All very true. I personally have seen a couple of 6’3" cisgender women, but that was when I lived in the Netherlands.
But ISTM that what we’re proposing is more like inventing a “shortest person” league. Everybody overqualified for it is disallowed to compete in it. Then we have a “slightly less short person” league, and so on.
I mean, I get what you’re saying that spectators are naturally more interested in finding out who makes the cut for the tallest person league, but I don’t think that obligates us to design our PPS calibration system on that basis.
You seem unable to draw inferences from the things you’re proposing; seriously, I’m not saying this to be mean but iwhy aren’t you connecting the dots here?
How do you propose the creation of additional categories without simultaneously increasing the number of men eligible to compete? Under the status quo, competition selects for only the elite. These are the players with the highest natural ability (PPS) and acquired ability.
By creating tiers for players with lower PPS and skill scores, you are creating opportunities that would not normally exist due to natural selection.
I spelled out the math earlier. Here’s the explanation again:
Let’s pretend we’re talking about track and field. A binary system (split by sex) means 50% of the events are for males and 50% are for females. This also means women will always win 50% of the events and get the good stuff that comes with that achievement. Men and women are getting equal opportunity with this arrangement.
Now let’s change this to the 4-category system you’re proposing. As you acknowledge, category B-D will be overwhelming male. Category A will also have some males. Good job, you’ve just made it so that you have greatly increased men’s access to sports. Not really a problem that needed fixing but good job anyway. But let’s look at what happens to women’s access. If they are essentially limited to category A and yet still required to compete against men, they will be represented in less than 25% of all events and will probably win an even lower percent.
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.
Let’s try another tack to get you to understand what I’m saying.
I don’t know what you do for a living, but let’s say everyone in your profession was ranked by ability and the scores were published every month. And you are always given a “A-rating”.
Would you want everyone to know you are ranked as a “A”? Would you want that scarlet letter pinned to your chest?
Would you be persuaded by the argument that your “A” rating won’t change how you’re perceived by your employer or prospective employers, since we’d only be calling you something you’ve always been and just haven’t said out loud before?
I can’t imagine any athlete wanting to be on an “A” team. But a women’s team? Yes. There’s nothing embarrassing about being on a team with other females. But there will always be a stigma associated with being the “worst”. You can pretend this doesn’t matter but it does.
Well, I’m not convinced that the overlap between the male and female curves for height in your graph is comparable to the corresponding overlap that there would be for PPS as a whole. I mean, we already know that men and women have a great deal of individual height variation around peak values that are only about 5" apart. If the red and blue curves for PPS had significantly smaller overlap, we would have almost entirely distinct male and female categories, not much different from using biological birth sex itself as a proxy for PPS.
You would think that, but the tiny sliver of males in the low end would dominate the vast majority of women in the lowest tier.
Just imagine your proposal applied to tennis. Right now, with separate men’s and women’s tours, there are an equal number of male and female champions, the women earn the same money as the men (as of only last year maybe, but still), and women’s tennis is wildly popular and very respected.
No matter how you measure your four categories, pretty much all women (maybe except Serena) get relegated to the bottom tier, but that bottom tier will also include tons of men who can easily beat all the women without too much effort. And further, nobody will care at all about that lowest tier because it’s basically just the guys who aren’t good enough to be in the higher tiers.
But ISTM that there are already numerous physical classification systems for athletes of diffeing size and power that don’t inspire the sort of embarrassment or shame you’re suggesting. Male athletes aren’t trying to conceal being in the “welterweight” instead of “heavyweight” category, for example. Or the fact that being a flat-race jockey generally means being shorter and lighter than a jump jockey.
I think—speaking as a former (low-talent, low-achieving) high-school and college varsity athlete myself—that female athletes are already on the receiving end plenty of baked-in disdain and indifference just for their comparative smallness and weakness (plus a hefty side order of general sexist denigration).
It really doesn’t seem to me that this would be exacerbated by being called the “A” team rather than the “women’s” team. I’m not claiming this proposed change would fix the problem, but I’m not at all convinced it would make it worse.
Being on something called a “women’s team” doesn’t, at all, stop female athletes from getting sneered at for comparative smallness and weakness. And given that everybody would be aware anyway that effectively all A-team athletes have female birth sex and thus are comparatively small and weak, I just am not grasping your argument that the new nomenclature would be perceived as embarrassing or derogatory. That may just be my lack of understanding, okay.
In order to create a bottom tier that is predominantly women, you’d have to set the bar at a point where all the athletes are lousy. The women who today are seen as dynamic athletes would be excluded from that tier, because their athleticism is more like an average man’s than an average woman’s. Those women, if we’re applying a neutral athleticism rating, would be grouped with a huge number of men who are similarly gifted.
But we are not letting men, no matter how small and weak and slow and feeble etc. they are, compete against women who are smaller and weaker and slower and more feeble etc. than they are.
Are you thinking that this system would automatically let, say, the lowest-scoring 5% of men compete against the lowest-scoring 5% of women? Because, no. If those men are significantly superior in physical prowess to those women, they are disqualified from those women’s league.
Those men are not allowed to compete against those women, because of the physical disparities between them, irrespective of comparative skill, talent, or training in the game.
I’m not saying “the bottom 5% guys against the bottom 5% women.” Remember my soccer example, where under-15 boys club teams easily beat (by large margins) the best women’s soccer teams the world has ever seen.
I’m saying the bottom 1% of competitive men (not couch potatoes like me; I mean guys who regularly play in amateur leagues on the weekend or something) would utterly dominate the TOP 1% of women.
Again, let this sink in: Under-15 boys club teams dominate the greatest full-grown women’s teams in the world. There are countless legions of men at that level and higher. (“Under 15” means not older than 14 years old.)
I’m saying whatever men you let compete with women will utterly dominate the women. Even with a hypothetically perfect implementation of your idea.
In their ability to play the game successfully, sure, because they’re very fit and high-achieving. But are they, for instance, as tall as an average man, or as heavy as an average man? Would they automatically end up qualifying for the same PPS-level category as an average man?
I am not convinced that the proposed PPS system would really produce competition categories that would automatically be dominated by men. And I readily admit that the confusion over that issue is ultimately my fault for not being able to define with precision exactly what PPS is or how it would be measured.
Well, for example, there is an uncountable multitude of brilliantly talented (or with potential to be) basketball players who weren’t tall enough to even consider playing the sport in a serious way. Your idea greenlights all of them to live out their dream, and many of them will be short enough (and whatever else enough) to qualify for your A league.
Yes, I know. But those amateur-league guys are still, on average, bigger/heavier/stronger/faster than those top women. So those guys would be disqualified from competing against even those most elite female players in the first place.
I’ve already admitted, and am happy to repeat, that I haven’t done an adequate job here of defining or quantifying this proposed “Physical Prowess Score” metric. But I do think I’ve already made it sufficiently clear that it is not intended to include talent or training in a particular sport, and that lack of talent or training (or age) wouldn’t be allowed to compensate for a disqualifying advantage in fundamental size or strength.
If you don’t know by now that in my proposed system even teenage boys and male weekend warriors would still overwhelmingly be rated too big/strong/fast to qualify to compete in the same league with even the most elite cisgender female athletes, you haven’t been paying attention to what I’ve been repeatedly saying.
How, though? How are these male players simultaneously short and weak and slow and feeble enough to be literally no better in absolute physical prowess than their female competitors (because otherwise they’d be disqualified to compete at that level), and at the same time mighty enough to effortlessly trounce all their female competitors?
I really don’t think we’ve got the same picture in our heads about what it means to qualify to compete at a particular PPS level. (And ultimately, whose fault is it that confusion about the exact nature of PPS is keeping us from getting the same picture? Yup, I’ll say it again: my fault.)
It really doesn’t seem to me that this would be exacerbated by being called the “A” team rather than the “women’s” team. I’m not claiming this proposed change would fix the problem, but I’m not at all convinced it would make it worse.
What problem is it fixing? I get that you don’t think it’s making anything worse for women. I disagree with this a whole lot, but let’s say it’s true.
What is the point of calling female/women’s teams “A” teams?
Let’s say we conducted a poll and it that showed 50% of ciswomen athletes are strongly opposed to being identified as “A” players while 90% of transwomen athletes are in favor of it. Let’s say 10% of the population are ciswomen athletes while 0.01% of the population are transwomen athletes.
If you were the ultimate decision-maker, would you ignore these poll results and go forth with your PPS scheme?
We aren’t talking about civil rights. We aren’t even talking about affirming people’s gender identities. We’re talking about giving ciswomen a label that will be a laughing stock just so that transwomen can play sports without being reminded of their biological sex. We’d be indulging something that shouldn’t be indulged in the first place. No one should be in denial over their biological sex.
I just can’t support anything that elevates the feelings of less than 1% of the population over the feelings of 50% of the population, especially when this segment of the population has been historically ignored and shat on. No one should have to have a scarlett letter pinned to their chest just so that someone else can feel good about themselves.
This argument mirrors the “men already sneak into female spaces to attack women so eliminating single-sex spaces isn’t a big deal” argument that drives me crazy.
Yes, female athletes are snubbed and stigmatized. The answer to this is not to make it easier to snub and stigmatize them. A hierarchical categorization and naming scheme that places females at the bottom of a totem pole does exactly that. You rob female athletes the dignity of elite status.
To take the gender-identity label off a category that transgender male (and some nonbinary) athletes are just as entitled to belong to (if having female birth sex is our qualifying criterion) as cisgender female athletes are.
I have to decline your nomination for the position of “ultimate decision-maker” on this issue. I’m making this argument because I want to take a stand for what I consider to be a better and fairer alternative to the current system, not because I aspire to impose my proposed alternative willy-nilly on people who are not in favor of it.
I think we are, actually. I think that having a nomenclature system where teams that transgender-boy athletes are allowed to join are not officially designated “girls’ teams”, and teams that transgender-girl athletes are allowed to join are not officially designated “boys’ teams”, is very much a matter of affirming people’s gender identity.
I absolutely do not support anybody’s being in denial over their (birth) biological sex. If a transgender-girl athlete who was born with a penis comes to me and says “I am a cisgender girl and I wasn’t born with a penis”, I’m coming right back at her with “That is not factually true, and I don’t support your denial of biological fact.”
But if a transgender-girl athlete comes to me and says “I am a transgender girl and I was born with a penis and I compete in sports against other people born with penises, because of the physical qualities of my birth sex. But I use female pronouns and refer to myself as a girl, and I don’t want to have to be officially labeled a ‘boy’ in order to play sports”, then I’m thinking she has a pretty good point.
Aren’t we perhaps over-weighting the presumed results of this, AFAICT, completely imaginary poll, though? I’ve already disclaimed any intention of forcibly imposing a new nomenclature on people who don’t want it, but that doesn’t mean we should take at face value your quantitative estimates of who does or doesn’t want it.
Huh, and here I consciously chose to present my original category-label suggestions D, C, B, A for the highest to lowest PPS levels in the reverse of the traditional order. Precisely so that the category most dominated by cisgender female athletes would get the “A” label, which is traditionally perceived to be at the top of a hierarchical “totem pole”.
I don’t think that calling girls’ and boys’ teams “A” and “B” teams respectively is likely to get female athletes more “snubbed and stigmatized” than they are already. I think that rather, it’s our culture’s ingrained sexism and misogyny that predisposes us to think that anything associated with being female—however momentary and artificial the association may be, as in my own invention of that “A-team” label this very day—must automatically be a snub and a stigma.
As has been stated before, there’s no rule barring women (cis or trans) from playing on men’s teams. There is nothing stopping a transwomen from trying out for a men’s team. My high school’s basketball team wasn’t called the Boy Warriors. It was just called the Warriors. The women’s team was called the Lady Warriors (which I found cringey but whatevs). Push for gender neutral terminology for male-dominated teams. But don’t push for stigmatizing labels for female-dominated teams and not expect females to have serious problem with that.
Male athletes aren’t the ones who are disadvantaged by the PPS system. Male athletes won’t have a problem with the “A” team because most won’t be on that team. It is off-putting to me that your solution to transwomen athletic sorrows is taking something away from ciswomen–the no. 1 historically stigmatized minority group of the sports arena. It seems to me the obvious solution to this problem–if we must entertain it as a problem worth worrying about in the first place–is to take something away from males. Allow ciswomen to keep the dignity of their gender identity and just remove gendered terms from male-dominated sports teams.
It makes no sense to snatch the dignity away from 50% of the population (both athletes and their fans) just to make less than 1% of the population comfortable in their sense of self.
Flash back to second grade. Did you have reading groups? My second grade class certainly did. The groups went by cutsie names like Wrens, Blue Jays, and Cardinals. The names were as non-hierarchical as you can get.
Yet everyone knew which group was for the smart kids and which group was for the slow kids. Even the slow kids. Especially the slow kids. No one wanted to be in the bottom group. You could have called the bottom group the “Glorious Raptors” and it still would have been seen as the group for the “dumb” kids.