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Comment by Theory5 | Hacker News Reader

I don't know the history of all sports, but the few tidbits I know all point to sex/gender separation as being initially based on beliefs that women were inferior to men. From physical sports to mental ones like chess, sex separation was due to women not being seen as equal to men.

I think its time to do away with separations on sex, and go with ones based on ability and size. Boxing does it with weight classes, why can't we do it with everything?

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Women would be crushed. As far as physical sports at the highest levels of play are concerned, women are inferior to men. That's not to say that women are lesser because of it, but that's just how it goes.

Karsten Braasch (peaked out at around 40th worldwide) beat both of the Williams sisters (both rank 1 players) back-to-back. He was twice their age and known for smoking cigarettes during changeovers. Male weightlifting records are hundreds of pounds higher than women's records. There are thousands of male sprinters who have posted a better time than the _world record_ female sprinter. I don't think there's even any data to compare men vs. women in combat sports like boxing because anybody who has ever paid any attention to sports can tell you it's an awful idea.

Yeah, we could do away with the separations, as long as you can accept that women will almost always take the back-seat at high levels of play.

>I don't think there's even any data to compare men vs. women in combat sports like boxing because anybody who has ever paid any attention to sports can tell you it's an awful idea.

Actually there is in the world of MMA. MtF fighter Fallon Fox dominated lots of biologically female fighters, in one particularly nasty incident it took her less than 3 minutes to give Tamikka Brents a concussion, a broken orbital, and leave her needing a bunch of staples to patch her skin back together [0].

If you do read the article, Tamikka Brents explains she is an abnormally strong woman, she is, but not compared to Fallon Fox. Tamikka Brents [1]. Tamikka Brents and Fallon Fox weigh in [2].

[0] https://www.attacktheback.com/transgender-mma-fighter-fallon... [1] https://www.sherdog.com/fighter/Tamikka-Brents-70699 [2] http://whoatv.com/fallon-fox-vs-tamikka-brents-fight-video/

> Boxing does it with weight classes, why can't we do it with everything?

I've often heard that women (in general) have ~5% more body fat percentage than males, because of how their body work. That means that if you have two 100kg people in optimal conditions, a man and a woman, the man would have on average 5kg of muscle more than the woman. This is a HUGE difference and wouldn't make for fair fights.

I’m not aware of a professional sports league in the US that excludes women as a matter of rules or policy - they just don’t have the physical makeup to play at that level. That’s ok, neither do you or I.

Go look up Olympic world records and compare the numbers for various events between men and women. It might not sound very nice, but women are on average physically inferior to men. At the top of any given objectively quantifiable sport, the best male athlete will beat the best female athlete, I'm guessing 99.99% of the time, although I don't know about all of the sports so some may give women an advantage I suppose.

Here's a recent study about the differences: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40279-020-01389-3

> Thus, the muscular advantage enjoyed by transgender women is only minimally reduced when testosterone is suppressed. Sports organizations should consider this evidence when reassessing current policies regarding participation of transgender women in the female category of sport.

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