Should we stop splitting sports by gender and just let everybody compete together? (fedia.io)

submitted 2 months ago by atro_city@fedia.io to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world

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No more men's and women's league, no more "gender eligibility" requirements, a common dresscode, same standards and rules for all.

Edit: since it looks like people missing the word let: the suggestion isn't to force desegregation. It's to allow it or even make it the default. Someone else made a good suggestion: segregate by attributes specific to the sport. In boxing it's weight class, in basketball it could be height, in biking it could even be doped and non doped. Sex and gender need not be the very first thing to segregate by.

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[-] lvxferre@mander.xyz 5 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

I think that by default sports should have a single league for everyone, unless data shows that some physical attribute has an undue impact on performance. Then leagues should be split by that attribute.

That attribute should not be immediately assumed to be sex. Often I feel like sex is being used as a proxy for something else, partially correlated; such as weight or height.

a common dresscode, same standards and rules for all

Yes.

[-] flamingo_pinyata@sopuli.xyz 2 points 2 months ago

Well said. I often think that discrimination in general is actually based on errors in what's known as feature selection in ML.
Humans observe the world, notice certain patterns (such as between weight and sex), but then unconsciously perform dimensionality reduction to simplify their mental model of the world. Our software is unfortunately buggy.

There's also the question of training dataset. If you always see people of certain sex in specific roles, you might conclude that's the way it's supposed to be.
There's a commonly shared but apocryphal story about models recognizing cloudy skies instead of tanks because of the data they were trained on. https://gwern.net/tank

[-] atro_city@fedia.io 0 points 2 months ago

I think that by default sports should have a single league for everyone, unless data shows that some physical attribute has an undue impact on performance. Then leagues should be split by that attribute.

Yes, precisely what I mean. I wasn't suggesting that all sports be forced to be exclusively mixed, yet somehow that's what people understood the question as.

this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2024

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