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Showerthoughts @lemmy.world
Pandantic [they/them] @midwest.social

With the recent issues of transgender people in sports, why don’t we move some sports over to a weight-class system?

Obviously this won’t work for all sports, but things like football, track, soccer, it would allow for de-gendered team, even allowing athletes with the skills but not the genetically-endowed physical attributes to have a place to play.

Note: I know very little about sports and being on a sports team, so please point out anything that doesn’t make sense.

263 comments

  • There’s a big issue with using weight classes in team sports: player weights vary dramatically. Take the NFL for example. Setting aside the enormous differences in weight between linemen (offensive and defensive) and all other position players, there are also huge weight differences within a given position. For example, quarterback Jared Lorenzen was 6’4” and weighed 275 lbs whereas Russell Wilson is 5’11” and weighs 211 lbs. That’s a huge weight difference!

    You can find similar weight differences across players in other leagues (NHL, NBA, and MLB). Weights don’t really correlate with overall skill level though they do somewhat correlate with position and skill set (and height of course).

    How would you classify by weight in team sports? You might think to do it by position but none of the leagues require a player to remain at a single position for their career. Players can and do switch positions, and many even do so multiple times during a game. Sports like NBA basketball don’t even have any particular rules about what a player at any given position is allowed/not allowed to do, so the positions on team rosters are more like a suggestion than a requirement.

    • For team sports, don't all firefighters have to go through the some physical stress test to show they can all operate on the same basic level? Maybe there is that minimum physicality test and if you can pass it, male or female, you become NFL eligible - maybe it's a combine thing? You can then have since that are more of less fit and capable, as with firefighters, but they've all met that standardized minimum to start. How does that not solve this?

      For broader need, maybe you could just start with the majority of the Olympics being co-ed and weight class?

      In that scenario, I think people may need to be ready to accept that there could still be a "natural" separation in performance by sex to start as even strong athletes may still be socialized to play differently. Give it a generation or so though and I think the weight class thing could normalize competition level as birth-assigned boys and girls grow up playing with each other on the same fields.

  • Forget weight limits.....I think baseball is the perfect place to start.

    I've watched baseball for 30 years. I don't like change. I understood the need for an automanic runner on 2nd during the covid years. It made sense for the context of it's time. That time has ended, and so should that rule. I hate the pitch clock. For me, baseball is sometimes not even about the game. Some men have a hard time admitting to others, or even to themselves that they enjoy the company of other men. But the truth is, we wouldn't hang out every weekend, get drunk, and watch sports together if we truely didn't care for each other. So even though you know your buddy cares about you, and you care about him, there still needs to be a game on. Now you're trying to make the game shorter? I am not a fan. I will happily watch a double header with the boys. We want MORE sports, not LESS.

    I'm also not a fan of the sensitivity of how balks are called now. Balks used to be so rare, that I had to be explained at age 19 what just happened when I saw one. This after watching baseball for 9 year already. These days it seems like EVERY game has a balk. Sometimes it's just a twitch of the leg, with no pitching gesture. In NO WAY can some of these balks be realistically interpreted as an intentional fake out pitch movement.

    As you can see, I'm a grumpy old set in my ways grey haired curmudgeon. However, even I wouldn't even mind at all if women played with men. If they can hit a 97 mph fastball, and beat out the throw to home, why WOULDN'T you want them on their team?

    The first one to break that barrier would be just as iconic as Jackie Robinson. At least you would THINK so. The reality of the situation is, women HAVE played on official MLB teams. The fact that I don't remember their names or their decades that they played is only testiment to how unfairly they were viewed. If MLB wants to promote diversity, and progressive views, we get Jackie Robinson and Larry Dolby. When the MLB wants to kill the idea, you never hear a word about it officially from them. Instead you only hear about it on youtube videos about obscure MLB facts.

    The point is, on a regular basis, I would still support competitive women playing on every team. There are some truely crappy players in the MLB (looking at you, Bartolo Colon), and if they get replaced with better playing women, then the MLB as a whole is stronger for it.

    ...........that being said, women and men should NOT play hockey together. It just wouldn't be right.

  • Nah fuck that shit. MMA integrated weight classes and that's sucked. Sumo is the only true martial art, straight up, not even pulling your leg right now

    Edit: Yeah, I mean, men are "stronger" pound for pound or whatever, but, we kind of, are idiots when it comes to thinking of sports, if we just suddenly think all sports are about explosive type 1 muscles, or muscular structure, or whatever. That's dumb, that's a brainlet comparison and a brainlet appeal, I would say. If you gain leverage in one direction, you lose it in another. If you gain a bunch of type one muscle fibers, you become a chimpanzee, but also, you gas really, really quickly, and humans are endurance predators that maximize that endurance with fine motor control even in what might be considered gross motor action. Everyone has this conception of sports as being these kinds of, oh, instant action gratification machines, where you just watch some guy get hit in the face really hard, or get tackled, and your monkey brain goes coco mode, and so obviously explosive strength is gonna be good for these displays, so, men are better at sports.

    This is not the case. Or at least, not entirely. Sports is more like a long-form storytelling vehicle with many different characters and mindless teams to it. Women can fulfill that role just as easily as men can, in many of the same contexts. If we have sports that are bad for co-ed play, then I would say, we have sports that perhaps need refining.

    Which everyone thinks is somehow like, a horrible thing to do, oh no, the sports, they're too sacred, we gotta find the best of the best, but sports have always been and remain subject to change and a ton of different shitty rulesets that everyone always hates. Basketball now, apparently, rewards a bunch of aggressive highlight-reel kinds of play, and apparently the older game used to be more defensive, I say apparently because I dunno. I know nascar has had the opposite trending for quite some time with limiter plates meant to protect drivers and the audience more at the cost of more spectacular crashes and pileups for which the sport might gain more casual viewership. And also not be boring as fuck driving in a circle for like three hours. That's not a sport getting better or worse, that's just some arbitrary cultural shift, a decision made, realistically, because of internal cost-benefit analysis at the behest of a corporation which runs the major league.

    We might have the same capacity to integrate sports into a co-ed kind of a deal, if we had the will to do so, but I think the truth of the matter is just that nobody really gives a shit about equality, except for when you bring it up.

    Me, I'm a fan of sumo, because fuck weight classes. I wanna see david beat goliath. To me, that's a more compelling casual narrative that can easily be built into a sport. Fairness is highly overrrated, and also doesn't exist, or else every match might as well just be random chance, or end in a draw. Michael phelps is some genetic freak or whatever. Go cry me a river, and then he can swim across it and back. Give me an abstract goal like "get ball through hope" or "throw guy out of ring" and then I don't need any more to it, I'm right there with you.

  • The issue isn't gender. Gender is a social construct. The issue is sex. Female sports were always intended to be for female athletes. Female athletes who choose to play female sports to have a more level playing field and to play against other female athletes find it unfair to be forced to play against male athletes playing female sports. Trans women are women but they aren't female.

    • Nah, that's simply not true if you look at the actual data about how well trans athletes perform.

      • What's not true? That trans women aren't female? That's undeniably true. That female atheletes who choose to play female sports to have a more even playing field and to play against other female atheletes find being forced to play against male atheletes unfair? That's undeniably true as well. That female sports were intented for female atheletes? That's undeniably true. That gender is a social construct? I mean...that's a central pillar of the platform so we have to agree that that's true.

        Your beliefs don't change reality and simply waving your hand in the air and declaring undeniable truths to be untrue does NOT make them untrue.

    • This post was reported for transphobia. Specifics weren't given. It seems like you use the term "female" to mean someone that was assigned female at birth. I'm not sure if language is changing in this area and I certainly don't know technical definitions. Female does seemed to be used as a gender identity as well. For example the opening paragraph here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans_woman

      I think many cultures are learning how to be more welcoming to people from all walks of life, which is great, and conversations like this one are good for discussing some of the nuance.

      Please keep things civil and assume the best of other's intentions. We are all learning. We are all human.

      Edit: spelling

      • I meant "female" in the context of biological sex as opposed to the social construct of gender as in, "woman" which may be a person who is either male or female. I am FAR from a transphobe and using the word and the reporting system on Lemmy as a bludgeon to try to silence anyone who doesn't buy into the extremist group think utterly devalues anything else that the extremists say. One of my oldest friends is a trans woman. She would VERY much disagree that I am a transphobe. My lesbian daughter whose trans and non-binary friends I interact with every day would also very much disagree.

        I would like to counter report this as a false report by an extremist pushing a political agenda and trying to silence anyone who has different ideas than them.

263 comments