In whatever the grip strength sport would be, wouldn't the strongest women and weakest men be in the same league according to this graph? Disjoint would mean a gap. Still, maybe the weakest-gripped men would find other sports than grip, so in practice disjoint. 1/

But don't you think there are sports this would not generalize to? I don't doubt there might be some sports where — setting aside rare but recurring spontaneous outliers and more recently trans people — capabilities are approximately disjoint, but I don't think that it is nearly all of them. /fin

Of course there would be female champions, just perhaps not at the highest weight or strength class.

Can we concede that the "sport" of chess need not be sex segregated? If that's so, are we so sure it's unique among competitive activities that typically are?

I'm glad to concede soccer points. My understanding of the game derives from whatever you call the league eleven-year-olds play at. If grown-ups are dicks to one another, that's no great surprise. 1/

Do they foul-tackle one another in what's now women's soccer? Are women more susceptible to injury if they are tackled by people of similar weight and strength? Are they worse (under the "right" incentives) at giving as hard as they are asked to take? 2/

Would the game be harmed if leagues adopted rules that incentivized behavior more like my kid's league? /fin

No, I wasn't saying you misunderstood my point, just that your tweet read in a legit amusing way! 1/

A more substantive response would be, stipulating race is less correlated with elite ability than sex, it's a difference of degree rather than kind, while the costs of discrimination arguably remain sharp. 2/

Even if outliers are fewer than they would be with race discrimination, why not make a place for them? At less elite levels, why not let everyone compete with people well matched by criteria less course than sex or gender? /fin

Here are my priors: You'll find that the right tails of the distributions are mostly disjoint, but the middles of the distributions are far from disjoint, the combined distribution has substantial mixed regions. 1/

I'm pretty sure that's right for most sports, but I'll concede it could be wrong. I'm not going to look it up, because this is a conversation far from my core interests and my time is limited. 2/

If you or anyone else wants to go to the trouble of say, charting full distributions of proxies of relevant ability (relatively easy for something like track! much harder for team sports, where observed outcomes depend on capabilities of teammates and opponents!), I'll be interested. 3/

I'd concede there is less of a trade-off to sex segregation in a sport with such (still usually implausible to me) disjoint distributions of capabilities, tho there still are tradeoffs due to outliers of various sorts (including both trans people + other potential sources of unusual capability) /fin

Soccer is not a tackle sport, and to the degree there are fouls or whatever women of similar size and strength to the men they are competing with will not be in some special danger. 1/

Ask a female soccer player what you are making up, because the answer you or I would presuppose is obviously made up, these are complicated issues that lots of people of both sexes, including people who play and compete, would disagree about. /fin

There may be sports where the distributions really are pretty much disjoint! By my priors, I'm skeptical, but that could be wrong, for some sports. 1/

And sure, for such a sport you could argue very little is lost segregating by sex or gender (or at least was until mainstreaming of trans rendered the categories less distinct). 2/

Even in such a sport, it's always possible for an extraordinary person to emerge from the inferior gender. In these cases, is the individual injustice of exclusion outweighed by the easy sorting that sex (perhaps once upon a time) enables? I guess that's a values question. 3/

But then we find that in sex segregated sport, such extraordinary individuals sometimes are banned from competing within their own sex category, cf Caster Semenya edition.cnn.com/2023/11/06/s... 4/

Given the existence of such outliers, and now the existence of trans people as well who further muddle whatever imperfect distinction across distributions that once existed, why isn't choosing more direct correlates of capability a better approach to defining like that ought compete with like? /fin

If the process was fair? I think the race analogy is apropos, some sports are disproportionate in racial demographics at top levels, and that's fine. Lower levels get more proportionately mixed. 1/

People who participate for the love of the sport mostly participate in venues that either are mixed or are disproportionate for reasons unrelated to capability segregation (pickup game or organized leagues in areas whose populations are themselves disproportionate). 2/

Promotion to higher tiers is ability based. This is all much better than having leagues or tiers de jure segregated by race, even in sports where race might in fact be correlated with top-level performance. /fin

you don't think there's a lot of overlap, among people interested in playing, between the least competitive of one sex or gender and the most competitive of the other, in most sports? 1/

that's all it takes. if the most competitive of one sex or gender would consistently dominate, that's not sufficient to render sex or gender a far from noisy proxy. 2/

if there's a middle of the unified distribution that's substantially mixed, then these categories are very noisy proxies for ability. 3/

if your only interest is competitiveness to be at the very top of the distribution, then perhaps these categories seem less noisy. (perhaps not, i'm not making the claim, but it might be right!) 4/

but most questions surrounding participation in sports are not restricted to this hyperelite level. 5/

using less noisy proxies doesn't harm sorting according to living in the very right tail. if the most elite strata by directly relevant proxies turn out to be very disproportionately of a sex, gender, race, whatever, that's fine! 6/

segregating by other characteristics or demonstrated capability doesn't preclude those outcomes, while segregating by sex, gender, race guarantees noise beneath the far right tail and uselessly may preclude outliers from unexpected categories who could compete in those tails. 7/

for most of sport that's not hyperelite, sex or gender based segregation almost certainly prevents fair competitors from meeting one another. at the hyperelite level, there's no cost to sorting by better proxies for ability whether or not the outcomes prove quite similar. /fin

why doesn't the existence of sex or gender segregated sports constitute unlawful discrimination? sports could legitimately be segregated by weight, musculature, skill, lots of characteristics rationally related to competition on like terms. 1/

but sex and gender are noisy proxies for any of this, and constitute categories discrimination by which demands elevated scrutiny under all circumstances. /fin