No more men’s and women’s league, no more “gender eligibility” requirements, a common dresscode, same standards and rules for all.
Edit: since it looks like people missing the word let: the suggestion isn’t to force desegregation. It’s to allow it or even make it the default. Someone else made a good suggestion: segregate by attributes specific to the sport. In boxing it’s weight class, in basketball it could be height, in biking it could even be doped and non doped. Sex and gender need not be the very first thing to segregate by.
Same dress code, standards and rules absolutely - regardless if competition is split or not.
Same competition definitely for some sports - chess and shooting come to mind.More physical sports - I’m undecided there. I’d support everyone competing together if for example weight categories are introduced. You don’t want people of widely different physical build competing together, it’s not fun either to watch or play.
Yes, let’s have a bunch of blokes beating the shit out of women in boxing. What could possibly go wrong?
I remember the Brit Awards scrapping gendered awards and putting everyone in the same category. The problem was, the only ones nominated turned out to all be men.
Combat sports already have weight classes, it’s not like you’d be putting a man up against a woman he has 30 cm and 50 kg over. If you’ve got people of similar size and ability, it doesn’t seem to me like their sex or gender matters. They all went in there expecting to both hit and get hit.
So if a woman was in the same weight class as Mike Tyson, you think they should be allowed to fight each other? And you think this would be a good look?
These hamfisted attempts at equality are actually the complete opposite.
No, men and women are not physically equal.
Why does that matter? Men also have divisions and leagues. Team in the top leagues will destroy the leagues at the bottom.
why does it matter?
Should we stop splitting sports by gender?
It’s inherently boring to watch sports competitions between unequally capable people, and there is a natural difference in that that can be clearly attributed to gender.
I admire your thought of equality but we need to talk about the differences in physique in genders as well if we wanna discuss this.
Don’t dismiss this claim, scientifically debunk it or share why not and how you come to this conclusion.
Of course people are differently capable, that why we have divisions, leagues, weight classes, and so on, even in the same sex. Why would that change when they all compete together?
“Hey! Do you want to watch division 7 soccer? They have a woman on the team!”
Hardly inspirational to girls everywhere. Whereas whenever I’ve caught the Canadian women’s soccer team, it’s usually at a pretty full arena with lots of girls teams there stoked to watch. I would never take that away from them.
Why do you assume they’ll be in the 7th division? And do you assume it will be the case for all sports?
No, it’s not attributed to gender. It is attributed to sex. Sorry to be pedantic but we live in a world where that distinction is very important for education purposes.
Men and men aren’t physically equal. Maybe basketball should have a rule that everyone in the team has to be the same height. Can’t have anyone with a physical advantage over anyone else.
Not if you value women participating in sports.
Why? Weight classes, leauges, and divisions won’t help?
Most professional sports in the United States don’t have any policies against women being in the sport. NBA, Football, Baseball, Hockey, etc.
None of them exclude women from playing in the professional leagues. Baseball did briefly in the middle of the 1900s, but that policy was reversed
It’s just that, for these sports, the best women in the game have not yet been better than the worst men in the game. A woman and a man of equal height and weight are still not generally physically equal. Muscle composition and growth, bone structure, etc. mean that on average, women are less strong and less explosive than men, and most popular sports emphasize those attributes.
WNBA teams would often scrimmage against male pick-up basketball players for practice, and they would also often lose. These were just random guys in the area, many of whom didn’t even play often.
The US Women’s National Team played against FC Dallas’s under-15 boys squad and lost 5-2. That USWNT went on to win the Olympics and the women’s World Cup. The Australian women’s team lost to U15 boys 3-0 and again to another U15 boys team 7-0; Arsenal’s woman’s team lost 5-0 to a U15 boys club; the professional squad Athletic Feminino in Spain lost to a U16 boys squad 6-0; and there are many, many more examples.
There is some research on evolutionary theory specifically about the vast differences in upper-body strength: “But even with roughly uniform levels of fitness, the males’ average power during a punching motion was 162% greater than females’, with the least-powerful man still stronger than the most powerful woman. Such a distinction between genders, Carrier says, develops with time and with purpose.”
There are very few sports where this would be feasible, and most if not all those sports are not well-watched and make very little money: shooting, archery, ultra-marathons come first to mind.
Yeah, also weight categories in fighting sports are body shaming
I wish they could be split by something more meaningful like muscle mass or weight. But maybe we don’t have the technology yet to come up with new categories. This split will likely correlate with gender anyway but it would give people on either end a chance to compete with others in their level
