3 ms·

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 experime

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.
  - belorn 7y ago
    I find it pretty boring that 41 percent of skiers that won medals between 2001–2010 had blood values that only has a probability of happening in 1 per 10000. It is basically theater where the audience is told to ignore that aspect. Maybe in 100m the effect is smaller but I do not know who would win a marathon between a top 0.1% woman that has blood levels close or above doping levels vs a top 0.1% man who has average blood. As research say, the effect from blood doping is more noticeable in long distance endurance sports which a 100m dash is not. We do have some understanding on what genetic factors give a performance benefit in sports. Weight, height, blood, hormones, and so on. Gender is just a fuzzy proxy. People who advocate for better classifiers is against a fuzzy proxy when current science can produce better competition where the result is less dictated from the start. I theory, such competition is more fair, healthy, and more interesting to watch.
    - dogma1138 7y ago
      It’s pretty simple elite athletes already are a one in 10^the_power_of_whatever it’s all about gaming the system and gaming the game beyond that. Better suits, better shoes, high altitude training, pressure chambers, “supplements” these are all in play. If you aren’t in the top 0.1% or even rarer than that you ain’t gonna win any Olympic medals. Take Phelps for example the guy is a genetic phenom he produces almost no lactic acid, he is double jointed which allows him to swim butterfly like no other, his proportions are utterly fucked up with having a longer torso with stubby legs, a longer wingspan than his height and huge flipper feet. His mom might as well had gotten knocked up by a dolphin considering how near perfect he is for swimming.

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.
- belorn 7y ago
  I find it pretty boring that 41 percent of skiers that won medals between 2001–2010 had blood values that only has a probability of happening in 1 per 10000. It is basically theater where the audience is told to ignore that aspect. Maybe in 100m the effect is smaller but I do not know who would win a marathon between a top 0.1% woman that has blood levels close or above doping levels vs a top 0.1% man who has average blood. As research say, the effect from blood doping is more noticeable in long distance endurance sports which a 100m dash is not. We do have some understanding on what genetic factors give a performance benefit in sports. Weight, height, blood, hormones, and so on. Gender is just a fuzzy proxy. People who advocate for better classifiers is against a fuzzy proxy when current science can produce better competition where the result is less dictated from the start. I theory, such competition is more fair, healthy, and more interesting to watch.
  - dogma1138 7y ago
    It’s pretty simple elite athletes already are a one in 10^the_power_of_whatever it’s all about gaming the system and gaming the game beyond that. Better suits, better shoes, high altitude training, pressure chambers, “supplements” these are all in play. If you aren’t in the top 0.1% or even rarer than that you ain’t gonna win any Olympic medals. Take Phelps for example the guy is a genetic phenom he produces almost no lactic acid, he is double jointed which allows him to swim butterfly like no other, his proportions are utterly fucked up with having a longer torso with stubby legs, a longer wingspan than his height and huge flipper feet. His mom might as well had gotten knocked up by a dolphin considering how near perfect he is for swimming.