# I Pit Babale **URL:** \ **Category:** The BBQ Pit\ **Created:** [April 7, 2025, 2:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-pit-babale/1016738 "2025-04-07T14:59:40Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 8
**Author:** ![RitterSport](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/rittersport/32/6326_2.png) [@RitterSport](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RitterSport)\ **Post date:** [April 11, 2025, 1:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-pit-babale/1016738/141 "2025-04-11T13:10:50Z")
We’re **this** close to agreeing on transwomen in sports, I’m sure of it! One or two more posts and we’ll all agree. ---
**Author:** ![Babale](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/babale/32/15666_2.png) [@Babale](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Babale)\ **Post date:** [April 11, 2025, 1:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-pit-babale/1016738/142 "2025-04-11T13:12:56Z")
> [@RitterSport](#): > > We’re **this** close to agreeing on transwomen in sports, I’m sure of it! One or two more posts and we’ll all agree Oh, I highly doubt it, but some of these posts (especially the last few posts from Puzzlegal) have been _highly_ instructive. ---
**Author:** ![puzzlegal](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/puzzlegal/32/3827_2.png) [@puzzlegal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/puzzlegal)\ **Post date:** [April 11, 2025, 1:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-pit-babale/1016738/143 "2025-04-11T13:25:57Z")
> [@Babale](#): > > Once a year when we went to a tournament, though, we were in a _competition_, and a competition should be fair, and telling 50% of the population “you guys can compete for fun if you want - awww, how cute! - but remember, you’ll never win first place, because you weren’t born with a dick” doesn’t seem like a fair way to handle competition. So boys fought boys and girls fought girls. But sports competition is never “fair”. The short boys don’t win at basketball. The nearsighted kids don’t win at baseball or racquet sports. So we slice and dice our sports enough that a large fraction of kids have a chance of doing well at something. And there aren’t enough trans girls that it matters to anyone else where they end up. Because almost everyone has to compete with that one kid who has a genetic advantage over them, and for every other type of genetic advantage, we say, “that’s okay”. It’s only not okay on this case because of gender policing, not because this genetic advantage is fundamentally different from any other genetic advantage. Yes, elite sports police body type, hormone levels, all sorts of stuff. High school sports generally don’t and shouldn’t. The kid with the artificial leg? He’s not eligible to compete in the Olympics with people who use natural legs, because with the right artificial leg, he has an advantage. Do you want to ban him from sports in high school? I don’t. ---
**Author:** ![Babale](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/babale/32/15666_2.png) [@Babale](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Babale)\ **Post date:** [April 11, 2025, 1:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-pit-babale/1016738/144 "2025-04-11T13:33:15Z")
> [@puzzlegal](#): > > But sports competition is never “fair”. The short boys don’t win at basketball. The nearsighted kids don’t win at baseball or racquet sports. So we slice and dice our sports enough that a large fraction of kids have a chance of doing well at something. Sure. But those advantages don’t come _from the very characteristic by which we split sports to begin with_. When you divide people by weight class in wrestling, you’ll get some people in the 134-143 weight class who have shorter arms and are weaker than people in the 125-134 weight class. There are certainly wrestlers in the lower weight class who could beat wrestlers in the higher weight class. But we would never say “Timmy has so many disadvantages that we will let him compete one weight class down”. > [@puzzlegal](#): > > And there aren’t enough trans girls that it matters to anyone else where they end up. Because almost everyone has to compete with that one kid who has a genetic advantage over them, and for every other type of genetic advantage, we say, “that’s okay”. It’s only not okay on this case because of gender policing, not because this genetic advantage is fundamentally different from any other genetic advantage. It’s not OK because sex _is the very characteristic by which we divide sports_. Again, you wouldn’t make the argument _“weight classes aren’t about fairness, they’re about weight policing, because we don’t worry about any of the other genetic advantages like arm length or shoulder width or BMI, we say “that’s ok” about this, it’s only not okay in the case of weight class because of weight policing but weight is not fundamentally different than any other advantage”_ > [@puzzlegal](#): > > Yes, elite sports police body type, hormone levels, all sorts of stuff. High school sports generally don’t and shouldn’t. The kid with the artificial leg? He’s not eligible to compete in the Olympics with people who use natural legs, because with the right artificial leg, he has an advantage. Do you want to ban him from sports in high school? I don’t. The split isn’t “elite vs non elite” sports. The split is “competitive vs recreational” sports. And in the US, school sports are competitive. ---
**Author:** ![puzzlegal](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/puzzlegal/32/3827_2.png) [@puzzlegal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/puzzlegal)\ **Post date:** [April 11, 2025, 1:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-pit-babale/1016738/145 "2025-04-11T13:36:03Z")
> [@Babale](#): > > It’s not OK because sex _is the very characteristic by which we divide sports_. Now you are making a circular argument. Because the alternative is to divide kids by gender. Which works just fine in the places where it’s done. ---
**Author:** ![Babale](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/babale/32/15666_2.png) [@Babale](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Babale)\ **Post date:** [April 11, 2025, 1:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-pit-babale/1016738/146 "2025-04-11T13:39:53Z")
> [@puzzlegal](#): > > Now you are making a circular argument. Because the alternative is to divide kids by gender. Which works just fine in the places where it’s done I don’t understand how it’s a circular argument. We are dividing men and women based on physiological traits and physical differences between men and women. These differences have nothing to do with gender identity (except insofar as for the vast majority of people, who are cis, gender identity and sex assigned at birth line up). These differences have _everything_ to do with sex (assigned at birth). ---
**Author:** ![puzzlegal](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/puzzlegal/32/3827_2.png) [@puzzlegal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/puzzlegal)\ **Post date:** [April 11, 2025, 2:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-pit-babale/1016738/147 "2025-04-11T14:08:00Z")
Those differences correlate extremely well by gender identity. We draw arbitrary lines. 120 pounds, not 125 for wrestling. We split “boys” from “girls” rather than measure testosterone, etc. Whether to pick sex assigned at birth or current gender identification is a choice. Both work, about equally well, to give a lot of kids a decent chance at being competitive in their league. As others have pointed out, trans girls, on average, fall somewhere between cis girls and cis boys in athletic ability. And there’s an enormous variance by kid. Where do you draw the line? 120lbs? 125lbs? In terms of making competition fair, it’s arbitrary. And > [@puzzlegal](#): > > At the elite level, all the stars are biological freaks of one sort or another. Swimmers with webbed feet, runners with weird mitochondria, whatever. Some of the cis elite athletes are no doubt hormonal freaks. If there were enough trans women that including them meant cis women would be forced out, that would be an actual problem. But there aren’t. This is not a problem of biology or or fairness. It’s a trumped up problem of gender and of gender policing. ---
**Author:** ![Babale](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/babale/32/15666_2.png) [@Babale](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Babale)\ **Post date:** [April 11, 2025, 2:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-pit-babale/1016738/148 "2025-04-11T14:13:05Z")
> [@puzzlegal](#): > > Those differences correlate extremely well by gender identity. Yeah, because the only exceptions are trans people, which the latest study I read said was 0.9% of the population. That doesn’t change the underlying reasoning behind splitting being based on physical characteristics, not gender identity. In the 0.9% of mismatches, we should go by what we are actually splitting by, not a correlate. ---
**Author:** ![We\_re\_wolves\_not\_werewolves](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/838e76/32.png) [@We\_re\_wolves\_not\_werewolves](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/We_re_wolves_not_werewolves)\ **Post date:** [April 11, 2025, 2:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-pit-babale/1016738/149 "2025-04-11T14:16:03Z")
> [@puzzlegal](#): > > Those differences correlate extremely well by gender identity. of course they do, because the vast majority have a gender that matches their biological sex, so someone identifying as a woman is going to be biologically female 99+ percent of the time. ---
**Author:** ![puzzlegal](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/puzzlegal/32/3827_2.png) [@puzzlegal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/puzzlegal)\ **Post date:** [April 11, 2025, 2:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-pit-babale/1016738/150 "2025-04-11T14:32:26Z")
But what we are actually splitting by is strength and size and… Stuff that correlates with sex. We know that sex is an imperfect metric. Some women are taller than some men. Some women are stronger than some men. For every metric that actually matters in sports ability, sex is only an approximate indication. And _because_ there aren’t many trans women, and _because_ they (on average) fall between cis men and cis women in all those metrics, gender is just as good a split as sex assigned at birth. And it makes more sense in a world where society is organized by gender. Except in some very specific elite athletic situations, where all the athletes get regular blood tests, and we impose all kinds of other requirements on their bodies. And I’m those cases, the individual governing bodies of each sport are in a better position to decide what they want to allow in each league than some government body trying to pass uniform rules. ---
**Author:** ![Babale](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/babale/32/15666_2.png) [@Babale](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Babale)\ **Post date:** [April 11, 2025, 3:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-pit-babale/1016738/151 "2025-04-11T15:26:03Z")
> [@puzzlegal](#): > > But what we are actually splitting by is strength and size and… Stuff that correlates with sex. Not really, or we’d be fine with wimpy, unathletic cis boys playing on girl’s teams. We wouldn’t have “Men’s Teams” and “Women’s Teams”, we’d have divisions based on skill, like they have in baseball - Major Leagues, Minor Leagues, etc. The reason we don’t do that is that if we _did_ split teams entirely based on who is big and strong rather than by sex, then the top teams would all be full of men (maybe with a handful of “token” women, like the kickers in the NFL that get suggested every so often). And for some dumb reason, human beings like it when they see people who are like them doing cool shit and being acknowledged for it. The Progressive wing of the party calls it “Representation”, and they lead me to believe it’s pretty important. So, in order to allow women to strive for excellence, we segregate sports by sex. ---
**Author:** ![puzzlegal](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/puzzlegal/32/3827_2.png) [@puzzlegal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/puzzlegal)\ **Post date:** [April 11, 2025, 3:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-pit-babale/1016738/152 "2025-04-11T15:51:04Z")
You realize that the top teams are all male, right? ---
**Author:** ![Babale](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/babale/32/15666_2.png) [@Babale](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Babale)\ **Post date:** [April 11, 2025, 4:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-pit-babale/1016738/153 "2025-04-11T16:03:39Z")
> [@puzzlegal](#): > > You realize that the top teams are all male, right?. Yeah, of course. Which is why it is a good thing that we have a separate, dedicated space for women’s teams, where they can be the top teams in their class. The top teams are men’s teams, but the top women’s teams are women’s teams, and men’s teams and women’s teams are in two different leagues that aren’t really comparable. ---
**Author:** ![Thing.Fish](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thing.fish/32/9168_2.png) [@Thing.Fish](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Thing.Fish)\ **Post date:** [April 11, 2025, 4:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-pit-babale/1016738/154 "2025-04-11T16:04:51Z")
> [@Babale](#): > > And for some dumb reason, human beings like it when they see people who are like them doing cool shit and being acknowledged for it. I think you’ve illustrated yet another crucial distinction here, between _amateur_ sports, which are played primarily for the benefit of the players, and may be purely recreational or highly competitive, and _spectator_ sports, which feature the most elite athletes and are of interest to large numbers of people not personally known to the players, and are usually though not necessarily run as for-profit businesses. I think everyone agrees that there’s no good reason for either sex or gender segregation at the recreational level, and that there are obvious reasons for it at the professional level. The tricky part is where to draw the line between recreational and spectator sports. The complicating reality is that in American high schools and colleges, some sports are recreational, albeit highly competitive, and some are quasi-professional, but they’re all run by the same athletic department. I am generally OK with the pre-Trump status quo of sorting by gender rather than sex, and see no reason to revisit it unless and until we see empirical evidence that transwomen athletes are experiencing significantly greater success than would be expected in the absence of any physical advantages. The privately organized recreational sports leagues my kid plays in don’t segregate kids at all until puberty, which seems sensible. The school teams do segregate by gender, but those don’t start until about age 11. We have one AFAB non-binary kid in the school, who was on the boys basketball team (but not getting playing time) in 5th grade and is now on the girls team in 6th grade. Nobody cares AFAICT. ---
**Author:** ![Thing.Fish](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thing.fish/32/9168_2.png) [@Thing.Fish](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Thing.Fish)\ **Post date:** [April 11, 2025, 4:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-pit-babale/1016738/155 "2025-04-11T16:06:23Z")
I think it’s safe to say you’ve won the Pitting when the OP has fled and the thread has turned into a remarkably calm and rational discussion of the underlying issue! ---
**Author:** ![BigT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bigt/32/12044_2.png) [@BigT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BigT)\ **Post date:** [April 11, 2025, 4:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-pit-babale/1016738/156 "2025-04-11T16:08:14Z")
Yay. Another actual calling out of transphobic shit got turned into a debate about trans sports. Guys, that’s the whole point of the tactic. It’s deflection. The title of this Pit thread is Pitting Babale. Yet he has gotten you to talk about what HE wants to talk about, and not continue to push on the ways he is being transphobic and should stop. Trans sports? why not make your own thread, if you must push this non-issue that was already being dealt with before people got all worried, and which hasn’t actually resulted in trans people dominating anything? ---
**Author:** ![puzzlegal](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/puzzlegal/32/3827_2.png) [@puzzlegal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/puzzlegal)\ **Post date:** [April 11, 2025, 4:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-pit-babale/1016738/157 "2025-04-11T16:10:18Z")
> [@Babale](#): > > Not really, or we’d be fine with wimpy, unathletic cis boys playing on girl’s teams. We wouldn’t have “Men’s Teams” and “Women’s Teams”, we’d have divisions based on skill, like they have in baseball - Major Leagues, Minor Leagues, etc. 1. it’s much much simpler to have rules than to judge each person’s skills. 2. we can’t have wimpy, unathletic boys playing on the girls teams because that would be too damaging to their delicate male egos. Because gender really _does_ matter. ---
**Author:** ![puzzlegal](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/puzzlegal/32/3827_2.png) [@puzzlegal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/puzzlegal)\ **Post date:** [April 11, 2025, 4:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-pit-babale/1016738/158 "2025-04-11T16:11:22Z")
Fair. And I agree that even if Babale doesn’t, himself, want to oppress trans people, he is carrying water for those who do. ---
**Author:** ![Thing.Fish](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thing.fish/32/9168_2.png) [@Thing.Fish](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Thing.Fish)\ **Post date:** [April 11, 2025, 4:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-pit-babale/1016738/159 "2025-04-11T16:12:28Z")
And I think puzzlegal has a very valid point that a big reason for segregation is that boys don’t want to lose to girls. Otherwise, in the not at all uncommon situation where, for instance, a smallish high school can field enough players to have a boys varsity team, but not a junior varsity, and not a girls team, the JV team could be opened to girls. But this never happens AFAIK. ---
**Author:** ![crowmanyclouds](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/crowmanyclouds/32/19884_2.png) [@crowmanyclouds](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/crowmanyclouds)\ **Post date:** [April 11, 2025, 4:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-pit-babale/1016738/160 "2025-04-11T16:12:50Z")
> [@Thing.Fish](#): > > I think it’s safe to say you’ve won the Pitting when the OP has fled Yes, how dare Gyrate not post in the last 24 hours. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-pit-babale/1016738.md?page=7) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-pit-babale/1016738.md?page=9)