked in the worldwide top 100 chess players ever, despite there being no physiological basis for disparate performance between genders. why? sociological and cultural reasons; the female talent pool for chess is tragically small because girls don't get interested in the game and parents/teachers/etc. are less likely to notice and foster female talent. so by having women's leagues, not only do we show women that they can play chess and provide an incentive for mentors to look for female talent, we also create a nicer and more welcoming competitive environment for girls, especially young girls (going to a competition is scary enough even before you take into account the specific type of male personality that chess seems to attract); and we also allow the best female players to win titles, recognition, accolades, visibility instead of simply being someone in the top 100 or top 1000; and the women's chess world champion can become a hero for little girls who might never have thought about playing chess otherwise.
that said, from a brief google target shooting seems like it could be a model case for full desegregation in sports (something like a 60/40 split in gender representation favouring men, and a 45/55 split in world record holders favouring women, according to the ISSF website). I know fuckall about target shooting and the culture thereof so I don't want to make any strong claims about it, but if there's any sport that could be desegregated without harming female competitors, it would be something with stats like that.
