No, I’m listening to you, but you’re refusing to listen to me.
I know. In my proposed PPS system, however, Serena Williams would almost certainly not be competing against physically untalented men.
A talented female player like Serena Williams would be qualified to play in a PPS-level category mostly populated by other tall and strong cisgender women. If she wanted to, she could use her exceptional talent to compete against (mostly male) players in a higher PPS-level category, but she would not have to, and I doubt that she would choose to.
RickJay, you seem to be consistently misunderstanding this hypothetical system as assigning athletes to PPS-level categories based on some combination of basic physical prowess and talent at their chosen sport. That’s not how this works. Serena Williams would not be automatically bumped up out of her own PPS-level qualifying category just because she can beat the pants off almost all the other women in it.
I would love to see professional mixed-gender sports. Make the rule of the league be that all teams must maintain a 50% mix of females and males on the field at all times. Invent a sport that requires of variety of challenges, some favoring the natural tendencies of males and some favoring the natural tendencies of females and some being completely unbiased along gender lines. (Something like the Hunger Games but without all the killing and savagery ).
Things like this would create new opportunities for ciswomen and transgender folks.
Consider it a different way. Suppose you invent an absolutely perfect measure of natural ability, PPS. I’ll just assume it’s possible.
Make a population chart with PPS on the X axis. Men and women will form two different distributions, roughly normal shape and with men farther to the right. You can put other populations on here too; transwomen, hormone therapy or not, whatever.
Sports are interested in the right-hand part of the chart: the well above average people. It’s easy to see that no matter how you set the thresholds, there will always be far more men in this area than women. It might be 10:1 or 100:1 or 1000:1 depending on where you are, but regardless it’s going to be mostly men no matter what upper and lower bounds you set.
So a binary or quaternary or whatever thresholding is irrelevant. Women only outnumber men when you get to the lower halves of the chart, which utterly no one is interested in. If you want actual women’s sport, you need to exclude biological males or they will dominate through sheer numbers.
So what? I don’t see how the claim “no one is interested in A-level sport” is worse or more detrimental to sports in general, or to cisgender female athletes in particular, than the claim “no one is interested in women’s sports”, which we also hear a lot of.
? The point is that no matter how you slice things, you end up with leagues that are almost entirely men. You might have a small number of women on the very lowest tiers, but that’s it.
Women’s leagues exist so that women can play, not to create a space for worse players. Ok, maybe no one’s interested in the WNBA (I have no idea really), but at least it’s a space where women can compete against each other fairly.
I’ve said all along that in this system we’ll end up with some leagues that are almost entirely men. I mean, did you think I was proposing this as a system that would somehow magically equalize average male and female physical capacity?
If you’re claiming that all the leagues would end up being almost entirely men, then I think we seem to disagree about what is actually meant by this “PPS” metric. If male athletes in any given category, even completely unskilled or untalented ones, are automatically going to defeat female opponents irrespective of their skill or talent level, then ISTM that the male players are physically overqualified for that category.
I mean, nobody is denying, as I’ve often repeated, that male people are on average bigger and stronger and faster and have more muscle mass and all sorts of other physical superiority over female people, on average. And I’m persuaded of the validity of using biological birth sex as a proxy for that average physical superiority.
But you seem to think that my proposed system requires women to compete against men who are bigger and stronger and faster and otherwise physically superior to them, and I’m not seeing why you think that.
Yes, all of them, as long as we’re talking about the upper part of the chart. The chart reflects the general population, so everyone in the bottom 75% is overweight/obese or is otherwise incapable of playing sports at even an amateur level. They’re irrelevant here. We’re looking at the right-hand tails of the distributions.
No, I’m not saying that at all. Remember, I allowed for argument a perfect PPS that reflects natural ability.
Consider a person at the 95% natural ability percentile. Whether man or woman, this person is above average. But if it’s a man he’s just moderately above average, whereas if it’s a woman she’s several standard deviations above average. There are obviously way more men in this category than women.
If we go further up, it looks even worse for women, and you seem to agree with that. But even the lower-tier leagues have a problem.
I’m also pretty baffled that Kimstu would agree to divide teams based on biological sex, but objects to naming them in a way that implies that. Why is language more important than actions? It seems to be a common thread in this subject.
Women’s leagues exist so that women can play, not to create a space for worse players.
Collegiate women’s leagues also exist so that women have an opportunity to go to college that they might not otherwise have. Many a female athlete has benefited from an athletic scholarship.
Will B, C, and D athletes compete for scholarships amongst themselves, leaving the pot reserved for the “A” athletes alone? Or will the “A” athletes have to compete against all the higher ranked athletes for athletic scholarships? Because if we allow the latter to happen, then we should expect fewer female athletes at the professional level, since instead of being able to focus on classes and sports, they will have to juggle classes, sports, and work obligations.
Something else that might help. I think you’ll agree that height is going to look similar to PPS in its distribution, so (without claiming that height is a proxy for PPS) we can take the lessons for one and apply it to the other.
You’ll agree that 7’ men massively outnumber 7’ women. So do 6’8" men. And so do 6’3" men.
Now, 6’3" is tall but not that tall for a man. I’m acquaintances with dozens. But I have never, ever met a 6’3" (cis)woman. They exist, but they’re incredibly rare.
If we were inventing “tallest person” leagues, a 6’3" man wouldn’t even make the bottom tier amateur league. You have to get to 6’8" or so before you get even remotely notable. And so co-ed leagues simply wouldn’t feature women at all except in very small numbers at the lowest levels.
The only existing ones I can think of are really pairs sports like mixed doubles in tennis and pair skating and ice dancing. The latter probably benefits from including both sexes as a larger, stronger skater can more easily lift a smaller, lighter one, and possibly a woman’s greater flexibility is also a benefit. So maybe some kind of acrobatics-based sport would work, but I think it would have to be more like gymnastics - a team would perform a routine and be given a score by judges, rather than competing against each other directly.
Maybe some of the sportier posters here would have better ideas.
So this is an admission that you are okay with increasing men’s access to sports while reducing women’s access. Failure to “equalize” means male overrepresentation.
Why would any female athlete see your proposal and not instantly reject it? No matter how you look at it, there are only downsides for them. Less attention, less prestige, less recognition, fewer scholarships, smaller scholarships…pretty much a shit sandwich.
There is a pattern here. In this Brave New World of gender identity, the costs that XX people must endure is irrelevant. The only equation that matters is the one that consider the benefits to XY people. If what I’m saying wasn’t true, you would not continue to defend this crazy categorization scheme. You would have realized three hours ago the cost-benefits to this proposal are too unacceptable to treat as a serious thing.
I think the major problem is that the physical benefits women have over men are not really relevant to sports. There’s no ‘surviving coronavirus’ competition or ‘living to 80’ award.
It’s for the smallest, weakest, slowest, etc. players, irrespective of talent or skill or training at the game.
Yep, I understand that for many spectators, small/weak/slow/etc. means “bad” when it comes to sports, and they’re not interested in watching it. And that’s their call to make. But I don’t think they’re going to become more interested just because small/weak/slow players are called a “women’s” team rather than an “A” team.
This seems as though you’re saying that the same PPS calibration should be applied to athletes at all competition levels: high school, college, casual amateur club team, pro athlete, Olympian. Why?
Wait a minute, again. In what way would this proposed system have to increase men’s access to sports while reducing women’s access? You seem to be constantly taking issue with things I haven’t said and never meant.
Did you think that I was proposing that sports leagues or teams or competition that are now populated by women should instead be opened to men, or recalibrated so that men inevitably end up dominating them? I wasn’t.
I’m saying it doesn’t actually matter how you do the calibration, at least for anyone much past puberty. Again, let’s use height as an analogy since the shape of the distribution will be similar. Just pretend that height is our PPS score:
You are using PPS to divide the leagues, so the only thing you can do here is set a min and max score and include everyone between those thresholds. We are looking to select the strongest female players. How do you pick out the women with a PPS of >175cm without the range being dominated by men?
Edit: by “dominated by men”, I don’t mean the male players will beat the female players. I mean that population-wise, there will be far more men. Assuming both gain an equal skill modifier, the population of the league should be close to the general population of that ability range.
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