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Notes -
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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