So today I was scrolling through TikTok, as I normally do in the morning, and there was a content creator who brought up a story about a boy and girls team in, I want to say, kentucky, where there was a league that was, I think, from 6th to 8th grade, something of that nature, where the boys and girls competed
Isiah Smith
@isiah · 4:43
They were seen as the race of the black man just was just not able to keep up with that of the white man. Now, we've put that to rest, obviously, but we segregate women, and we have all the same stories. We have all the same tropes. We have all the same ideas about bone mass and structure and height. And, yes, it does seem as though basketball players in general are going to be taller as men than women
Let's limit the girls, inhibit the girls, make it so that the girls can't do X-Y-Z. But anyway, when there started to be headlines around an uproar around trans individuals competing in sports, I started wondering, maybe we could do something more like, do you know how in wrestling and in boxing they've got weight classes? Something kind of like that, instead of sports by gender, but broken down by maybe a variety of factors
Swell Team
@Swell · 0:15
Belle 🍕
@ReySkywalker · 0:51
I think you're absolutely right and I couldn't have said it better myself. If it was truly about the girl's safety, then they wouldn't have been removed so late. And I honestly think that it's just to protect the boys feelings. They just don't want to be beaten by girls. I do think you're onto something that instead of separating sports by gender, they could do something where maybe based on weight, like in wrestling, but also maybe some strength tests
Yeah, sports are not really my thing either, but I continue to learn bits and pieces and more about the human body. And when you think about that, gender itself is super reductive. And whatever metrics are being used, each one of those metrics is a spectrum in itself. And you can't draw a surgical line between this is male and this is female. And even if you could, you would have to draw a surgical line on each one of those metrics
Angela Kaye
@AnngieKaye · 1:51
And so we don't want to have just the scouts. And so that does translate to sports for many young men, many young women, a lot of women. Young girls build confidence in sports. They build their knack for athletic ability without the competition from boys who are going to be bigger and stronger, and they're able to bond and build friendships. The sports is about so many things that I think that they should remain separated by gender again. And what adults want to do is different
Michael Knight
@MK1981 · 4:11
Because I think as someone who's a sports enthusiast, who enjoys watching sports, who played sports growing up, I just want to see the best competitors compete. That's it. Period, the end. So we don't have to spend copious, unrelenting amounts of time talking about these things. Because if the idea is to create a society that's fair, equal, and just, all right, cool. Nothing. Nobody gets to be singled out. If women get hurt, they get hurt
Michael Knight
@MK1981 · 0:59
And maybe that's something we really need to spend time around, is trying to find ways to make people think boys and girls feel better about competition. But, yeah, ultimately, yeah, I don't think that boys and girls care that much
Michael Knight
@MK1981 · 1:40
You know, that is one part of sports that I think is really good. But I think you could still develop confidence and all of those attributes that you get from sports in a gender neutral environment. Because the thing is, I've heard the argument that if girls play with boys, they won't be able to stand out. But welcome to sports. There's a lot of people who are on sports who don't get to stand out. I ran on a championship track team
And I didn't interpret it as to be a jockeying of or shuffling of hierarchical positions of who's better, who's worse, you know what I mean? But rather than more like what you were talking about, how it was, probably everyone was pitching in with respect to doing hunting and gathering and that kind of thing, and just generally sort of deconstructing the conventional wisdom, quote unquote, of men leading the pack in this particular way, to use a poorly chosen phrase in this context
Blair Redmond
@blairbearing · 4:43
So there is the possibility that people can just go play in a coed league. When you're talking about getting into certain levels of competing and competition, then coed leagues sometimes dissipate and you can't really compete at a certain level on a coed team. So then it becomes, well, different genders want to play and they want to play on teams that are historically one gender. And should we allow them? Should we not allow them? It's hard
Michael Knight
@MK1981 · 0:48
You. Thank you for responding. It was really beneficial to have a female athlete, female former athlete, talk about this subject because we really rarely ever hear from female athletes really speaking about the subject too often. So I'm just curious from your perspective as someone who played football, because even I was too chicken shit to even get on the field like that. So kudos to you. Did you feel a difference playing with the boys opposed to playing with girls?
Blair Redmond
@blairbearing · 2:52
I've never played coed basketball other than, like, a pickup game way back when. And I'm not doing that. I'm good. Basketball is not my sport. But football was only ever played around boys. And in general, there are women's leagues. I am very much aware of that. But it's not a normal thing for women to gravitate towards in a sense of wanting to play it