No more men’s and women’s league, no more “gender eligibility” requirements, a common dresscode, same standards and rules for all.
Edit: since it looks like people missing the word let: the suggestion isn’t to force desegregation. It’s to allow it or even make it the default. Someone else made a good suggestion: segregate by attributes specific to the sport. In boxing it’s weight class, in basketball it could be height, in biking it could even be doped and non doped. Sex and gender need not be the very first thing to segregate by.
Most professional sports in the United States don’t have any policies against women being in the sport. NBA, Football, Baseball, Hockey, etc.
None of them exclude women from playing in the professional leagues. Baseball did briefly in the middle of the 1900s, but that policy was reversed
It’s just that, for these sports, the best women in the game have not yet been better than the worst men in the game. A woman and a man of equal height and weight are still not generally physically equal. Muscle composition and growth, bone structure, etc. mean that on average, women are less strong and less explosive than men, and most popular sports emphasize those attributes.
WNBA teams would often scrimmage against male pick-up basketball players for practice, and they would also often lose. These were just random guys in the area, many of whom didn’t even play often.
The US Women’s National Team played against FC Dallas’s under-15 boys squad and lost 5-2. That USWNT went on to win the Olympics and the women’s World Cup. The Australian women’s team lost to U15 boys 3-0 and again to another U15 boys team 7-0; Arsenal’s woman’s team lost 5-0 to a U15 boys club; the professional squad Athletic Feminino in Spain lost to a U16 boys squad 6-0; and there are many, many more examples.
There is some research on evolutionary theory specifically about the vast differences in upper-body strength: “But even with roughly uniform levels of fitness, the males’ average power during a punching motion was 162% greater than females’, with the least-powerful man still stronger than the most powerful woman. Such a distinction between genders, Carrier says, develops with time and with purpose.”
There are very few sports where this would be feasible, and most if not all those sports are not well-watched and make very little money: shooting, archery, ultra-marathons come first to mind.
To be fair, about that women’s world cup team, if i recall correctly it was a PR move to play an exhibition match with those kids and they were not trying very hard to win. I don’t think they would truly lose to U-15 if it was, for example, a tournament.
Your overall point has merit but i think that specific example gets overused a bit.
It was hardly a “PR move,” they didn’t publicize it, and it didn’t really get traction until Carli Lloyd “admitted” it on Twitter. I’m sure they were taking it a little easy though. That being said, the Australian women’s team lost to U15 boys 3-0 and again to another U15 boys team 7-0; Arsenal’s woman’s team lost 5-0 to a U15 boys club; the professional squad Athletic Feminino in Spain lost to a U16 boys squad 6-0; and there are many, many more examples.
I actually watch more women’s soccer than men’s, so I’m not denigrating the game or quality of play, but I think you’d agree the above represents a pretty clear trend.
Muscle and bone density is a big differentiator. When I was younger I dated some women who looked very strong. Like, their legs were three times thicker than mine. Yet when it came to actual strength, their legs were a tenth as strong as mine. It was actually kind of shocking how much stronger my legs were than theirs, considering the visual differences. It wasn’t until later in life that I learned about the muscle density differences between men and women, and then it made sense. My legs felt like slabs of iron when you touched them. Their legs, despite looking outstanding, still felt fairly soft. That’s because of the differences in muscle density between biological males and females.
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