I don’t think we should segregate by wealth. Rather, I think we should vastly lower the stakes for youth sports across the board, returning them to pastime-level activities rather than as paths to college or paths from poverty or what have you.
I also, and this is important, want a pony.
It seems to me that it would be… not good to close off a potential path out of poverty, however problematic, without first creating a lot of new and better paths.
Even partial college assistance goes to only a select few. A select few of those might have a chance at going pro. A select few of those actually have a shot at a career in the pros.
Holding up a sports career as a path out of poverty is a pipe dream.
What happens to college athletes who don’t go pro? They still got to go to college, are they better off than non-athletes from the same areas?
I also think that elementary school, middle school, and high school sports should not be treated solely as they are now as the training grounds for professional sports. They’re technically school clubs. Then let them be school clubs and follow the rules that other school clubs must follow.
Just happened upon another example of objective male vs. female anatomy: the “Q-Angle”:
Maybe classify sports categories by pelvis and femur anatomy, with no reference to gender?
Alas, this appears to be yet another example of a physiological characteristic that manifests on a somewhat sex-overlapping spectrum rather than as a sharply distinct gender binary.
And I kind of doubt that Q-angle on its own would be a reliable determinant of comparative sports performance even if it did have a strictly binary distribution.
It wouldn’t make much sense to use this singular measure, when there are hundreds of differences between male and female bodies that affect health and sporting performance, and we are still discovering new ones.
I dunno. In the case of American football, sometimes they get brain damage and are a lot worse off.
But more broadly … If they go to a college with a less competitive sports program, that doesn’t have the NCAA sequestering the athletes into their own little enclave, yeah, they might be better off. But a friend who used to teach at Notre Dame told me that the football players don’t take any of the regular classes (they might fail) don’t eat in the regular cafeteria (i forget why) and live in separate housing (to make it harder to bribe them or something) so I’m dubious they get a lot of benefit from that “college education”. I suppose they have a degree, which might tick off a box somewhere. But i suspect that in terms of learning academic stuff, making social connections, and learning independence, they’d do better at a community college without the sports.
I recalled reading this thread and thought that it was worth bumping in light of the recent in-depth study and recommendations by the UK sports councils.
It is a neutral approach, based on a full examination of the best research and representative opinions.
The upshot? it’s complicated. An extract.
- The science shows that trans women retain physique, strength and stamina advantages;
- There is no magic solution that balances trans inclusion in female gender-affected sport with competitive fairness and safety;
- Therefore some sports will have to make a conscious choice prioritising either inclusion or fairness and safety.
I rather suspected that this would be the conclusion and rather than simplifying and clarifying matters it leaves a landscape of choices in which the debates will continue unresolved. I’m sure sports lawyers will be happy.
I honestly don’t know if this will make a different to those on either side of the debate. The transphobes are hellbent on using this issue as a cudgel against transgirls with their “concerns” about fairness being a fig leaf for their bigotry. For many of those who want to protect transgirls’ right to participate, it doesn’t matter to them whether transgirls have an advantage over cisgirls or not.
People with entrenched opinions are likely to pick up on the parts of this that are relevant to, and supportive of, their position whilst decrying the parts that aren’t. 'twas ever thus.
I think they’ve done as good a job as can be reasonably expected given a pretty much impossible and thankless brief.
It’ll be interesting to see the response to this, the openness and subjective nature of the recommendations probably do accurately reflect the challenges ahead but personally I don’t think this provides a path to a fully acceptable solution. We can hope though.
The OP of this thread was about HS sports. I expect the athletic differences at that level aren’t going to be such a big deal no matter what because there’s a big mish-mash of ability on HS teams. A HS is made up of whatever random people are in the district, so there will naturally be a big variation in ability. If a girl is in the district who happens to compete at a national-level in her sport, then she may be better than everyone else at her school, including the boys in that sport. But at later levels where there is recruitment and filtering, there is less variation. A AMAB person competing on the college or pro women’s team will likely be at the top in terms of ability. At later levels the differences will be more significant and will need to be addressed through things like medical qualifications or different categories of competition (e.g. open and female-only).
The national athletics records for females in the 13-15 range are bang-average for males of the same age so I don’t necessarily share your optimism that it won’t be a big deal.
And the recommendations are suggesting that it won’t be easy (or likely even to be possible) to come up with a one-size-fits-all across sports. The concept of an “open” category is basically what the male competition is now, which of course trans people are free to compete in.
I think any attempt to retain a category purely for biological females is where the legal challenge will occur and I don’t think we’ve seen a fraction of the courtroom drama yet to come.
The solution seems obvious. If there are gender related issues in sports competitions, establish trans-male and trans-female categories.
You’ve thought carefully about that solution and honestly don’t see any problems at all with it?
Not in the context of gender distinctions. Women worked hard for support of female sports because of gender related physical characteristics. The result was two gender categories. If trans-persons present similar distinguishing physical characteristics (ie Q angle above) then shouldn’t they be supported by the same solution.
The minuscule number of people that would be in such a league makes this solution a nonstarter, and not one that’s proposed seriously. It looks like a rhetorical gambit rather than a genuine attempt to resolve a problem.
There was a time when the same argument was made for girl’s soccer in the US.
There are many sports that developed from ‘miniscule’ categories, ie blind baseball. Physical differences are not rhetorical.
Since girls make up 50% of the population, there are plenty of them to field full teams. But transgender people make up less than 1% of the population. Even if 100% of transgender people were athletes, there wouldn’t be enough to have meaningful competition if they were in their own division. On average, a HS might have about 300 athletes. So maybe 3 or fewer of those athletes would be transgender. Maybe at the national level there would be enough transgender athletes to have their own division, but at the HS level it wouldn’t really be practical.