Btw, I appreciate your patience and sincerity. Though I confess I struggle to grasp how you envision the school sports, ideally.
I think in practice few enough boys will try to game the system that women’s sports will do fine. I think it’s a bit of an invented problem.
Conflating seperate sports by gender and race I find intentionally dishonest, particularly at the high school level. The athletic benefit testosterone provides is enormous. Racial differences are on the periphery at best, that’s why we can do things like have Olympics.
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Then segregate by testosterone. Testosterone levels for both boys and girls are extremely varied during high school. Segregating by gender is intentionally dishonest as well. Lots of high school boys can’t compete with high school girls athletically in high school. I was one of them.
There’s no need to latch onto the relic that is gender segregation for no good reason.
A comment from the peanut gallery in the middle of a mature conversation…
Isn’t the point of sports to measure success within a predefined set of ability and skills? Why would any factor other than those within the predefined set matter? If you have more participants that want to compete than slots on the team just have more levels, an A team, a B team, a C team, etc.
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It doubles the number of winners anyway. Women could still play, they just couldn’t be the best. Yes that it is a pretty big deal.
Women can be good at other things. Not everyone needs to have a chance to be #1 at every activity. I’m not good at sports, and I’ve moved on.
The NFL doesn’t have gender restrictions, and no woman play in the NFL. I don’t see anyone protesting.
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Historically, there were few sports opportunities for girls. When i was a kid there were lots of news stories of girls joining “boys” sports, because those were the only sports. I remember one article about a girl whose father sent her to practice with a toy teacup on a chain around her neck because the rules required players to wear “protective cups”.
It was controversial to let girls play sports at all. Too masculine. But the girls who played (no doubt the most athletic of the girls) completed okay with the boys. No, they weren’t the stars. But they were solid players.
That changed, i think with title IX, and a lot of girls sports have been created. And it turns out that girls benefit from sports, too.
I think it’s good to have several “levels” of sports, so most kids who want to play can do so without being overwhelmed. Varsity/JV/club is one mechanism. Boys/Girls is another. But i think it’s objectively false to say that being born with a penis, or even having undergone male puberty, is such an overwhelming advantage that we need to draw the line exactly there.
We are already doing the experiment. About half the states let trans girls play on the girls’ teams. And there haven’t been a lot of problems. Oh, I’m sure there will eventually be a trans girl who’s a really talented athlete who blows everyone out ief the water. No different from having the kick to have an Olympic contender in your school. It happens from time to time, but not so often that it prevents the other girls from playing or anything.
And that’s the point. More opportunities for kids to play sports.
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My experience from playing coed sports is I’m much worse than all the younger guys, and much better than all the younger women, like, dramatically. So, in my experience with sports, male puberty makes an enormous difference. I’ve never seen a woman who can run as fast as me, and most of the 20 something guys run faster than me. The difference is significant.
I think almost noone is going to fake being trans to get on the women’s team.
But I think if you get rid of the women’s team almost no women will ever make the top tier team, and I think that’s the wrong outcome.
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Example, strength standards for bench press. An elite woman who weighs 150 pounds can bench 225 pounds. An elite man who weighs 150 pounds can bench 299 pounds. Etc.
ETA the elite female bench press is half way between an intermediate and advanced male. Some sports are more skill based, but for any strength based sport getting rid of the women’s category means the top team is all male, and the next level team is mostly male.
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Even if people don’t fake being trans (which is hard to say) there’s also the question of which team real trans women and intersex individuals belong on.
If you agree that there should be a division in sports, should it by gender identity or current testosterone levels or whether you went through male puberty or some other characteristic?
Should Caitlyn Jenner have competed in the women’s heptathlon instead of the men’s pentathlon? If not, why not?
why is this a problem? is it as much a problem if say, no short person makes the top tier team? or no fat person makes a top tier team?
Sports are mostly as you say. I’m not quite all the way to “winning is the point” of school sports. Pro sports? For sure. High school, not so much. The benefit is the activity, not the result. Is anyone willing to argue that kids have more than enough physical activity today? That they learned all about teamwork in algebra 1?
None of the girls on the Sophomore B soccer team believes they are getting a scholarship or makng the US Olympic team. They do it all the same. And more power to them.
These differences get much greater at greater weights.
A 250 pound elite male lifter can bench 450 pounds, while a woman only 285.
I assume this is because men are able to out a lot of extra muscle on their upper bodies, as compared to women.
I didn’t suggest eliminating the girls team in high school. (John did, i didn’t.) I said that having a few trans girls on the girl’s team isn’t going to create problems. Yes, the strongest men are stronger than any women. Yes, the typical man is stronger than the typical woman. But having a single trans girl who underwent male puberty is not going to unbalance the sport for the rest of the girls. Certainly, no more than having a single boy who underwent male puberty messed up the boy’s team in my sixth grade class. (He was taller than all the teachers and had facial hair. But he played with the other boys, none of whom had undergone puberty. The typical post-pubescent girl is stronger than the typical pre-pubescent boy.)
And it’s happening in something like 17 states plus DC. Per
These states allow children to play sports with other children of their social gender. (I plucked the date the policy has most recently been modified, if that was easy to find)
CA 2014
CT 2011
CO 2014
FL 2019
MD 2014
MA 2012
MN 2015
NV 2014
NH
NJ 2017
NY 2014
OR 2018
RI
SD 2019
UT 2016
VT 2014
WA 2013
DC 2013
That’s a lot of kids playing for a lot of years with very few problems having made the press.
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Thanks, I was wondering what the actual rules are. I wonder if the most difficult part of this is just making rules that sound contradictory.
I agree with that, ie allowing trans athletes in isn’t causing any issues, so it’s fine to keep male and female sports.
If you’re fat you can lose weight.
If you’re short you can compete in a sport where height is less advantageous (ie soccer).
So…if you’re not physically capable at one thing you can do a different thing that you’re good at?
Sounds like you’re for getting rid of gender segregation in sports then.
I’m in favor of adding some co-ed sports, and/or making some existing sports co-ed, fwiw. But not in favor of wholesale removal of girl’s sports in school.
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