With the recent issues of transgender people in sports, why don’t we move some sports over to a weight-class system?

I think because guys are pound for pound stronger than girls. I've read stories on Reddit years ago by girls who are wrestlers or fighters and get into a playful tussle with some random guy and they describe it as terrifying.

Hot take: Sports are not that important, and it's not the end of the world if someone in the other team is "physically better" than you.

Sports should be just played for fun and for making exercise, not as a profession. And the whole sports industry should be taken down all together. Make all sports amateur and just for the fun of it and suddenly it really doesn't mather who is on your team or in the other team.

Because a man tends to be stronger, faster, and more athletic than a woman of the same weight. It won't work for football, track, or soccer.

soccer

"Male" soccer is not restricted to men. Both genders are allowed. There are only men because they outperform women.

edit: Although FIFA forbids women from access to the main World Cup. Also the statement above is true generally, but not everywhere.

Just make an "open class" where any identification, body mods, and performance enhancing drugs are unregulated. The best athletes that science can create.

What sports would it work in? Do you think people will care about the best tennis player that weighs 140 pounds? The best 240 pound soccer players? The fastest 130 pound swimmer? No one wants to watch any of that. It barely works for boxing.

All that aside from the fact that you're still pretty much ruining competitive sports for most cis women by doing it. The reason there's a female "insert sport here" competitive league to begin with is so many women have a reason to compete and can win. A 150 pound trained male athlete will still wipe the floor with a 150 pound female athlete. It's far, far, from just a weight thing. The Williams sisters were the best female tennis players the world knew, and they went out and proved they couldn't beat a man that was ranked over 200th. The world champion austrailian female soccer team couldn't beat a boys highschool team. The fastest woman to ever run the 1500m did it in 3:49. A 5' 9" guy did it in 3:26.

Weight and size is only a little portion of physical differences.

If there's so many Trans athletes, why don't they just have a category of their own?

or why don't we just keep everything as is because it's not a big fucking deal despite what bigots say

if you really wanted to "fix" or "save" womens sport, just start by fucking paying them the same as men and giving women's sport the same attention on tv

Martial arts already has weight classes and gender on top. Weight doesn't cover gender differences

Nobody's making the obvious suggestion to chemically sterilise all athletes.

PSA: The preferred term is “transgender people”, not “transgendered people”.

https://glaad.org/reference/trans-terms/

Yes, splitting teams by sex/gender has never made sense, instead it should be by physical attributes that may or may not happen to align with sex, but irrespective of if they do.

The recent issue with transgender people in sports is manufactured as a tool to spread trans hate. It's a non issue that preys on Americans's sense of fairness.

I'm still a fan of just removing all the rules around drugs and bodies. Let's see what 21st century science can do!

I feel like weight class doesn't do it. Women have higher body fat %. Is a welterweight woman athletically equivalent to a welterweight man? I don't think so.

Testosterone level AND weight. Wait til they find out what happens when you're on hormone blockers.

At a minimum men are born with more muscle fibres and process energy a little more effectively. Puberty is not a factor.

If we could wave a magic wand and make transitions change the multitude of differences it'd be great but the science isn't there yet. We're left with reality.

Weight classes won't cut it unfortunately.

For team sports you can assign a point value to each player and force the team to deploy a maximum total value, like for armies in WH40K

I could see this working better than the current system and would undermine bigots argument about an unfair advantage. Though there are people that think being transgender gives people an advantage in chess somehow.

The purpose is to oppress the queers, logical compromises are not welcome.

I think all athletes should be forced to use large amounts of testosterone to even the playing field. Let's see what the human body is really capable of

Weight is the wrong criteria to use. Why not just have it classed by skill level. Enforce equity in school sports by mandating that a meaningful distribution of skill-based leagues are funded. This seems like a very simple solution to me that would address gender-based inequities in general as well as improve sports overall.

BMI

Muscle mas doesn't equal weight.

Judo has both

Just merge men's and women's sports, nobody watches 'em anyway

This is all so stupid.

Robot Sports are the future!

I feel like it'd probably be better to group based on performance. I don't see why this wouldn't work for pretty much all 1v1/FFA/small-team sports/games.

There’s a big issue with using weight classes in team sports: player weights vary dramatically. Take the NFL for example. Setting aside the enormous differences in weight between linemen (offensive and defensive) and all other position players, there are also huge weight differences within a given position. For example, quarterback Jared Lorenzen was 6’4” and weighed 275 lbs whereas Russell Wilson is 5’11” and weighs 211 lbs. That’s a huge weight difference!

You can find similar weight differences across players in other leagues (NHL, NBA, and MLB). Weights don’t really correlate with overall skill level though they do somewhat correlate with position and skill set (and height of course).

How would you classify by weight in team sports? You might think to do it by position but none of the leagues require a player to remain at a single position for their career. Players can and do switch positions, and many even do so multiple times during a game. Sports like NBA basketball don’t even have any particular rules about what a player at any given position is allowed/not allowed to do, so the positions on team rosters are more like a suggestion than a requirement.

How many trans people are actually competing?

Are they dominating in the sports they're competing?

Are their testosterone level similar to their competitors?

I am sincerely asking because I don't care enough to look it up myself.

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I say fuck it and let everyone compete together. Ain't no reason men and women couldn't compete with each other in baseball, basketball, hockey, tennis, golf, etc. Even if you believed men are capable of being bigger and supporting more muscle, there's tons of sports where that isn't going to be the most useful thing to win.

How would you know this gender or that gender is better anyway unless you actually let everyone compete together, regardless of what's in their pants or their heart?

Forget weight limits.....I think baseball is the perfect place to start.

I've watched baseball for 30 years. I don't like change. I understood the need for an automanic runner on 2nd during the covid years. It made sense for the context of it's time. That time has ended, and so should that rule. I hate the pitch clock. For me, baseball is sometimes not even about the game. Some men have a hard time admitting to others, or even to themselves that they enjoy the company of other men. But the truth is, we wouldn't hang out every weekend, get drunk, and watch sports together if we truely didn't care for each other. So even though you know your buddy cares about you, and you care about him, there still needs to be a game on. Now you're trying to make the game shorter? I am not a fan. I will happily watch a double header with the boys. We want MORE sports, not LESS.

I'm also not a fan of the sensitivity of how balks are called now. Balks used to be so rare, that I had to be explained at age 19 what just happened when I saw one. This after watching baseball for 9 year already. These days it seems like EVERY game has a balk. Sometimes it's just a twitch of the leg, with no pitching gesture. In NO WAY can some of these balks be realistically interpreted as an intentional fake out pitch movement.

As you can see, I'm a grumpy old set in my ways grey haired curmudgeon. However, even I wouldn't even mind at all if women played with men. If they can hit a 97 mph fastball, and beat out the throw to home, why WOULDN'T you want them on their team?

The first one to break that barrier would be just as iconic as Jackie Robinson. At least you would THINK so. The reality of the situation is, women HAVE played on official MLB teams. The fact that I don't remember their names or their decades that they played is only testiment to how unfairly they were viewed. If MLB wants to promote diversity, and progressive views, we get Jackie Robinson and Larry Dolby. When the MLB wants to kill the idea, you never hear a word about it officially from them. Instead you only hear about it on youtube videos about obscure MLB facts.

The point is, on a regular basis, I would still support competitive women playing on every team. There are some truely crappy players in the MLB (looking at you, Bartolo Colon), and if they get replaced with better playing women, then the MLB as a whole is stronger for it.

...........that being said, women and men should NOT play hockey together. It just wouldn't be right.

Ok but what if.... We just got rid of sports.

Nah fuck that shit. MMA integrated weight classes and that's sucked. Sumo is the only true martial art, straight up, not even pulling your leg right now

Edit: Yeah, I mean, men are "stronger" pound for pound or whatever, but, we kind of, are idiots when it comes to thinking of sports, if we just suddenly think all sports are about explosive type 1 muscles, or muscular structure, or whatever. That's dumb, that's a brainlet comparison and a brainlet appeal, I would say. If you gain leverage in one direction, you lose it in another. If you gain a bunch of type one muscle fibers, you become a chimpanzee, but also, you gas really, really quickly, and humans are endurance predators that maximize that endurance with fine motor control even in what might be considered gross motor action. Everyone has this conception of sports as being these kinds of, oh, instant action gratification machines, where you just watch some guy get hit in the face really hard, or get tackled, and your monkey brain goes coco mode, and so obviously explosive strength is gonna be good for these displays, so, men are better at sports.

This is not the case. Or at least, not entirely. Sports is more like a long-form storytelling vehicle with many different characters and mindless teams to it. Women can fulfill that role just as easily as men can, in many of the same contexts. If we have sports that are bad for co-ed play, then I would say, we have sports that perhaps need refining.

Which everyone thinks is somehow like, a horrible thing to do, oh no, the sports, they're too sacred, we gotta find the best of the best, but sports have always been and remain subject to change and a ton of different shitty rulesets that everyone always hates. Basketball now, apparently, rewards a bunch of aggressive highlight-reel kinds of play, and apparently the older game used to be more defensive, I say apparently because I dunno. I know nascar has had the opposite trending for quite some time with limiter plates meant to protect drivers and the audience more at the cost of more spectacular crashes and pileups for which the sport might gain more casual viewership. And also not be boring as fuck driving in a circle for like three hours. That's not a sport getting better or worse, that's just some arbitrary cultural shift, a decision made, realistically, because of internal cost-benefit analysis at the behest of a corporation which runs the major league.

We might have the same capacity to integrate sports into a co-ed kind of a deal, if we had the will to do so, but I think the truth of the matter is just that nobody really gives a shit about equality, except for when you bring it up.

Me, I'm a fan of sumo, because fuck weight classes. I wanna see david beat goliath. To me, that's a more compelling casual narrative that can easily be built into a sport. Fairness is highly overrrated, and also doesn't exist, or else every match might as well just be random chance, or end in a draw. Michael phelps is some genetic freak or whatever. Go cry me a river, and then he can swim across it and back. Give me an abstract goal like "get ball through hope" or "throw guy out of ring" and then I don't need any more to it, I'm right there with you.

I think they should have classes limited by hormone level and just let people supplement to equality.

Just create a trans league. Trans men and trans women all in the same league. Id watch that shit, it would make money. So why don't we have this yet?

The issue isn't gender. Gender is a social construct. The issue is sex. Female sports were always intended to be for female athletes. Female athletes who choose to play female sports to have a more level playing field and to play against other female athletes find it unfair to be forced to play against male athletes playing female sports. Trans women are women but they aren't female.

If you wanna get answers from a community that’s been training in 1000x earths gravity to fight anti-trans rhetoric, ask this in hexbear.

When I was thinking about it, I came to the conclusion that sports that don't require confrontation should just evolve and give up on the competitiveness. Swimming, javelin, whatever shouldn't have the winner be the best out of every contestant, we should celebrate each and everyone's force of will to better themselves first. We already have that with high jumping, where individual performance is rated Vs their height goal.

Give up competitiveness in sports where it isn't needed, and you no longer have people melting down because someone has more muscular mass, or a different gender than expected.

Give up competitiveness in sports and you return to a celebration of the human body and it's physical prowess, instead of childishly fighting for who's best.

Obviously this doesn't work in football, or sports with direct confrontation, that i haven't found a solution yet, maybe during the next shower ?