the discourse around gender segregation in sports drives me nuts
"actually, most sports became segregated because a woman beat a man and the men got mad" cool, do you have a source or are you just regurgitating an anecdote you heard because it makes you feel validated?
"there's no biological or physiological basis for men to perform better than women in any sports" cool, have you ever been seriously involved in any sport of any type? have you ever experienced, say, walking into the gym and outbenching a serious female lifter of the same height and weight on your first day? have you ever experienced wrestling with a woman of a similar height and weight and experience and realising how much *easier* it is to overpower her than it would be one of the guys in your class? Because I've experienced both of those and things like them, many times.
"oh, at school there was this one girl who could beat all the boys with her hands tied behind her back" cool, do you think that a random collection of highschool kids is a representative sample without any outliers? do you understand what an anecdote is?
"oh, but women are taught to eat less and exercise less and stay small and quiet" cool, there's probably some truth in that, broadly speaking. do you think that possibly applies at all to serious athletes, many of whom were scouted when they were knee high to a grasshopper and put into serious training programs designed to maximise their chances of being a competitor?
"they should just segregate by height/weight/ability/etc." cool, do you understand that they already do this? do you realise that women have more essential visceral fat, and a female athlete in peak condition has something like 15-20% bodyfat compared to a male athlete's 8-12%, putting a female athlete at an objective disadvantage compared to a male athlete of equal height and weight? do you understand that the muscles of the upper body are much more testosterone-dependent than the muscles of the lower body? do you understand that no woman has ever been able to perform the iron cross in gymnastics, despite it being a "B-grade" skill in mens gymnastics?
"women only don't win because they're not allowed to compete with the men" cool, do you realise how completely divorced from reality this is? Most sports have the figures as a matter of public record, for christ's sake, you can very easily look at the records and say "hmm, 20 is lower than 22". And if you desegregate sports and force the women to compete with the men, the women who were previously winning their divisions—even world champions!—just start losing, and quit their sport because they'll never be competitive, and then young girls don't get inspired to get into sports and nobody wants to foster their talents, and now you just have no women in sports at all!
idk it just really bugs me. it's not un-feminist to acknowledge these well-documented physical differences, and even if you do take the (absurd) stance that they're entirely due to social factors, desegregating sports would be just about the worst thing that you could do for women in sports.
