Do we need a protected class? If yes, there must be standards and those standards must be either endocrine or genetic or both. Yes they should be tested. Anyone failing the protected class can compete in the open class. It’s really that simple.
If it’s about who might get hurt, maybe we should divide things up by something other than gender. I know plenty of women who could do a ton of damage with their fists and they aren’t even boxers.
It’s one thing to work within the limits of your physique to become stronger, better, etc. It’s another thing to have a totally different physique that gives you a starting point higher than can be achieved naturally by anyone else.
So put those women in a higher class. There are plenty of women with “masculine” physiques… or are you going to claim Brittney Griner is also not a woman?
So many sports are entirely about the physique you inherited though. Yes there is some technique to swimming and obviously you have to train hard. But these are just prerequisites, not differentiators. If we start saying that winning because of your physique is no victory, then really half of the events become meaningless. To a large extent, the Olympics does measure inherited traits and I think we ought to recognize that that is its point. If you think back all those centuries, it was very obviously the point to prove that your people are genetically superior to their people.
Boxing has weight classes. As do most other martial arts.
The problem is not a 50kg men fighting a 70kg women in terms of injuries and power imbalance. And in that set up the women most likely wins. The problem is the typical situation of a 80-100 kg men smacking down on a 50-60kg women. And that is the image the demagogues try to conjure.
So if your full blown men is a 60kg feather to be able to compete against another 60kg women, the whole trope falls apart.
Boxers and wrestlers have weight classes because weight confers a massive advantage and almost predetermines the outcome of the match. You might as well just award someone for weighing more, because skill can only overcome it to a point.
I would prefer if competitive classes were determined by things like weight which are universal and obvious and non-invasive to measure. However I don’t know if that works for everything. Hormones do in fact confer major advantages, as chemical doping does. Should we not test for doping either?
I do think it’s actually more invasive to try to measure if someone “lives as a woman” than it is to measure what’s in their blood. How do you even begin to define that, and aren’t you engaging in prescriptive sexism as soon as you start? I can tell that your suggestion comes from a place of wanting to support women and their autonomy but I don’t think you thought it through at all, at least not in the context of competitive sport. If you don’t care at all about fair sports competition, it’s all super easy. If you do want to enable fair sport competition, you have to actually deal with the complexities and not just fire off leftist slogans.
Do we need a protected class? If yes, there must be standards and those standards must be either endocrine or genetic or both. Yes they should be tested. Anyone failing the protected class can compete in the open class. It’s really that simple.
Here’s a standard: if you live as a woman you’re a woman.
There is absolutely no reason to assert that this must be the case.
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If it’s about who might get hurt, maybe we should divide things up by something other than gender. I know plenty of women who could do a ton of damage with their fists and they aren’t even boxers.
This is the correct answer. Divide competitors up by class, skill level, or anything else besides perceived sexual anatomy.
It’s one thing to work within the limits of your physique to become stronger, better, etc. It’s another thing to have a totally different physique that gives you a starting point higher than can be achieved naturally by anyone else.
So put those women in a higher class. There are plenty of women with “masculine” physiques… or are you going to claim Brittney Griner is also not a woman?
So many sports are entirely about the physique you inherited though. Yes there is some technique to swimming and obviously you have to train hard. But these are just prerequisites, not differentiators. If we start saying that winning because of your physique is no victory, then really half of the events become meaningless. To a large extent, the Olympics does measure inherited traits and I think we ought to recognize that that is its point. If you think back all those centuries, it was very obviously the point to prove that your people are genetically superior to their people.
Boxing has weight classes. As do most other martial arts.
The problem is not a 50kg men fighting a 70kg women in terms of injuries and power imbalance. And in that set up the women most likely wins. The problem is the typical situation of a 80-100 kg men smacking down on a 50-60kg women. And that is the image the demagogues try to conjure.
So if your full blown men is a 60kg feather to be able to compete against another 60kg women, the whole trope falls apart.
Can you cite an example of this?
Boxers and wrestlers have weight classes because weight confers a massive advantage and almost predetermines the outcome of the match. You might as well just award someone for weighing more, because skill can only overcome it to a point.
I would prefer if competitive classes were determined by things like weight which are universal and obvious and non-invasive to measure. However I don’t know if that works for everything. Hormones do in fact confer major advantages, as chemical doping does. Should we not test for doping either?
I do think it’s actually more invasive to try to measure if someone “lives as a woman” than it is to measure what’s in their blood. How do you even begin to define that, and aren’t you engaging in prescriptive sexism as soon as you start? I can tell that your suggestion comes from a place of wanting to support women and their autonomy but I don’t think you thought it through at all, at least not in the context of competitive sport. If you don’t care at all about fair sports competition, it’s all super easy. If you do want to enable fair sport competition, you have to actually deal with the complexities and not just fire off leftist slogans.
What open class? There is no open class at the Olympics. So no it isn’t really that simple.