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Re:Olympic Committee Announces a Broad Ban of Transgender At... by kelseyfrog on Thursday March 26, 2026 @03:43PM (#47534792)
The solution is simple: class every sport like boxing.

Pick a sports-relevant metric and split into divisions. Some sports will naturally fall into gendered divisions, while others will have varying degrees of co-ed competition among competitors of similar ability.

The way out of this is not to pick a better scissor of sex or gender, it's to pick a better scissor of ability.

Re:Olympic Committee Announces a Broad Ban of Transgender At... by baumy on Thursday March 26, 2026 @03:58PM (#47534955)
This "solution" can really only be proposed by someone who has not played sports. This would simply result in women being unable to compete in sports professionally, outside of a couple small niches like ultra long distance swimming and a couple sub-disciplines of gymnastics.

I do not consider that to be a good thing.

Re:Olympic Committee Announces a Broad Ban of Transgender At... by kelseyfrog on Thursday March 26, 2026 @04:05PM (#47535034)
It really depends on the way classes are divided. Dismissing the general concept demonstrates a fear of change rather than a legitimate openness to fair play.
Re:Olympic Committee Announces a Broad Ban of Transgender At... by baumy on Thursday March 26, 2026 @04:11PM (#47535106)
No it doesn't, and no it doesn't. Proposing this concept demonstrates a profound ignorance of what competition at the top level of sports actually looks like.

The concept is just bad, unless your goal is to prevent women from being able to make a living playing professional sports.

Re:Olympic Committee Announces a Broad Ban of Transgender At... by kelseyfrog on Thursday March 26, 2026 @04:16PM (#47535165)
The thing is, we're already using a scissor for ability, just a poor one with the exact problem you describe - it renders trans women unable to make a living playing professional sports. Throwing one group under the bus for another cannot be avoided so long as sex or gender are part of sports divisions.

Please let go of the need for this.

Re:Olympic Committee Announces a Broad Ban of Transgender At... by baumy on Thursday March 26, 2026 @04:20PM (#47535209)
You are clearly out of your depth. Have you ever competed in high level sports? Please don't speak on things you know nothing about. It takes a lot of gall to tell someone 'please let go of the need for this' when they are pointing this out. I will do no such thing, but I likely will give up trying to educate you.

I won't respond further unless you pick an example sport, and propose how your "scissor for ability" would work, in concrete detail. If you do this, I will be happy to explain why this would result in neither women _nor trans women_ having any chance to make a living as professional athletes.

Re:Olympic Committee Announces a Broad Ban of Transgender At... by 1718627440 on Thursday March 26, 2026 @07:18PM (#47537110)
His proposal is to make divisions by whatever way it would be the justest way. If that would be the man/woman division for a given sport, than keeping it is part of his proposal. His proposal is not going to be less just than the current rules by definition, but it IS a bit vague.
Re:Olympic Committee Announces a Broad Ban of Transgender At... by kelseyfrog on Thursday March 26, 2026 @10:47PM (#47538597)
Her* (sorry)
Re:Olympic Committee Announces a Broad Ban of Transgender At... by 1718627440 on Friday March 27, 2026 @11:57AM (#47544406)
Fair. Did I fail at reading comprehension or at making implicit assumptions?
Re:Olympic Committee Announces a Broad Ban of Transgender At... by kelseyfrog on Friday March 27, 2026 @01:00PM (#47545275)
No worries. I assumed that everyone who was trying to lecture me about women's sports was a man.
Re:Olympic Committee Announces a Broad Ban of Transgender At... by PaulDavisThe1st on Thursday March 26, 2026 @05:40PM (#47536150)
I have competed in reasonably high level sports, and my wife was US Masters duathlete of the year a few years ago (with me as her coach). I think you're wrong, though it's easy to see why.

Currently, with sex-based categories, a woman can be declared "the best in the world" and most people won't waste much time on the question "yeah, but could she beat the best men?" (granted, some will). They will accept that, e.g. she has the fastest time over 26.2 miles in the world right now, even though a few hundred or a few thousand men worldwide are faster.

If you use performance based metrics to create the categories (the way that road cycling does, for example, though still within gender divisions), that "title" would go away, and likely a woman would only be "the best in the world in division X", other than in (as you noted) some endurance, climbing and gymnastics sports where an elite subset of women could potentially be the best of "top" category.

It isn't completely obvious that this is a negative - how much of a change it would be would depend on a lot of other changes (or lack thereof) in how sport was organized. Certainly if it continued to focus on only the top division, then women would be shut out of most opportunities to be professional. But that's not inherent in the design. I do concede, however, that it is quite a likely outcome of such a category structure.

Re:Olympic Committee Announces a Broad Ban of Transgender At... by wstrange on Thursday March 26, 2026 @07:23PM (#47537149)
If we are talking about amateur sports where the stakes are low, the concept of slotting athletes into divisions makes sense.

In elite sports, no one wants to see "best in division X". They want to see the best hockey players, the best golfer, the best skier, etc. The money incentives are considerable.

This would destroy women's professional sports.

Re:Olympic Committee Announces a Broad Ban of Transgender At... by PaulDavisThe1st on Thursday March 26, 2026 @10:28PM (#47538492)
Implicit in what you're saying is that they want to see the best sex-identified athletes in a given sport. If that wasn't true, women's sports would have no audience and we know now (finally!) that this is not the case.

I personally think that we'd live in a much better world where you compete against others who broadly speaking are in the same performance category as you.

But I do appreciate that the transition to such a world would, indeed, destroy women's professional sports, and thus I do not attempt to really advocate for that transition. If it could happen overnight (it cannot), perhaps I would, but that's not where we live.

Re:Olympic Committee Announces a Broad Ban of Transgender At... by machomaster on Friday March 27, 2026 @03:46AM (#47539983)
WNBA is being sponsored by men's NBA and they would not have survived without.

The merr existence is not an evidence of success.

Kids' little leagues also exist, but can't be compared, with actual professional men's sports.

Where is women's American football? Women's baseball? Crickets...

Women's icehockey is in such a state, that there are only 2 decent countries dominating everybody, and they would get destroyed by men's amateur players.

There are only few women's sports disciplines that are actually popular on their own. Like figure skating and tennis. And the athletes would get annihilated by their male counterparts.

Re:Olympic Committee Announces a Broad Ban of Transgender At... by PaulDavisThe1st on Friday March 27, 2026 @11:00AM (#47543458)
The world's best female ultradistance runners, rock climbers (particuarly sport and bouldering, but lead also), ultradistance swimmers, are all on a par with their male counterparts and occasionally better.

Since I personally don't have any interest in team sports of any type, I have nothing to say about your observations, though I will continue to wear my "I'm here for the women's race" t-shirt whenever I can.

Re:Olympic Committee Announces a Broad Ban of Transgender At... by s1artibartfast on Friday March 27, 2026 @03:14PM (#47546992)
> I have nothing to say about your observations, though I will continue to wear my "I'm here for the women's race" t-shirt whenever I can.

Yet you would hapilly abolish them and think the world a better place? Im genuinely confused.

Would you wear a "division 2" or "slow bracket" shirt with similar gusto?

Re:Olympic Committee Announces a Broad Ban of Transgender At... by kelseyfrog on Friday March 27, 2026 @06:37PM (#47549309)
Why would you name it "division 2"? If you're going to test for SRY as the way to assign participants, then you should name the divisions "SRY-pos" and "SRY-neg". At least that would be correct.
Re:Olympic Committee Announces a Broad Ban of Transgender At... by PaulDavisThe1st on Friday March 27, 2026 @09:36PM (#47550633)
That's the exact opposite of what I'm suggesting up-thread.

Categories would be assigned based on performance criteria for the sport in question. One simplistic approach, loosely modelled on how road cycling works, would be to have categories based on race performances - you enter an "open" category, and after N finishes above a certain level, you are required to move up to "division 4". After N finishes above a certain level in div4, you are required to move up to "division 3". And so on. The idea is that you're racing against your performance peers, regardless of their gender (or age).

Re:Olympic Committee Announces a Broad Ban of Transgender At... by PaulDavisThe1st on Friday March 27, 2026 @09:33PM (#47550611)
I said that I would only abolish them if we could get to the endpoint overnight. Which clearly is impossible, ergo, I would not happily abolish them at all.

I'd happily wear a "I'm here for the D2a race" shirt in such a system.

Most people's paths as sports participants (not spectators) is that they enter a tiered system and remain there. Only a tiny percentage of people rise through that system to become truly national or internationally competitive.

One of the central problems here is that there are conflicts between what's good for the participants and whats good for fans/spectators. They are not always in conflict, but in several important ways, they truly are. 99.99999% of people who run marathons are not Eliud Kipchoge, and are not interested in a system that is designed around his level of performance and competition. But 90%+ of the people who would pay to watch marathons have little interest in a system that isn't built around talents like his. The same is true of almost all sports - solo or team - but it doesn't show up for 80% of them because there is no market for paid viewing of them. Or rather ... there wasn't until YT became what it is today. "The Finisher", a film about Jasmin Paris, the first woman to finish the infamous Barkley Marathons, has had 1.8M views, something it would never have achieved in "legacy" media.

Re:Olympic Committee Announces a Broad Ban of Transgender At... by kelseyfrog on Thursday March 26, 2026 @04:30PM (#47535329)
Let's use the present scissor and the current state of affairs, which at present excludes some women for the sake of others. Which, I'll remind you, comes with all of the problems we currently experience.
Re:Olympic Committee Announces a Broad Ban of Transgender At... by machomaster on Thursday March 26, 2026 @06:35PM (#47536696)
And solves a lot more of the problems, including the ones we are discussing.
Re:Olympic Committee Announces a Broad Ban of Transgender At... by kelseyfrog on Thursday March 26, 2026 @06:50PM (#47536844)
You do get how it doesn't, right?
Re:Olympic Committee Announces a Broad Ban of Transgender At... by fourseventy on Thursday March 26, 2026 @06:36PM (#47536714)
Trans women can compete in the men's division where they belong.
Re:Olympic Committee Announces a Broad Ban of Transgender At... by kelseyfrog on Thursday March 26, 2026 @06:53PM (#47536876)
Haha funny, but please, I'm only taking serious proposals.
Re:Olympic Committee Announces a Broad Ban of Transgender At... by 2muchcoffeeman on Thursday March 26, 2026 @03:53PM (#47534901)
Doesn’t Boxing use weight classes?
Re:Olympic Committee Announces a Broad Ban of Transgender At... by lbreakjai on Thursday March 26, 2026 @05:41PM (#47536157)
Weight classes within gender classes. Women would have no chance to compete against men of identical weight, all else equal. Men have more lean mass.
Re:Olympic Committee Announces a Broad Ban of Transgender At... by kelseyfrog on Thursday March 26, 2026 @05:56PM (#47536337)
Sounds like lean mass would be the right way to structure divisions then.
Re:Olympic Committee Announces a Broad Ban of Transgender At... by fourseventy on Thursday March 26, 2026 @06:40PM (#47536749)
Men are stronger, faster, have more dense bones, have bigger lungs, bigger hands, etc, etc, etc. Men and women are different in hundreds of ways it's not just 'lean body mass'. Men are better at sports than women. Do you even live in reality? Have you ever completed in anything in your life?
Re:Olympic Committee Announces a Broad Ban of Transgender At... by kelseyfrog on Thursday March 26, 2026 @06:51PM (#47536853)
Then create those divisions. Please be rational.
Re:Olympic Committee Announces a Broad Ban of Transgender At... by baumy on Thursday March 26, 2026 @09:29PM (#47538055)
Good lord. Absolutely nobody is going to watch boxing divisions based on lung size and bone density.

Did you actually think that lean mass would be a sensible way to separate divisions in a gender neutral fashion? That would, again, just result in women being unable to compete professionally in virtually any sport. They would be relegated to Division N, for some very large value of N. Competing alongside multitudes of biologically male amateurs, where nobody cares and nobody pays to watch. To even entertain this idea betrays a total lack of understanding of the matter at hand.

Right now you are acting like Elon Musk storming into the government and having 20 year olds cut everybody's budget. You may think you're coming in with fresh outsider perspective and an open minded way to look at things and improve them, but everyone actually involved in the domain can see a trainwreck in progress. It's not a good look.

I am quite certain it's not your intention, but you're really coming across as someone who hates women's sports, and doesn't want them to exist. On behalf of my wife and sister and a lot of the women I've known in a lifetime of playing sports - kindly keep your awful ideas to yourself. Women fought tooth and nail for the right to have their own professional sporting opportunities. Don't you dare try to take it away from them.

Re:Olympic Committee Announces a Broad Ban of Transgender At... by kelseyfrog on Friday March 27, 2026 @12:06AM (#47539025)
I wish there were some trans women in your family so you you tell them how hard you fought for them.
Re:Olympic Committee Announces a Broad Ban of Transgender At... by machomaster on Friday March 27, 2026 @03:50AM (#47540005)
And then you get a situation with as many divisions as there are people and everyone get a gold medal, everyone is a winner. The true woke paradise.

Fortunately, most people don't like to live in this hell and are against clear attempts to destroy women's sports by the clueless and/or purposefully malicious activists.

Re:Olympic Committee Announces a Broad Ban of Transgender At... by mr_mitm on Friday March 27, 2026 @06:05AM (#47540812)
Those divisions already exists. Most sports have different leagues. There are international leagues, national leagues, regional leagues, all the way down to hobby leagues or beer leagues. If we assign everyone into a league independent of gender, the highest leagues (the most popular and most lucrative ones) will be exclusively men and women will only be present in the lower leagues. No one can want this outcome.
Re:Olympic Committee Announces a Broad Ban of Transgender At... by mikkupikku on Friday March 27, 2026 @06:33AM (#47540964)
For what conceivable reason would you want to recreate the male and female division using a dozen or more proxies for sex instead of just using sex, to wind up with people being placed into the same buckets they would have been if you just went by sex in the first place? This seems ideologically motivated.
Re:Olympic Committee Announces a Broad Ban of Transgender At... by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF on Friday March 27, 2026 @11:20AM (#47543767)
The controversy in these comments answers that question nicely. It seems likely that such a change would obviate these edge cases, though they may introduce their own; that seems worthy of consideration.

Really, the question seems better turned around: why use a known bad proxy for physical ability when another one might be better?

Re:Olympic Committee Announces a Broad Ban of Transgender At... by fourseventy on Thursday March 26, 2026 @06:35PM (#47536703)
Dude, men are better than women at virtually every single sport. What are you talking about.