How important is it that sports need to be separated by sex or gender? Why not do what they do in boxing?

[herdingcatss]

Hear me out.. I'm all for inclusion and diversity as a whole. but I'm not in favour of transwomen taking part in women's sports as they do have unfair physical advantages etc etc. They even play the same game differently (google transwoman volleyball player). I do get that and believe that if you have sports separated by physical biology than that is what it should be, and gender identity shouldn't come into it.

But when it comes to team sports, surely there could be a new approach that could help solve the issue of including transwomen and where to put them? Otherwise the option is to have them muscle their way into women's sports which is obvs unfair to women, and it's not realistic to have lots of separate teams to cater for different identities.

Personally, I think that we should think about doing away with separating team sports by sex or gender altogether for a new approach - for example maybe do what they do in boxing - ie: match people by weight and/or skill to compete with each other, or to work together in a team. TBH I don't know much about boxing so i could be wrong, but from what I understand, they match players in terms of whether they're lightweight, middleweight or heavyweight, to make it equal (I know boxing is still separated by sex but this is why I'm focusing on teams instead).

If we have teams set up for the same weight category, then they have the option of focusing on obtaining the skills they need as a whole, and can bring in people based on their strongest skills in the game, whether they are men, women, trans etc. Then teams from the same categories could play each other in tournaments etc and it wouldn't matter what gender/sex they are made up of.

So basically it's an overhaul to the way traditional sports is run. But it's just an idea as I think we need a new way of looking at sports in society, to move the subject on, as the discussion seems to be at a stalemate at the moment with little progress going on imo. It's tiring!

Anyway do you think this is a potential solution to the issue? Or have I missed something major? I don't play sports but if anyone does, I'd love to know what you think of this approach, and whether mixed teams of equal weights would work instead of being based on biology (or gender).

Hmm one man’s ‘progress’ is another woman’s ‘crossing my boundaries’.

@herdingcatss your ‘helpful’ contribution is not useful, probably because you don’t know enough about sport. HTH

Because men and it seems a fair few women just can't cope with or bear the thought that men can't have everything they want and more.

Misogyny runs deep.

Other important groups who need to be included more in sport and exercise are middle aged and older women , asylum seekers and refugees and homeless people.

Absolutely. Let's not forget people with disabilities, and people living with chronic conditions where exercise and connections with people that joining in with sports clubs brings mean a better quality of life.

Would you put a 15 stone muscular male against a woman the same weight who probably looks like Dawn French?

The biggest difference is muscle ratio - women are not as muscular as men. Fact

What an utterly ridiculous idea. My DH and I have both done a white collar boxing bout recently. Both same height, similar weight. I trained hard and was considered to be a heavy hitter for a female, he would have destroyed me. In boxing clubs men are never allowed to hit women (we can use them for practice but not allowed vice versa).

My son does judo competitively.

He spars with girls in training sessions but never full throttle and absolutely doesn't compete with them.

Does no one understand basic biology and difference between sexes anymore?

Like serious wtf?!

It's not just hormones. It's not just size or weight. Everything is different. Men have more quick twitch fibers in their muscles making them faster and stronger even with the same size. They have larger hearts and lungs so they get more oxygen. Their bone density is also larger.

When a man tackles or hits a woman the woman is 40% more likely not just to get hurt, but to get seriously and permanently hurt.

It's why for DECADES men were told not to punch women even if the woman punched him because they can break her skull easily and kill her.

I am getting so angry about how stupid society is becoming. I just can't...

Oh they know @OneMorePlant they just don't fucking care because it all about men not having hurty feels 'cos they can't do something they want to do.

It confirms, if ever confirmation were needed, just how low on the scale women are.

No, this is why I specified team sports, not one on one like boxing matches. I know it's dangerous for a man to fight a woman, regardless of size and not advocating it at all.

The point I raised about boxing was about the principle of the idea of splitting by weight), not the actual sport itself.

Thank you to everyone for your comments, which I will be reading and responding to where possible. I only posted last night and haven't had time to catch up on this thread til now.

I don't know if progress is mixed sex sports teams, i was just putting an idea out there. It could well not be,

When I say tiring, I didn't mean physically! I meant mentally, as I follow the topic a lot on twitter. It comes up so so much so it's something I just wondered about, finding a way forward on this,

What is Hth?

The way forward is to keep sport segregated by sex as it is now and as Sports Bodies are now reiterating.

Why do you think there has to be a different way forward? You've admitted you don't play sport and are clueless about sport including team sport which your idea clearly shows, so why?

I wouldn't want that either. That's why I was thinking of teams as a whole. i don't think this is something that would work for every type of sport or team either but I was just wondering about the concept of separating people by weight/size as seen in boxing, not necessarily boxing itself.

"ie: match people by weight and/or skill to compete with each other"

You don't know anything about sports, do you?

Ok my lack of knowledge on actual sports and games is one thing, and fair enough to point that out, but I'm not completely oblivious, just because I don't play anything in a team or something. You can still have an opinion or idea about something (even if half-baked as mine clearly is!) especially if there is a social impact on society as a whole, which is of more interest to me tbh, not specific sports itself. That's where I'm coming from.

Your lack of knowledge on sports does not matter. Your lack of knowledge about the body you inhabit is what is worrying.

The social impact of all this is that women with half a brain have realised how little women matter and how much men hate us.

I'm not sure where the 17 has come from??

I was just taking the concept of it from boxing. I definitely don;t think men and women should fight each other in boxing. I should have made that clear in my original post.

@OP What about people who’s religion stops them playing sport with the opposite sex. Like the 6.5% Muslims?

Not just handicap races, fillies and mares get a weight allowance in graded races as well ( that is races where everyone carries the same weight, usually championship races). There are also mares only races in both flat and jumps racing. And racing is not ( at least intentionally) a contact sport.

The three principles that have been proposed: fairness, safety, and inclusion should all be thought about for any particular proposal to alter sex categories in sports.

It's common to see the first two supporting keeping sex segregation as it is in sports while inclusion is seen as supporting changing the basis for segregation from sex to an abstract gender identity.

This sets inclusion against fairness and safety when we discuss women's sports, but it would also cause the same outcome for paralympics if able-bodied people argued that they identify as disabled and should be allowed to compete with people who have disabilities.

And that suggests to me that we shouldn't use 'inclusion' to dismantle the sex categories in sports, because those categories are actually essential for true inclusion: Without them women and girls will have a strong incentive to quit competitive sports because their categories will be mixed sex ones, and they will have very small changes of ever getting on the podium or earning the money awards some races now have.

I'd argue that all three principles support keeping the sex-based categories sex-based. How to address transgender sports is a separate issue from this one and should be solved separately, perhaps by additional categories. But it shouldn't be a job for women to fix that.

An aside on incusion: Some marathon events in the US at least now have a separate nonbinary category, with money awards for the winners. I have looked at the results and it is male runners (who wouldn't have placed high in the men's category) who are taking home that money as a reward for greater inclusiveness. Seems like a metaphor for what's happening to women in this issue.

But when it comes to team sports, surely there could be a new approach that could help solve the issue of including transwomen and where to put them? Otherwise the option is to have them muscle their way into women's sports which is obvs unfair to women.

What, you think saying “Shimmy up girls, a man wants a place on your team” is fair? If you have a women’s team, and a man who identifies as a woman takes a place on it, it means an actual woman (to paraphrase Ricky Gervais - you know, the old fashioned sort) will lose her place on the team. Because space must be made.

So I have an alternative suggestion - why not sort people for the purposes of sport into what sex they have passed through puberty as? This way the men who identify as women could still play sport, just against people they don’t have an unfair advantage over and without denying women their place in sport too.

especially if there is a social impact on society as a whole, which is of more interest to me tbh, not specific sports itself. That's where I'm coming from.

What is this social impact? Is this a couched way of saying to women be kind?

The solution is easy and simple. Keep women's sport and make men's sport open for all the special identities and genetic disorders that don't qualify for women's sport.

The only reason this did not happen is because, socalled marginalised, tiny minority of a group of mens feelings matter more than all women on the planet

The way I was thinking was for teams to be based on weight categories. so all the players of that team will be of that weight level. Obviously most women would probably be in the lower weight categories alongside lower weight men, while the heavier weights categories would probably be dominated by men, and transwomen will go where they fit in terms of their weight. And that's fine as matches would be based on categories. You wouldn't have a lightweight team go up against a heavy weight, it would have to be against another lightweight.

I do get the point made earlier that this approach could put a lot of women off to begin with, especially if they have to play alongside men, and that it would be dangerous for them if they are tackled by a man even in the same category it so I guess its probably not a realistic solution in the real world, at least not for contact sports.