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When I said "weighted & tested", I meant it as some magical way that would ensure that individuals of similar body type and physical characteristics are grouped

When I said "weighted & tested", I meant it as some magical way that would ensure that individuals of similar body type and physical characteristics are grouped together independently of gender. Taking boxing as an example again, sure if you put a female heavyweight (179 pounds / 81 kg) against a male heavyweight (201 pounds / 91 kg) the male will dominate. But if you standardize the divisions and have her compete against an equal the situation might be different. The again, you would have to take into account things like bone density, etc. In a sport like boxing, that's not very straightforward to do because of the fact that individuals with testosterone usually have greater upper body strength and that's a big advantage. In a team sport, this might be different since they allow for the team to be balanced depending on their members. For example, some individuals might have greater endurance but lower strength, etc. I'm sure that we would also see a more diverse cast of males as opposed to only "peak athletes" (7 ft+ basketball players, super heavyweight hockey players, etc.) and that would be great. I do agree that's it's a complicated question that should be deeply analysed and that we won't come to a solution in this comment section. However, a statement such at that one from the article is simply anachronistic and wrong in 2019. This isn't the right way to tackle the problem. "mandating that healthy athletes undergo medically unnecessary interventions in order to compete [...] These changes—including reduced muscle and increased fat—are supposed to produce the kind of body that Stéphane Bermon, Director of the IAAF Health and Science Department, has presented as the “ideal female phenotype” at scientific conferences."

dogma1138 7y ago
If you put a mediocre male featherweight against a female heavyweight champion in any contact sports the male would pummel her into a pulp we had these experiments before in show matches. Gold medal women winners would not pass the men’s qualifiers in most Olympic sports, in fact in many of them the world record for women isn’t enough to pass the qualifiers for mens. Anyone who is advocating turning sports into coed brackets has never competed in their life professionally on at least a national level or they don’t mind women not wining a single match from that point onwards. Now as far as transwomen (I’m assuming that’s the correct term for M2F gender reassignment) in professional sports this would likely require a separate bracket if we get to the point where there is a sufficient mass of trans athletes, or if there will be explicit proof that it doesn’t matter allowing them to compete in the women’s bracket under certain conditions. However the doesn’t matter is also a tricky part there is a big difference between someone who transitioned before going through puberty and someone who transitioned 6 months ago. Humans are a dimorphic species males are stronger, faster have better response time and ironically when trained are even more flexible than females because they are stronger and have better joint stability. The irony is also that the closer you get to peak performance the wider this gap gets which is why while in say high school track or varsity basketball some females can play in the same ballpark as males once you go into professional sports and Olympic sports they might as well not be the same species.
- belorn 7y ago
  Raphmedia is talking about improving competition through better classifier, and you are pointing to experiments when people removes all classifiers. There are searcher studies on how much of athletic success is heredity. That number is estimated to be around 66% at a minimum for all athletic sports, and around 80% for sports which has highly heritable (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3993978/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3993978/). That number is with gender separated sport classes. If we did coed brackets it would naturally go up, and in many sports above 90%. No one is advocating for such solution. Instead what is suggested is to replace current classifier with those that reduces heredity as a determining factor. If we take endurance sports like biking, skiing, and running, blood values should not all be in the 99.9999 percentile of rare blood disease. Blood doping tests use conservative numbers and allow extreme range of blood values, and yet most contestant in world championships and the Olympic tend to be on the border of doping. Heredity should not determine the outcome of professional competition. Weight, height, blood, musculoskeletal, cardiovascular, respiratory, nervous, and more all influence outcome. As can be read in the linked study, there are key performance genes linked directly to performance. As the study conclude, Current evidence suggests that a favorable genetic profile is critical for the achievement of elite athletic status. Splitting sports into male and female does not fix this problem, and the discussion around rare chromosomes disorders that Caster Semenya has is a good reason why we should look into fixing unfair advantages that favorable genetic profiles has in competitive sport.
  - dogma1138 7y ago
    You don’t need a study to know genetics play a major role, in fact the only role elite athletes would be elite athletes regardless of the sport they play which is why the US has more football and basketball players than soccer and rugby it’s not because Germany and Australia have better genetics for the latter than the former but because the same elite athletes choose sports based on cultural and environmental factors. You can’t classify people based on genetics we don’t have enough information and at that point it’s going to be boring might as well give the gold to the one with the best genes and be done with it. However if you take the top 0.1% of males and the top 0.1% of females of even further 0.001% it’s still not a competition. Heck the world record for women’s 100m which likely will never be broken as it was achieved with both doping and a timer screw up isn’t enough to pass the qualifiers to even compete in the 100m men’s event.
bassman9000 7y ago
Like that time a bunch of teenagers beat the australian women soccer team? https://www.standard.co.uk/sport/football/australian-womens-national-team-lose-70-to-team-of-15yearold-boys-a3257266.html https://www.standard.co.uk/sport/football/australian-womens-... Or when the ~200 men tennis seat, a smoker, beat the Williams? http://www.tennisnow.com/Blogs/NET-POSTS/November-2017-(1)/The-Man-Who-Beat-Venus-and-Serena-Back-to-Back.aspx http://www.tennisnow.com/Blogs/NET-POSTS/November-2017-(1)/T... That magical way exists already, and it's called gender.
- Raphmedia 7y ago
  > That magical way exists already, and it's called gender. If it was magical we wouldn't be having this conversation. What of individuals like Caster Semenya? Should we ban her from all sports because she does not fit classical gender classification? One thing is clear in my mind is that we should not force hormones on her as if she was cattle.
  - pandaman 7y ago
    Anyone can participate in "men" events, since there are no biological restrictions other than being a human as already explained elsewhere in these comments.
JamesBarney 7y ago
This is definitely tough. It seems like society has two competing goals, we want women to be able to compete at a national/international level, but we also don't want to have to put people in one bucket versus the other. I don't necessarily think that punting the decision to the "weight/tested algorithm" solves this hard problem. I think you'd create the equivalent of minor league vs major league. With a few women in the minor league and none in the major.

dogma1138 7y ago

If you put a mediocre male featherweight against a female heavyweight champion in any contact sports the male would pummel her into a pulp we had these experiments before in show matches. Gold medal women winners would not pass the men’s qualifiers in most Olympic sports, in fact in many of them the world record for women isn’t enough to pass the qualifiers for mens. Anyone who is advocating turning sports into coed brackets has never competed in their life professionally on at least a national level or they don’t mind women not wining a single match from that point onwards. Now as far as transwomen (I’m assuming that’s the correct term for M2F gender reassignment) in professional sports this would likely require a separate bracket if we get to the point where there is a sufficient mass of trans athletes, or if there will be explicit proof that it doesn’t matter allowing them to compete in the women’s bracket under certain conditions. However the doesn’t matter is also a tricky part there is a big difference between someone who transitioned before going through puberty and someone who transitioned 6 months ago. Humans are a dimorphic species males are stronger, faster have better response time and ironically when trained are even more flexible than females because they are stronger and have better joint stability. The irony is also that the closer you get to peak performance the wider this gap gets which is why while in say high school track or varsity basketball some females can play in the same ballpark as males once you go into professional sports and Olympic sports they might as well not be the same species.

belorn 7y ago
Raphmedia is talking about improving competition through better classifier, and you are pointing to experiments when people removes all classifiers. There are searcher studies on how much of athletic success is heredity. That number is estimated to be around 66% at a minimum for all athletic sports, and around 80% for sports which has highly heritable (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3993978/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3993978/). That number is with gender separated sport classes. If we did coed brackets it would naturally go up, and in many sports above 90%. No one is advocating for such solution. Instead what is suggested is to replace current classifier with those that reduces heredity as a determining factor. If we take endurance sports like biking, skiing, and running, blood values should not all be in the 99.9999 percentile of rare blood disease. Blood doping tests use conservative numbers and allow extreme range of blood values, and yet most contestant in world championships and the Olympic tend to be on the border of doping. Heredity should not determine the outcome of professional competition. Weight, height, blood, musculoskeletal, cardiovascular, respiratory, nervous, and more all influence outcome. As can be read in the linked study, there are key performance genes linked directly to performance. As the study conclude, Current evidence suggests that a favorable genetic profile is critical for the achievement of elite athletic status. Splitting sports into male and female does not fix this problem, and the discussion around rare chromosomes disorders that Caster Semenya has is a good reason why we should look into fixing unfair advantages that favorable genetic profiles has in competitive sport.
- dogma1138 7y ago
  You don’t need a study to know genetics play a major role, in fact the only role elite athletes would be elite athletes regardless of the sport they play which is why the US has more football and basketball players than soccer and rugby it’s not because Germany and Australia have better genetics for the latter than the former but because the same elite athletes choose sports based on cultural and environmental factors. You can’t classify people based on genetics we don’t have enough information and at that point it’s going to be boring might as well give the gold to the one with the best genes and be done with it. However if you take the top 0.1% of males and the top 0.1% of females of even further 0.001% it’s still not a competition. Heck the world record for women’s 100m which likely will never be broken as it was achieved with both doping and a timer screw up isn’t enough to pass the qualifiers to even compete in the 100m men’s event.

bassman9000 7y ago

Like that time a bunch of teenagers beat the australian women soccer team? https://www.standard.co.uk/sport/football/australian-womens-national-team-lose-70-to-team-of-15yearold-boys-a3257266.html https://www.standard.co.uk/sport/football/australian-womens-... Or when the ~200 men tennis seat, a smoker, beat the Williams? http://www.tennisnow.com/Blogs/NET-POSTS/November-2017-(1)/The-Man-Who-Beat-Venus-and-Serena-Back-to-Back.aspx http://www.tennisnow.com/Blogs/NET-POSTS/November-2017-(1)/T... That magical way exists already, and it's called gender.

Raphmedia 7y ago
> That magical way exists already, and it's called gender. If it was magical we wouldn't be having this conversation. What of individuals like Caster Semenya? Should we ban her from all sports because she does not fit classical gender classification? One thing is clear in my mind is that we should not force hormones on her as if she was cattle.
- pandaman 7y ago
  Anyone can participate in "men" events, since there are no biological restrictions other than being a human as already explained elsewhere in these comments.

JamesBarney 7y ago

This is definitely tough. It seems like society has two competing goals, we want women to be able to compete at a national/international level, but we also don't want to have to put people in one bucket versus the other. I don't necessarily think that punting the decision to the "weight/tested algorithm" solves this hard problem. I think you'd create the equivalent of minor league vs major league. With a few women in the minor league and none in the major.