this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2024
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I think all sports aren't equal in this. The rules for MMA would surely be different than the rules for curling or chess. The people who control sports organizations usually have a life dedicated to their sport, and are in a much better place to make a call about it than congress or randos on the internet. This matter should be handled by them. The fact that anyone without skin in the game cares about this at all is a losing battle.
If sex doesn't matter in curling or chess, then why are there different competitions for men and women in curling and why do women get their own titles in chess?
I do understand the sentiment of what you're saying, but it's not the reality we live in.
I can't speak to curling, but in chess the womens' leagues are there to get women involved. There are no biological advantages at play. This is a 2000 year old game they were excluded from playing until 100 years ago. So someone could put forth a good argument that it's more about gender than physical sex.
There's actually a big different in mens and women's IQ distribution. Men are all over the map, from extremely dumb to extremely smart, but women tend to statistically cluster in the middle with comparatively few outliers. Way less mentally deficient, very few Bobby Fischers.
There are very few women chess players at the top level of the game. The reasons for this are debatable, it could simply be that women are less interested in chess or that women are put off by a male dominated "sport", but I've also heard that men are much more likely to have a specific type of autism that makes them especially suited to doing well at chess.
I'm absolutely open minded to the idea that women can become top level chess players and that women's titles could be made redundant, but I think it's reasonable to see the evidence of this before we say that it's an equal playing field for both sexes. I'd suggest that we should see a decent proportion of women in the top one hundred players of the world, or even the top two hundred and fifty.
Given the current ranking of chess players, it's really hard to say that women have the same chess ability as the men and I absolutely don't want that to come across as sexism, it's just factual.
https://ratings.fide.com/top.phtml
Brain like squirrels, duh.
That's absolutely not what I'm saying and I don't appreciate the insinuation.
Squirrel spotted
The "people who control sports organizations" only made separate leagues for women because some mens' feelings get hurt when they lose to women.
There's no other point to segregating sports by gender, just straight white cis dudes getting bent out of shape by any challenge to their supposed superiority.
I think you mean sports without a physical activity aspect; and even then, sports like chess don't separate males and females (they offer female-only competitions).
What are you on about? There are two HUGE reasons: safety and fairness:
Especially in contact sports, allowing women to play with men is not safe, and would only lead to an environment conducive to women getting injured.
There would be zero professional female athletes (excluding sports that only require mental strategy ofc) if there were no separate leagues for women. They wouldn't perform at even close to the same level as the men, AND would be at increased risk of injury.
I don't know what fantasy world you live in, but here are biological factors that make it necessary to separate men and women in order to have fair competition. Female athletes would be infinitely worse off if forced to try to compete in a single league shared with men, because they aren't be able to.
No, I do not.
Mens egos are so fragile that women were banned from minor league baseball when Jackie Mitchell struck out Babe Ruth and Lou Gherig in 1931.
Figure skating was segregated in 1903 for the same reason, Madge Syers took the silver medal from a man.
The history of womens' sports is rife with examples like this, most sports started out as co-ed and only stayed that way until women started winning.
Figure skating is a perfect example of a performance sport, there isnt any physicality. Also, I think its absolutely ridiculous to claim that Jackie Mitchell striking out an aging Ruth and Gherig in an exhibition match is a woman 'starting to win'.
Which sports do the women often beat the men in?
Ultra-endurance sports such as marathons (women show a statistical advantage over men above the 150-mile mark), Figure Skating (Madge Syers beat two men for the silver medal in 1902, women were then banned from competing until the sport was gender-segregated in 1906), Baseball (Jackie Mitchell struck out Babe Ruth and Lou Gherig in 1931 and was kicked out of the league a month later), Shooting sports (Zhang Shang took the gold in shotgun skeet in 1992, women were't allowed to compete again until the sport was gender-segregated in 2000, and women average higher scores in the rifle category to this day), etc etc.
Shootings an interesting one. Most people familiar with guns notice women take to shooting accurately more easily and quickly than guys (with rifles, not handguns). I've seen this lots personally. My theory involves lower heart rate and lower muscle mass being conducive.
I dont know what they're on about with Mitchell.
This lacks SO much context, it was an EXHIBITION match and she never played in the MLB, she played in the minors. Anyone reading that would assume she struck out two greats in a real game and was banned by the MLB.
There's a lot of truth to she shooting thing, that should absolutely be co-ed.
However, my point still stands: women and men should be separated if the sport has a physical component to its competition. (i.e. any sort of contact.)