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What are you actually trying to claim here? "Children's sports are not literally the same as young adults'" is a very different claim than "women's sports matter, and should matter, as little as children's sports compared to men's".
Personally, I believe that humans reaching the height of what their bodies can perform does deserve celebration. In that, women's sports are equal to men's sports because exceptional women are still exceptional. Local leagues and children's leagues are transitional, at least in theory, and that's why they are not the same as women's leagues.
Should I have a daughter, my fatherly advice to her will not include "even if you become the best of all women in X, this won't matter in the slightest because male boys are still going to be better than you" or whatever argument against female sports is common those days. You're welcome to tell your daughters otherwise, of course.
Should you have a daughter you would do her a disservice to imply anything other than women's sports are not the same as men's sports. They are unequal(biologically), and that's fine.
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As stated, this is a fine and consistent view (professional sports is ultimately about entertaining the fans, so it is up to the fans to decide what is entertaining), and the standard one I hear in defence of women's sports.
But do you actually believe this as stated? If we look at Olympic medalists in the men's 100m sprint, all 33 of the Gold/Silver/Bronzes since 1984 have been Black (the closest exception being Marcell Jacobs, who is Black x White) And looking even further, the remainder have been White.
If the committee were to split the 100m into a Black, White, and Other Race category (with the Black category in practice being the open category, and the White category open to any non-Black), would you consider a winner worthy of celebration? It is still true that an exceptional (amongst non-(Black/White)s) runner is exceptional.
And even more generally - many people's physical peaks will vary based on genetics (but in ways that don't count as an actual disability, e.g. a healthy man who cannot put on muscle very well) - would you also consider them reaching their respective peaks as not only worthy of celebration (I'm happy with celebrating it) but of deserving a special segregated category (that is treated as equal to the open category) with its own parallel medals?
I'm guessing that you don't (certainly, this is an unpopular view amongst women's sports defenders as a whole) - so I'm not sure how to defend women's sports (and disabled sports) without somehow privileging the genetic shortcoming (vis-a-vis physical sports) of XX chromosomes (and the various genetic defects that count as medical disabilities) over any other kind of shortcoming.
And I don't think it is a bad thing to privilege XX-having (women really are special in the big picture of society) - but I don't think it makes sense in the generalised abstract "everyone should be celebrated for reaching their full potential" way you seem to be gesturing towards.
I do privilege the XX-having as a segregated category.
I'll try to explain with an example. Suppose the human species is split into two fantasy races - one is 9ft tall on average, and the other 3ft tall (with all the commeasurate differences in peak ability). Assuming that we've found an equilibrium in society in most things, rather than fighting forever fantasy race wars or a genocide/utter subjugation of one by the other, it makes perfect sense to me that we would have a 9-footer league in sports and a 3-footer league, and the 3-footer league would be treated as "real sports", rather than being dismissed by all of society as insignificant simply because 9-footers can run sprints thrice as fast.
Now, if you look at sports cynically, then genes determine what your peak is, genes determine how tenacious you are, parents and infrastructure determine how much you're railroaded into professional sports, and political lobbying determines what kind of supplements are considered legitimate as opposed to doping.
Once you choose to not look at sports cynically, then splitting the Real Sports into two leagues based on two groups, where:
appears to be both a minimal subdivision and a necessary one, if one is to promote general admiration for one's physical form in society. Things such as black people being slightly more represented among peak runners or white people being slightly more represented among peak [stereotypically white-dominating sport] do not appear to warrant further splitting.
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I'm claiming that men's sports and women's sports are not "equal". Not that the latter "doesn't matter in the slightest".
I tell my daughter to to as many sports as she likes, to any level she can achieve, and the more she does the better. I don't tell her that regardless of her actual abilities, her performance and/or the interest of spectators will be in any sense "equal" to that of any given others.
When your constitution says "all people shall be equal before the law", do you feel compelled to say "but they're not, why must we pretend otherwise"?
"All people are equal before the law" is a declaration of intent, not a statement of biological fact. And equality before the law has nothing whatsoever to do with individual judgments on what sorts of athletes should receive what level of social acclaim. No one is trying to arrest the women's olympic team for the crime of sporting while female.
Sure, but they will get arrested for excluding men who claim to be women, or at least punched really hard by an example of the same.
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Honestly, yes. I think we're well past some nebulous "equality" being a useful social fiction, and well into it having become the object of a socially debilitating cult.
When "equality before the law" meant "there are no longer hereditary aristocrats for whom a separete code of laws applies", it was useful. When it is taken to mean "the legislature is not to distinguish between races, genders or religions", then at least that's actionable. But when "the law" is a ten-million-pages nightmare of exceptions, intentional and accidental loopholes, carveouts, special interests, favored and disfavored groups, discretionary budgets and authorities wielded in suspiciously un-equal ways, and a wide array of impossible impositions on an uncooperative reality, then good riddance. The fiction is entirely at odds with the facts.
I know it's a very important word to many people, but yes, absolutely, when someone tells me that different people are equal, then I feel very strongly compelled to ask "IN WHAT SENSE?".
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I kinda do.
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