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A modest proposal to solve the trans sports issue (and maybe also all other gender issues in human society)
(Warning: controversial and lizard brain pilled. I’m not sure how much I actually believe this, I just want to have some fun speculating)
Recently, despite the massive blue wave in the midterm election, there was one conservative victory: the state of Washington (a very blue state!) passed a ballot measure that banned trans girls from competing on girls’ sports teams. This has triggered a quick lawsuit, and I have to think it’ll get struck down, but we’ll see. At any rate, it shows what a controversial issue this still is.
My proposal: stop segregating girls and boys sports teams all together. “Separate but equal is inherently unequal.” We already make them take classes together, and in fact mix genders in almost every activity now, even the Boy Scouts! Separate male and female bathrooms are also quickly becoming a thing of the past. And women are now proudly welcomed into every branch of the military, even front-line infantry. Also, kids are fully expected to play together during elementary school sports, as well as most adult rec leagues. So why are middle and high school sports this one, weird exception where everyone wants segregation?
I think that if we’re being honest, there’s one clear reason: it’s because the boys are too much better than the girls. We make the separate girls league so that the girls can win and feel good about themselves. It’s to give them self-confidence.
But isn’t that anathema to sports? Or at least, to competitive sports where there’s tryouts and tournaments and stuff? It feels wrong that the same league which says “you must do everything to be the very best and win” also says “but we’ll make a special, easier division to give out more trophies to the weaker players.”
At a stroke, this instantly solves the transgender issue. Everyone plays on the same team. No need for “vagina inspection day” or however the hell Washington was planning to do it. (And if you ban trans girls from the girls team, then where are they supposed to play? I guess they just don’t get to play sports at all?)
You might ask, but wouldn’t this stop girls from playing sports? No, I don’t think so. They’ll still be on the team, they’ll still practice and compete. It just might stop them from being starters, because they’re probably not good enough for that. But that’s the same problem that most boys have, too. It’s not some fundamental human right to have a starting spot on the varsity basketball team.
But what about the girls’ self-confidence? Wasn’t that the whole point? Well… here’s where things get extra spicy. (Translation: deranged, half-baked, hot takes.)
I believe that a lot of problems in our current society are caused because women have too much self-confidence, and men have too little. The girl who was the star of her girls’ field hockey team gets a full-ride scholarship to Harvard, then gets recruited into a hedge fund, where she is quickly promoted to make diversity quotas. So she becomes an extremely confident, ego-tripping, “girl-boss,” with immense power to make bad decisions that damage the world, or at least her company. She makes life hell for her subordinates, and loses all attraction to any normal men. She advocates strongly for feminist programs that benefit women like herself: more money for girls sports, no trans girls allowed in girls’ sports, and more female executives.
Meanwhile, her male equivalent? Well, he diligently played sports throughout his teen years, and was objectively better than her, but not good enough to make the Varsity team. Certainly not good enough for any college to offer him a scholarship, or even really care. So he goes to his local state university where tuition was cheap. He struggles to date anyone there because he looks bad compared to the football players and celebrities. He graduates, gets a perfectly normal job, but struggles to get promoted because “they have too many men in management already.” He tries and fails on all the dating apps. He stops giving his opinion on politics, because he’s scared of getting cancelled or shouted at by angry feminists.
Mixing up the girls with the boys would change all of this dynamic. The boys would get a big shot of confidence as they realize just how big and strong they are. The girls would stop getting fake confidence at winning a separate league, and really appreciate the boys for what they are. The colleges would open up far more spots to boys, so the gender ratio there would balance out. The boys would get laid a lot more, boosting the birth rate. And then they’d go on to get better jobs and be more active in politics, thus restoring reason and logic in our society.
Am I right? Tell me how any of this could possibly be wrong.
edit: see my response to people saying that the male league is technically "open" here: https://www.themotte.org/post/4074/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/497696?context=8#context
The ideal solution technically is an ELO/MMR system like literally any other competitive environment ever, the issue however is that this is just impractical with sports. They don't play enough games to get a solid baseline, especially not when the teams are set in place so bad teammates can be carried by good ones and vice versa.
Because how sports are set up right now is inherently unfair, everyone knows it and no one seems to care about this issue except in the one limited circumstance of trans athletes. But trans athletes are not an actual issue, they mathematically can not be.
Even if every single trans athlete was an elite player that their cis counterparts can not match, the amount of people they displace from sports if they are allowed to join is only .5-1% of the population. Meanwhile 99% of the population is already displaced and that's because most men and most women are not allowed to do sports in a meaningful competitive manner already. Only the top most genetically gifted people are able to. Most people already have no chance.
Some sports are more blatant than others, basketball for instance is very obvious. The average height of a basketball player is 6'6, this is well over the 99th percentile. People say that men's sports are open to everyone, but that's not true. Men's basketball is not even open to the average man, it is only available to the genetic freaks who tower above everyone else. Likewise the WNBA is six feet. The average WNBA player is taller than the average man. The WNBA is not open to the average woman, only the genetic freaks who tower over everyone else.
Competitive sports are not inclusive, they are not fair, and they are basically impossible for the large majority of humans to participate in already. Men's sports do not include most men, women's sports do not include most women. 99% of the population is already displaced, so trans athletes barely even make a splash in the fairness discussion because the additional displaced is a basically invisible amount compared to the number who already have no access. They're a drop in the ocean of unfairness.
But no one actually cares about fairness in sports and therefore discussion of how we stop displacing 99% of the population from playing are nonstarters. They just want to see genetic freaks playing against other genetic freaks, and the trans sports discussion isn't about fairness, because again we already know no one gives a shit about that, and is instead a proxy for whether or not they're "really" their identified gender.
This might be true at the elite level, but despite being quite a bit slower than NCAA-tier elite women, as a guy I still feel "allowed to do sports" when I show up at a local foot race. At smaller races I sometimes even manage to place well in my age group.
IMO even individual sports benefit from a clear basis of comparison. I can be impressed at masters runners putting up solid times even well behind the elite winners. I think it'd be disheartening and disappointing if a 25 year old could win the 60+ division just because he "felt old". And women's divisions were created basically whole cloth in living memory (notably with opposition from some feminists in favor of a gender blank slatism that generally seems disproven today) to give these sorts of opportunities: I don't think we should part with them lightly.
If you're talking about a competition that has separate categories for men, women, juniors, masters, sport, first-time participants, and people who weigh more than 200 lbs., you're not talking about a serious competition but an event designed to attract the widest participation possible. I've been semi-involved with the organization of these kinds of competitions (I wasn't part of the organizing committee but involved with the host organization), and I can assure you that the resources don't exist to do any kind of verification beyond the honors system. A 25-year-old who "feels old" isn't going to sign up for the masters division just to increase his chances at a trophy for the same reasons that people who are actually good don't sign up for the sport division.
And these categories don't matter much for the average participant. I pulled the results for the Great Race, a 10k held in Pittsburgh every September. The top men's time this year was 31:05, and the top women's time was 34:46. The top men's master was 33:49, and the top women's master was 38:33. If the top woman raced in the men's category, she'd have finished in 30th place, which doesn't sound impressive until you consider that the men's category had 2,458 participants with a median time of 56:26. For comparison, the women had 2,671 participants and a median finish time of 1:03:02. The median man could certainly increase his success by racing with women, but going from 1,229th place to 671st place isn't the kind of improvement most people think of.
yeah running is in general a category where women and men are most equal, strength is generally where the differences lie the most. Look at a weightlifting competition and try to see what it looks like. I was shocked that me a total wimp who deadlifts 345 would be among the top lifters in the female division of a local comp.
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What would also be disheartening (IMO) is if top runners in the 60+ age category demanded the same level of social status, respect, and money received by top runners in their 20s. And if those demands were taken seriously.
It's somewhat true already: they get trophies and podium time and even press coverage in excess of much faster athletes who place outside of the top three (prize money may go a bit further, but not to say the 100th finisher). "Local athlete won the [not young] age group in [big marathon]" is a pretty regular headline in local news in my experience. The oldest finisher sometimes gets coverage too.
I'd like to see examples of 60+ runners demanding social status, respect, and/or money commensurate with that of top runners overall. And those demands being taken seriously.
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