Women should try harder
Women and sport is a theme today.
Photo from the Asia Women’s Handball Final a few days ago.
The team (Aus) with a man on it won by 4 points – surely they should be disqualified and the cup given to Iran?
Hannah Mouncey is 6 for 3 and weighs over 100kg. Used to play women’s rugby (where he broke a woman’s leg). pic.twitter.com/gSiKDxBwtz— Jen Isaacson ☀️ (@isacsohn) December 4, 2018
Listening to an academic on @BBCWomansHour advocating for scrapping women's sports (to accomodate trans women) despite acknowledging that women are unlikely ever to be able to compete on the same level as men so will be erased from professional sports. Anyone for some kool aid?
— Rosa Freedman (@GoonerProf) December 4, 2018
Here an academic says women athletes would try harder if they competed against men. And believes all sport should be mixed sex but doesn’t care if women never made the teams. This is where denial of human biology intrinsic to extreme trans dogma leads. Goodbye, women’s sports. https://t.co/tiav6xN83o
— Janice Turner (@VictoriaPeckham) December 4, 2018
Hey, I wonder how much training Mouncey needed to become a six footer? Those other women clearly need some workout tips.
This person is a fraud. I respect people’s different opinions on sex and gender and their preferred pronouns, but this has crossed the line into bullying and cheating. We can leave gender out of it. If biological luck makes you six foot tall and capable of unusual strength, it is not fair for you compete in these physical sports against smaller-framed people. And you know it’s not fair. Transgender rights do not extend to causing serious injury to people by cheating at sports.
What’s next? Heavyweight boxers identifying as featherweight boxers so they can send their oppenents flying into the air?
Ben McGorrigan: Oddly, the way you phrased things gives rise to the rejoinder: “Sports should be more like boxing and wrestling, divided by weight-class (possibly including height-based divisions as well), but not by gender.”
I’m not pushing this idea, though I would be interested to see an analysis of different sports made under such divisions, to see how it would play out. Do male-bodied individuals still have an advantage over female-bodied individuals above and beyond the height/weight differences? Does it matter which sport is being played? If not, it might actually be fair to have a Light-, Middle- and Heavy-weight division for handball, for instance.
But–and here’s the thing I have to admit–it would require the sort of research and conversation that the current trans extremists are utterly opposed to. I do still suspect a lot of actual post-op trans individuals would welcome that sort of approach–it would help them see if there’s a way to participate in society without their trans-ness being an issue one way or the other, which most of the transfolk I’ve known (including two late-life transitioners) actually want.
Ben, I don’t think you can leave gender out of it. Team sports typically don’t have weight classes, so if you’re bigger and that’s an advantage, that’s just how it goes.
I apparently don’t know what handball is judging by what’s going on in that picture. I didn’t realize there was so much hair pulling and elbow biting in it.
#4 Freemage
That only really works for individual sports, as teams sports usually have a variety of roles/positions within team which each may have a lean towards certain body sizes. Having a team all of one body size would mean a fair few people would need to fill a role/position that does not suit them.
Plus, dividing the skill pool into multiple leagues means teams become much larger organisations with, on average, worse teams due to not being able to winnow the applicant pool down to a single team comprised of the very best. And the number of matches required to see all weight divisions through a season will multiply, with no real way of knowing whether the crowds will support them equally.
As to your other question, yes, there are still physical advantages in favour of men even if you control for height/weight… though they are far less dominant. For example, for the same height, men’s chests will have a larger space between sternum and spine than women’s, allowing for larger lung capacity. There are others, but they are increasingly subtle / decreasingly consequential.
#5
I completely disagree – gender can and in fact should be left out of sports. Sex on the other hand… not so much.
Skeletor: I take it we all want to protect people from injury and maximise the quality and fairness of sport. Traditionally this is done by having biological women compete against one another and not against men, who on average will be bigger and stronger. New conceptions of sex and gender challenge this convention.
It is possible to respond by disputing new conceptions of sex and gender. I was trying to avoid that just out of charity. Assuming that trans women are women and should be addressed with female pronouns and in some respects be treated like other women, it remains the case that if you are a 6 foot woman with tree trunk thighs and you break a small woman’s leg playing women’s rugby, you’re not a very good person. The rules of sport might not reflect that but i think the moral reality is that such behaviour is narcissistic and violent. Even if the trans lobby is 100% correct about sex and gender, and even if this woman has broken no rules within her chosen sports, she is still a bully and i don’t know how she sleeps.
Freemage: i agree, weight classes and so on should be explored in order to see if a compromise can be struck with the trans lobby. Or we could wait and see if the new gender politics is just a phase.
In American children’s football (well,really BOYS football), leagues have traditionally been organized by age. This has put boys with weight differences of a hundred pounds and height differences of a foot or more on the same playing field. I vaguely recall some attempt at using weight as a sorting factor, but I don’t think it caught on.
There have been amateur basketball leagues for (male) players under 6 feet tall.
Ben, I can’t agree with “We can leave gender out of it. If biological luck makes you six foot tall and capable of unusual strength, it is not fair for you compete in these physical sports against smaller-framed people.” I have a daughter who had the biological luck to have a build similar to my own. She is just shy of 6ft with a strong, muscular build (not like Mouncey’s, more akin to Sigourney Weaver); are you saying she should be excluded from playing these physical sports?
An irrelevance maybe, but I wonder how those women in the picture feel about grabbbing the born male Mouncey? Their hijabs suggest uncomfortable at best.
Holms: The ‘weight class’ approach could still address one of the most globally visible categories of sport–the Olympics. Team sports are still comparatively rare there, especially if you also eliminate ‘teams’ that lack varied positions (tennis doubles, volleyball, etc). Do we really regard lightweight boxers as ‘lesser’ than heavyweight boxers? (And again, the extreme trans activists are probably the biggest hurdle to a comprehensive, evidence-based research approach to the question.)
Acolyte: My claim was that somebody with that sort of physique choosing to compete against smaller-framed people in a dangerous sport like rugby is wrong.
My claim may be wrong. I know very little about sport, women, biology etc. Happy to be corrected. But my inpression from the article above is that someone is behaving badly and has caused at least one serious injury by doing so. There may not be a gender- or sex-related solution to that problem given that it’s a problen of weight and strength which as you point out can vary significantly for all genders. So yeah, maybe big people should not be competing against small people when it’s dangerous and unfair. Maybe weight classes are the way to go. But i’ll leave that to people who know about sport.