A 6th grade girls team from Kentucky was set to go for the year-end championship tournament, but was told they were banned due to fears boys teams might ‘retaliate’ if they lost to the girls team.
A 6th grade girls team from Kentucky was set to go for the year-end championship tournament, but was told they were banned due to fears boys teams might ‘retaliate’ if they lost to the girls team.
Just another reminder that sports are segregated by gender because men got upset at women beating them, not because of “muh muscle mass” or “muh bone density”.
It’s why Chess is fucking segregated by gender. The most “giga brained chess grandmasters” didn’t like being beaten by women.
This girls team was winning because the boys haven’t gone through puberty yet. Not saying it was ok to ban them, but it’s false to claim that differences in bone mass and muscle density are imaginary. It just doesn’t happen until after puberty.
And chess isn’t exactly segregated by gender. The women’s league exists to make women in chess more visible, to make it easier to pursue sponsorships, and to encourage more women to join the game. But women are free to compete in the “men’s” category (which is actually called the “open” category), and often do. The reasons women haven’t gotten to the top of it yet are cultural; women are discouraged from starting to play the game at a young age as all the top players do, and so far fewer women attempt the climb in the first place. But it will happen eventually.
Now if you want to talk about how transphobic FIDE is, there’s some real merit in those accusations. Their rules around people who are transitioning are nonsensical, punishing people for absolutely no reason. But the women’s league itself exists for good reasons.
This is a super good point. When my daughter went to 6th grade the girls towered over the boys by more than a foot in many cases. The boys looked so little.
Yeah, the story clicked when I saw it was 6th grade kids. From the headline I’d assume late teens.
If it was 4th grade it wouldn’t have been an issue, but basketball is a very height based sport.
Howdy queue -
From where does your belief arise?
I asked (in a left-leaning space) whether sports segregation was sexist, and it was explained to me it was necessary.
Just like it’s hard to argue men aren’t massively bigger murderers than women, I thought there was no contest in the majority of sports too.
I see claims like “no woman in the world is competitive with any top-rated male athlete in any sport except shooting.” redditors add equestrian sports and a few others to the mix (SafeReddit source).
Everyone deserves visibility, and segregation apparently helps.
From Wiki:
https://theworld.org/stories/2016-08-17/see-120-years-struggle-gender-equality-olympics
For example, Judit Polgar. Chess grandmaster, and excellent player, her highest rank in unsegregated rankings, like maybe top 100 right? Yeah, by age 12 she was 55th. Peak she was 8th in the world. Not 8th among women, among men and women.
It’s unsettling how she was regarded by some, and this was in the 90s. If I remember right, even Kasparov was less than kind. He might have turned around in his later years.
You say that in past tense as if he’s dead or something, but Russia put him on its list of “terrorists and extremists” only a few days ago. I dunno if he’s still bigoted against women chess players, but as an anti-Putin activist he can’t be all bad.
Not intentionally.
I noticed a long time ago that there is “basketball” and “women’s basketball” and have considered so much of sports machismo being about male fragility ever since.
Nobody actually cares about women’s basketball. Do you watch WNBA?
I don’t watch basketball at all, but what is your explanation for that?
It’s not exciting. It’s boring to watch, at the end of the day that is all it is. I don’t watch men’s basketball either, but I can very clearly see the difference in the game, they’re actually different games entirely.
Be the change you want to see in the world. Call both of them basketball or gender identify both. In other sports, like the Olympics or Xgames, they identify each section by gender, which makes sense in describing what’s happening.
I can’t change the fact that there’s the NBA and the WNBA.
Until they make it the WNBA and the MNBA, my point stands.
The NBA has been around since 1946, and the WNBA was introduced in 1996. They could have rebranded the NBA at that time I suppose, but the league was under no obligation to and why should they? If someone else spins up a business , I shouldn’t have to change my name to accommodate them. I’m going to assume in most cases where the sport league is gendered, it’s because one league existed prior to the other like in basketball.
Gender equality.
It’s not inequality to identify the different leagues. They could have been the, “Alternate National Basketball League” if they wanted, but instead opted to use a clearer descriptor. Also, just because it’s labeled, doesn’t make it anything lesser and it’s not insulting, it’s just a literal description of what it is. In
internalinternational competition, they are identified as men’s and women’s sports, but it would be nonsensical to rebrand a league just because a different league uses a more specific name.“It would be nonsensical to rebrand” was also what I heard about the Washington Redskins.
“Redskin” is a is a racial slur and is a negative descriptor. “Women” is not a slur nor insulting. These are two very different situations, unless you’re insinuating that calling females, “women” is some kind of insult akin to calling Native Americans “Redskins”.
For some sports yes. Chess is bullshit, as is shooting and a couple of others.
Most sports are based on physical strength though, and men would dominate them.