There are physical differences in body structures between men and women, so that would be unfair.
on a tangent, gymnastics with music is much more watchable
Gender is just one way to segment the population in groups. I agree it makes things more fair. Just like weight groups do. But with the challenges around classifying transsexuals and females born with naturally high testosterone, it's not always perfect.
At some point, if we want to continue classifying by gender, we should have 2 groups: "women" and "others". With a very opinionated and scoped definition of female. Because grouping by gender is, ultimately, designed to protect women.
Yeah, I don’t think we should design policy around edge cases. Is it worse to make the exceedingly rare instance of a transgender gymnast select a division or to call the vast, vast majority of gymnasts an “other”? Female divisions exist to allow competition within the limits of their biological capabilities, and that’s a good thing. I think the classic example of how Serena Williams is outranked by most college male tennis players is an example of why those limits need to be supported. The whole thing about transgender women competing is thorny, but it can’t be as simple as someone’s identity determining whether they get to disrupt that protected competitive class. Physical traits must be adequately considered. Even that seems very hard to do fairly. Is it fair to only let transgender women compete against biological females if they rate poorer than some female top tier? If they rate higher than the top tier, is it appropriate to let them compete? IDK, but I’m in favor of sober approaches to these question rather than brow-beating from the self righteous.
Gender is one of the most predictive classification in social sciences, even taking into account extreme outliers like the 0.1% (at most) of transgender individuals.
There are physical differences in body structure between any two individuals. Michael Phelps has long arms. Is it not unfair that someone born with short arms has to compete against him?
In highly competitive physical sports there would no woman at all in the olympics for example.
The 100m dash woman world record has disputed legality and sits at 10.49s. That is 6339 fastest recorded time for men.
Not having gender separated competition would probably decimate female sport participation in quite a lot of domains.
The short armed argument that you actually raise is more interesting. There are weight classes in boxing, and there could probably be arm length classes in swimming as well, but other physical differentiator that would take the place of arm length. I'm not really able to conclude on anything, but have feeling that the physical and cultural gender difference is large and important enough that it is prioritized, while arm length for instance is not.
One could try handicapping as is done in horse racing to even things out.
See https://www.britishhorseracing.com/about/handicapping/
"Around 60% of all of the races run in Britain each year are handicaps. These are races where the Handicappers try to give each horse an equal chance of winning by allocating them different weights.
The highest rated (or ‘best’) horse in the race is given the highest weight to carry; and then inferior horses will carry lower weights.
For most owners, handicaps offer their best chance of winning a race. Without them, the top horses would almost always win and there would be no point in owning anything other than a top horse."
This might make sense in gambling, but I don’t see how it applies to the Olympics. I’m sure I (a non-runner) could beat Olympic runners in a race if they hade 150 pound vests on, but why is that interesting?
Now obviously that’s a dumb example, but why would it be interesting to see olympic sprinters beat Usain Bolt in a sprint if Bolt has a 10 pound vest on? I feel like the challenge at that point is determining how much to handicap everyone, and all the results would tell you is if you handicapped them correctly or not.
> In highly competitive physical sports there be would no woman at all in the olympics for example.
In (edit: some) highly competitive physical sports there would be no person below median height at all in the olympics for example.
We can slice and dice all sorts of extremely visible inborn characteristics that will over time hopefully have just as much cultural relevance as sex or gender, as the cultural relevance of sex and gender decreases [0]. As that happens, we’re going to have to reevaluate what we culturally look for in sports. At the amateur level, hopefully this isn’t too hard, but I have no idea whether it will make professional sports more or less accessible.
[0] While height is mostly out of your control, it’s still unclear which of the kids in tryout team will end up tall enough to compete. That’s where sex and gender are more of a clear split, because you know most of the kids on the girls team won’t end up on a men’s team, so the split remains stable as they grow up.
"In highly competitive physical sports there would be no person below median height at all in the olympics for example."
That's not true for all sports. Gymnastics is highly physical and favors short people. Likewise, wrestling and Judo favor people who are short for their weight.
I do think height classes would make sense in basketball though, just as we have weight classes in combat sports.
I don't think "fair" is a good word for it (although I know the GP used it.) The reason we have a special women's category is because half the population are women, and they would be almost entirely excluded from high level sport as a group if expected to compete against the highest ranking men.
The categories of world-class sport should really be "women" and "everyone." If women want to (and have the physical ability to) compete in "Men's" sports, they should always be allowed to - unless they dominate in a particular sport, in which case a special exclusionary men's version should be created.
That being said, we do have both the Special Olympics and an enormous number sports organizations of segregated by age and geographic location. You can start a swimming championship segregated by arm length, but people probably won't like it enough to watch, which is the real point. It's entertainment. Women's tennis is better to me because women don't serve/hit as hard, therefore more returns and longer exchanges. That's got nothing to do with "fairness."
Agree. I usually don't care about gymnastic, but if i have to choose, i'd watch women gymnasts over men, and all my friends (men or women) would too, because the music make it look like a dance, an artistic performance, whereas men gymnast feels like a competition of strength and skill, with no "art" component. I know it isn't true, but reason loose to feelings all the time (sadly for all of us). I think this is actually disavantageous for men gymnasts in the long run tbh.
I don't see how it's irrational to find women's gymnastics more interesting and artistic. You can do that without making a judgment on the difficulty or superiority of one over the other.
Music that one of the chess players would deeply loathe? Deliciously evil. I love it.
Would be the kind of supervillain move than everybody expects from a chess master. Petting cats should be also encouraged as a part of chess competitions. Lets give viewers what they want.
