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Seems to me like an attempt to paper over a major hole in their ideological worldview.
I've spoken on the topic before, martial arts, combat sports, and such similar endeavors based on physical prowess in an actual fight for 'survival' against another human remain mostly untouched by the forces of 'woke' and are still a place where masculinity is allowed to exist without suborning itself to female-centric norms of behavior or lefty egalitarianism.
Its a cultural arena where any and all illusions about socially constructed gender norms smack into a wall of sheer pragmatism. Quoth myself: "end of the day, there is simply no amount of social maneuvering that will make up for the strength differential between men and women, and you can't 'fake' martial arts skills without willing participants, which makes entryism nigh-impossible."
A biological male who goes through male puberty has an insurmountable advantage over any person whatsoever who hasn't gone through male puberty. Unironically, If I were forced to bet on a no-holds barred brawl between a barely-trained 70 year old male and a heavily trained mid-twenties female in the same weight class, I am picking gramps for the win. Cardio will 100% be a factor here, but also, old man strength is REAL. (Oh I'm prepared to lose my money, but absent actual medical problems a 70 year old is not as fragile as you think.) I wonder why such a matchup hasn't been done before. Hmmmm.
But biology also has a tendency to be messy and perhaps defies categorization on the margins, so we can have women who produce a lot of testosterone and maybe some weird genetic quirks that trigger the same disgust reaction as a male whalloping on a female even though, technically, if we squint, its still women fighting women. But closer to the center of the respective bell curves for men and women there are no surprises to be found.
The lefties who want to claim the only reason anyone objects to Imane Khelif being in the women's division is wanton transphobia are depending on some very, very rare and unique circumstances to justify the situation that has come about. If we apply the left's logic, literally any person who was "assigned male at birth" who transitions at any age should be eligible to compete in the women's division. That's how they treat every other sport. So if we see some jacked, bearded wrestler sweep a women's karate tournament what exactly are we supposed say that ISN'T transphobic?
But the reason I reject the idea that it is 'fine' to let a trans woman compete in a fighting sport against cis women is mostly what I alluded to up above. Biology is messy but also merciless. Just as one might be repulsed by the image of a muscular male cracking a young lady's skull, the image of a strapping young buck trading blows with a senior citizen thrice his age also tends to also generate pity for the older guy and disdain for the younger who is showing blatant disrespect for his elder and risks hurting, maybe killing someone who is much less able to recover from the damage.
BUT WAIT, age is just a social construct. A 'spectrum,' one might even say! There is no exact set of physical traits that makes someone "sixty years old" other than the date on which they exited their mothers womb! How can you assert that a 25-year-old is going to have inherent advantages in a fight over a 65-year-old? Why should these arbitrary categories justify rules that seek to protect the latter from the former? Somebody can identify as a different age than the one presented by their body, that much is true!
Well, because our current scientific understanding of how aging works... and common sense from what we can observe with our own eyes, tells us that even if we can't precisely predict how 10, 20, 30 years of time passing will impact a human body, we can be certain that the general trend will be that person will become slower, weaker, more prone to injury, and thus overall at much greater risk than the equivalent person who is 20 years younger.
So uh, when our current scientific understanding of how sexual development works... and common sense from what we can observe with our own eyes, tell us that even if we can't precisely predict how 300 ng/dL of added testosterone will impact a human body, we are still going to be certain that the person without that testosterone will be slower, weaker, more prone to injury, and overall at much greater risk than the 'equivalent' person who has 200 times their testosterone levels.
Yes, there's a plethora of other factors and the causal arrow can point in multiple directions, remember I'm granting that biology is messy.
Leaving aside whether women should be competing in combat sports at all, if they're going to have their own league or division, the rules should be focused on mitigating the risks to the competitors (and maximizing 'fairness,' I guess) and thus shouldn't be thwarted by the aforementioned weird edge cases, and definitely not thwarted by someone who can convince the organizers that they REALLY REALLY believe they're a female.
And I would say precisely the same about age divisions. A 30-year-old could in theory have the mind of a 60-year-old, but lets not force the actual 60-year-old into the ring with them because we want to accommodate the younger guy's beliefs... Again leaving aside whether 60-year-olds should be competing at all.
Lefties don't (currently) see the age spectrum as an issue worth fighting over, but dohoho they certainly will take any and every opportunity presented to fight over the gender identity spectrum. Especially when they're desperate to make inroads into the combat sports world which, as I stated elsewhere, is extremely resistant to entryism. This helps them slap a facade over the "males and females are fundamentally physically different in non-trivial ways" hole by arguing "transphobes can't even tell the difference between a trans woman and a woman who is merely huge physical outlier."
Anyhow. Maybe we revisit this topic after the Jake Paul/Mike Tyson fight
This has panned out to be an interesting subportion of the thread. I'm trying to imagine showing this to my wife, and I think an interesting question just occurred to me: where would a feminist land on this question of women's vs men's strength?
On the one hand, they want to believe that women and men can go toe-to-toe in boxing and a woman would have an equal chance. On the other hand, they want us to believe that women are in constant terror at all times that a man might hurt her. And I remember conversations on this very forum where people have been indicating that in certain situations women have no choice but to willingly go along with whatever a man wants her to do in a 1 on 1 setting, because there's a small chance he could get violent if she objected at all.
I have met women who've sincerely asserted that men and women are exactly equal in strength, speed and stamina, and women are underrepresented (not represented, I should say) among top athletes for the same reason they are underrepresented in STEM: the patriarchy favours male athletes and systematically discourages women from pursuing sporting careers which would allow them to reach their full athletic potential. These women are the minority: virtually every woman I've met is abundantly aware that men are stronger than women for reasons that have nothing to do with socialisation. One could persuasively argue that this simple objective reality is the entire impetus behind feminism as a movement - without it, a reasonable response to women complaining about male oppression might be simply "git gud" or "do you even lift?"
There are doublethinking feminists of the kind you're describing: feminists who seem to simultaneously believe that men and women are exactly alike in strength, speed and stamina, and also that all women are living in constant fear of male violence which they are powerless to defend themselves against. But I do genuinely believe that such people are the minority.
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There is a way to thread a needle wherein they argue that men just train more because they don't get harassed out of the gym and thus are more likely to get good at fighting, so you end up with men tending to be strong and 'dangerous' and women who are less so, unless they power through all the harassment and naysayers to trains as much as a comparable man. Thus they could willfully believe that a trained woman is able to take on a trained man but that most women are still 'at risk.'
However, I really wonder if anyone believes that female powerlifters could match male powerlifters if they were just given the chance to start training as early and train as hard as men.
There does seem to be a large-ish contingent who want to deny that going through puberty awash in testosterone and having an elevated level of same later on equates to VASTLY improved muscle development and bone density... even though they tacitly acknowledge that it DOES make one more aggressive overall and thus makes men more likely to assault others.
Also, I laugh a bit at the argument that women are harassed or threatened and THAT is why they won't train in certain sports as much as men... which just implies that women are unable to handle being insulted or verbally abused as well as men can, so they're still 'weaker' in a certain sense.
Well, no. It implies that women are harassed more. "If men were harassed more than women, then men would be the ones intimidated" is well within the realm of that kind of argument.
Men are harassed more. Women suffer from gendered harassment more, the definition of which is designed specifically to make women suffer from it more in order to be able to dismiss the harassment men face.
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If thats the argument then WHY are they harassed more?
Are men trained to harass females from a young age or do they have some psychological tendency for it?
Kinda just pushes the argument back a level.
The answer's generally "because society has been set up so that it works to empower men more than women; that's what 'patriarchy' means". As for why did it happen to be set up like that originally, please ask actual radical feminists, I don't know.
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I honestly don't agree with this. I went to BJJ for a couple of months just prior to starting dialysis. I was strong, not super strong but pulling 1 rep-max of 50kg over my 75kg body weight on a pullup kind of strong. I had no technique just strength and the technique was developing, but only enough to resist tapping to white belts for the 5 minute hard sparing periods. And for some of the novice white belts I was pretty comfortably in top position against (just had no idea how to submit anyone). I went up against a judo girl about the same size and weight as me. Absolute utter domination. She had been doing this since she was very young. I think I got tapped out like 3 times in the span of 3 minutes. This was in the first week of my short bjj bout, but still.
I have utter respect for BJJ as a discipline, and its one of the few areas where a female with technique can win under the rules of the sport against a male, since many submissions use leverage rather than strength. And you can get choked out at any size.
Under the rules of BJJ.
I'm not certain a female fighter can get a male to go to the ground, where the techniques work best, if he doesn't want to go down there. She certainly risks catching a devastating strike or getting body slammed in the process.
We always started standing. I mean she was a judoka so, it wasn't that hard for her to get me to the ground. If you are so heavily out skilled and you have the same weight, the strength makes very little difference. She isn't going to let you body slam her and might do the same herself. Most women are very much NOT the same weight as me, indeed majority in the sparing sessions were about 20kg lighter. Which means it would probably go down as you are proposing, weight + large strength difference. But this was the only big Dutch woman there hence the result.
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Would it have been different if you could have used strikes? Remember, no-holds-barred was the premise.
If you know how to fight standing then I think it goes without saying strength matters a lot. But I also did a few weeks of MMA (Friday was like sparring from standing with strikes allowed) I remember going against a person who was vastly superior striker (with my 2x MMA striking, you can imagine my state). But I shot quiet fast and took him down and there it was quiet easy. I imagine, given that she was so good at judo (coming from that background), etc, unless I got lucky or for some reason she just couldn't deal with striking being a part of the game, she would similarly take me down and go to town. As I replied to faceh, similar weight + huge skill imbalance is where you would get a woman absolutely dominate. If she was 20kg lighter (as is usual) I think it would be a very different story.
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I drew a similar analogy here. Why couldn't one have a "weight identity" distinct from one's biological mass?
Props to you for making that point against someone who seemingly was hellbent on ignoring it.
We could enumerate all the reasons why weight classes are necessary and good but I like to just post this video of Connor McGregor fighting the Mountain. Even under playful conditions I think its clear why this is not a 'fair' fight, and its not because Connor is/was a top 1% MMA fighter.
I wish I could believe that they'd never try to remove weight classes but yeah, if they don't care about the advantages gender confers, that might very well be on the agenda.
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A strange aspect of this phenomenon I've noticed is people somehow misremembering facts into existence that are the exact opposite of reality. I encountered this Tumblr post, where OP and several people in the notes seem to believe that Serena Williams "famously" beat a bunch of men at tennis, when the only professional match she ever played against a man she lost, and he was ranked 203rd.
It's hard to have a discussion when half of the people are wishcasting their opinions into existence. (I say this as one of the people on this forum more generally sympathetic to trans inclusion across a variety of social domains.)
My brother pointed out that whenever this debate comes up, feminists always go back to the well of the Billie Jean King vs. Bobby Riggs tennis match (that is, a 29-year-old woman beating a man almost twice her age, in which there were credible allegations that Riggs had deliberately thrown the match to get out of some gambling debts). What's striking about the match is what an outlier it is: in essentially every battle of the sexes before and since, the man has come out victorious: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Sexes_(tennis)
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Just yesterday I was reading twitter conversations spurred on by the Olympic shooting event memes and getting people confidently stating that the reason these sports (and similar competitions) were segregated was men were scared of losing to women and women were sick of being harassed by men. Community notes swoops in to point out that the decision to segregate happened in 1991 and the female winning was 1992, so something else was probably afoot.
THIS one had 24k likes. And sure maybe there's some element of that but you can directly point out that in most cases women are very much allowed to compete against men if they want. But they choose not to and usually they don't place well when they do.
Like sure, on some culture war issues a difference of opinion can be sustained because the facts on the ground are ambiguous. But thousands of people sustaining a false outlook on the world that could be refuted by simply looking at the reliable records is some serious epistemic collapse.
I wonder if there are 'strength truthers' out there who believe that female powerlifters could absolutely catch men's records if they started training as intensely as possible as early as possible and weren't being harassed out of the gym by the 'bro culture' or whatever. Actually, now that I've said it, I'm now certain there's people out there who believe that.
I would caution against taking community notes at face value without checking their underlying reference. The relevant underlying quote is :
That is, the proposal was accepted for later IOC approval in December 1991. Since the IOC's 84th session had been in September of 1991, this means that final approval must have been in the 85th or 86th session, the earliest of which was in May, three months after the 1992 Winter Olympics.
It's not clear where the note is getting "women requesting the IOC to do so" from. UIT was the (French) name for the shooting organization that eventually became the ISSF, but pretty much every group of every Olympic sport launders their calls to action through the international sporting org, so that's not proof against. But the UIT wasn't (and the ISSF isn't) exactly a knitting club when it comes to demographics, and their contemporaneous claim was that they couldn't support the matter as "only a handful of women shooters are able to qualify against men for major competitions."
((There's also a longer history; as the underlying link points out, separation of men and women's shooting sports had begun in 1984, well before 1991, with trap and skeet being the last to swap. More broadly, women were arguing in favor of discrete Women's events for new sports, an argument they had mostly won in 1990, but existing sports were as often recast as 'mixed', some of that persists to this day. There was also a contemporaneous movement, mostly from eastern europe, in favor of gender segregated sports over mixed ones, not because but because of social/religious norms.))
I'm very skeptical of the harassment explanation, especially for the shooting sports, but women do compete, albeit rarely, in non-Olympic shooting sports. Some have gender-segregated roles, some have mixed-gender competitions, some do both. Handgun work generally favors men slightly,
Bigger issue is that there's just not as many women interested. USPSA tends to have had the best luck getting interest from the fairer sex, both due to match style and for historic reasons, despite the best efforts of IDPA to try and poach. But while you have women like Justine Williams and Jessie Harrison that are absolute terrors, you don't have anywhere near the number of 'almosts'.
Yeah I just fundamentally don't believe that wanton sexism is the explanation for segregating out womens divisions.
It seems unlikely that one lady winning one medal in one year is enough of an impetus to create new divisions by itself.
Blatant corruption is always on the table.
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This doesn't pass the sniff test to me. Digging up one robust 70 year old example doesn't change anything. 70 year olds have a 3% chance of not even making it through the year on average. They are, in fact, rather fragile.
Granted I have some bias on this issue because I train with guys approaching 70, so the availability heuristic has me thinking of the most robust members of that age cohort.
But it is hard to understate just how advantaged, pound for pound, a male is over any given female. I stipulate same weight class and the average male weight for an over-60 is about 190 pounds. I want you to try and imagine what a 190 pound woman looks like. Especially if we assume she's NOT freakishly tall (another factor impacted by testosterone).
In my mind, the theoretical fight really comes down to whether the woman can avoid the guy long enough until he's mostly gassed, and then execute a successful submission. Similarly, if the guy manages to grab hold of her and keep her from getting away, dropping her with a strike to the head or slamming her hard to the ground are likely finishes. I'll stipulate that a lightly trained male is almost certainly not choking out a heavily trained female.
I assure you that the average 190 pound male looks like a sack of dog shit.
And if a 190 pound male manages to lie on top of a 190 female, she's going to have a hard, nearly impossible time getting unpinned regardless of how he looks.
We're talking about a heavily trained woman and almost untrained man. That scenario seems unlikely.
Yes, that's why its fun to consider, since we really have almost no real-world examples to prove up one side or the other definitively.
On the other hand, I watch a lot of videos of street fights, and virtually none of them depict a female KO-ing a man in any context.
Here's a Mixed MMA fight from about two months ago between TWO females and one large dude:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=lQllTuPzOXU?si=H90MBAshtGUD2IL4
The women were allowed headgear and he wasn't. Notice him turning all his attention to one and not even reacting as the other woman hits him from behind at about the 2:00 mark. Skill is not really the determinant factor here.
I cannot overstate how huge the physical advantage is for the male, even if that guy gets gassed its still not safe for a female to approach lest he grab her and just SIT on her.
How many street fights involve seventy year old men, let alone a seventy year old man and a young woman?
Virtually zero! But not quite zero.
So my priors are not well informed on this but I still have priors.
So the speculation is fun! I have to consider a number of disparate data points and project outcomes into a realm of uncertainty and argue my case based on inductive logic and reasoning from whatever similar situations exist.
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Hell, even if that was a barely-trained mid-twenties male and a heavily trained mid-twenties female in the same weight class, I would probably bet on the woman.
Since she's heavily trained, she will keep her distance, avoid the telegraphed punches and grabs and attack the joints and the groin until she can go for a throw and an armbar.
Male and female weight classes are different, a male and female in the same weight class is one where the male has a mass advantage.
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Hard disagree, the male will compensate for poor technique with brute strength and mog her.
Really? I am a mid 20s decently fit male who knows nothing about boxing and has never been in a ring. I don't think I'd manage to hold a candle against the women competing in my weight class at the olympics.
The gap is much larger than what popular culture lets people believe.
Lucia Rijker one of the best female boxers and kickboxers got knocked out by an amateur Muay Thai fighter. Polish arm wresler Ula Siekacz got in an MMA fight with Piotrek Muaboy and he brutally mauled her.
Technique helps but it doesn't substitute for all the biological advantages even an average man gets: they just hit a lot stronger and can take a lot more punishment.
Realistically the average fight between a man and a women is over as soon as he grabs her and/or she gets knocked out. You can compensate a lot with technique so top women can probably take on men that don't exercise, but introduce any sort of strength training and it's just over.
An amateur Muay Thai fighter is a huge step up from a barely trained rando like me or BC.
I am quite sure that I could pound a woman into submission if I got on top of her, but getting on top of her is the problem. You need several months of training as an adult to be able to avoid cheap shots if you didn't grow up fighting in the playground.
I'll admit I don't know how much that matters in that particular configuration. Could an expert woman neutralize the average dude in at most a couple of blows? I guess you just go for the nuts and the eyes. But you can't really go hard for that in any sort of sanctioned fight so unless you can go for a knockout that's going to involve some level of wrestling, and it's very hard to compensate the strength advantage then.
Seems like you have to thread a needle to make it work.
We were talking about a no-holds-barred fight.
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Fights between really strong unskilled fighters and really skilled but weak fighters (under marquess of Queensbury) look more like the skilled fighter dancing on the outside, trying to sneak in jabs and counterpunch while avoiding taking big hits. A woman defeating a man would look more like going the distance without taking many punches, than it would like getting a quick ko.
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I sincerely think you would perform better than you think. Even a man's skull is harder than a woman's, the woman's punches won't hit as hard.
I used to row in a past life and happen to sort of know one of the Olympic GB female rowers. Despite the fact that she almost the same height as me (height is very important for rowing) and basically the same weight class as me (if not lighter) she had a 15-20 second faster 2K erg than me (this was before she went professional), although the caveat is that I was only training 3x a week while she'd have been doing 7+ sessions a week.
Perhaps boxing isn't like rowing but equally in the other sports where I can do a direct comparison easily (like weightlifting), the Olympic women in my weight class are miles and bounds ahead of me. The lowest score for the snatch was 90kg in the 76-kg category in Tokyo 2021 while I topped out at like a 50kg snatch back when I used to train for rowing.
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I mean, if we're being 100% literal, yes, BurdensomeCount would almost certainly lose a boxing match. If he knows nothing about boxing, he doesn't know which moves are illegal, so he'd get DQed.
@faceh's thought experiment specified a "no-holds barred brawl" rather than a boxing match with rules and a referee.
In the latter case, my money's on the trained woman (if for no other reason than the man fighting cautiously out of fear of accidentally breaking the rules) - and it might well come out with the trained woman getting knocked out, but winning by default by referee's decision, because the man broke a rule.
In the former case, my money's on the untrained man: assuming he's reasonably fit for his age and body mass, he will absolutely dominate the woman through brute force alone, no matter how much training she's received.
Yep. Have to assume that both sides are allowed to use whatever tactics and techniques they like or else the victor probably wins on a technicality.
Ironically the main thing that a trained female has going for her is less fear of being punched in the face, whereas an untrained guy might flinch and cower when he gets struck.
But the other thing an untrained male might do is flail and swing wildly, and the female CANNOT afford to take an errant hit by pure luck.
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