I think another thing that should be discussed when bringing up the topic of WWCR is how demoralizing it can be when you’re separated into another category based on your gender.
I am assigned female at birth and played multiple sports as a kid. I pretty much quit all sports once I was moved from a co-ed team to an all female team where we only competed against other girls. While I could outplay a good chunk of my male teammates, it signaled to me that, because I identified as a girl at the time and people perceived me as female, that I was not considered as “good” as my male teammates, and that was one of the worst feelings I ever experienced up to that point. It didn’t encourage me at all, because it signaled to me that, no matter how well I did, being a “girl” mattered more to people. And so I quit.
The “separate but equal” thing thrown around is bullshit. These women deserve to be competing alongside men in the same categories, not to have their sport segregate them into a different competition based on the gender they were assigned at birth.
There were a million and a half other ways to do this, but the fact that this was the approach take signals to me how little they care about these women and how much they want them to fail and not compete.
