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You said conspiracy. I said advantage. Height is a huge advantage in basketball. The average height of an NBA player is over 6’5”. Height is mostly genetic exc
by babesh 5y ago
You said conspiracy. I said advantage.
Height is a huge advantage in basketball. The average height of an NBA player is over 6’5”. Height is mostly genetic except for malnutrition. Different populations have different average heights.
The optimal build for a weightlifter is to have short arms and legs and to have the two parts be of equal length. That is mostly genetic. Of course different population groups have differences here as well.
Weight is an advantage in combat sports both because you can dish out more and because you can absorb more punishment. I suspect that high bone density is advantageous and is mostly genetic. Different populations have different bone densities.
No one is denying that sex has explanatory power. The point is that many other things have explanatory power as well and that choosing which categories to consider is ideological.
Why have separate sports for sex? Why have separate weight classes? Why have a minimum age requirement for gymnasts? Why not allow professionals until 1992?
Why not have separate height classes for basketball? Why not have separate weight classes for football?
- acituan 5y ago> The point is that many other things have explanatory power as well and that choosing which categories to consider is ideological. Why have separate sports for sex? No need to complicate; if we didn't have sex segregated sports, for almost all sports (save for maybe open ocean swimming), we couldn't have any women competing at all[1]. In fact there are "battle of sexes" type exhibition matches that demonstrate the rough placement eg Braasch vs. the Williams sisters. [1] To expand this statement because I know some people will get offended; this doesn't mean men are better at sports than women. It says, at the tail end of distributions, where most of the professional sports are played, tail end of men's distribution will be better than tail end of women's, leaving no opportunity for women to compete if distributions are intermixed.
- Y_Y 5y agoI tried finding examples of other sports where women are roughly competitive with men at the top level: archery, shooting, curling, ultra-marathon, gymnastics, climbing.
- jayGlow 5y agomen's and women's gymnastics are practically different sports. they only share 2 events and those events have pretty different rules between men and women.
- nasmorn 5y agoIn Ultra Marathon women win races that are not super competitive. Women hold basically zero course records for important races. The difference is smaller though with longer distances. But not even Courtney Dewaulter wins the UTMB outright.
- acituan 5y agoRoughly competitive doesn't cut it when the competition itself is designed to find out and honor the outliers. If top 3 men in archery has consistently higher scores than the top 3 women, pitting them against each other would mean women not getting any medals anymore. So unless you have hard statistics to back up these claims or are an expert in one of these fields, I would go with the experts' decision to sex segregate their leagues because they might know a few things or two we won't necessarily consider. Just from my amateur interest; for outdoors archery, the draw strength matters a lot for accuracy, in curling likewise drive and sweeping strength make a difference.