I do think there are sports this kind of idea will be more or less plausible for. Wrestling, my intuition was, would survive scrutiny for sex segregation, although some interlocutors came at me with counterexamples on that! Rugby also, intuitively. 1/

Re showers, what if the norm simply changed so they were less communal? I am in general shy about sharing showers, although I confess complete ignorance about what role communal showers might play in team bonding or morale. /fin

So, one way to put this critique would be, if sports were ability- rather than sex- segregated, the leagues in which women competed would be so vast or multiple (as very ordinary men would share the placement of elite women)… 1/

it wouldn't be like the pros vs college or minor leagues, but like the pros vs little league teams. Women would only place among real mediocrities with men. 2/

That might be the case, but it would depend quite a lot on details of the distribution that I don't think we can presume. How frequent are real outliers? As individuals, might they gain a lot of recognition, even if the bulk of women competitors, as is already the case, don't get so much? /fin

I guess I'd say I'd want to run the experiment, again I think we're reverting to stereotype a bit. We might find it really fun to have co-ed, ability segregated teams, and they might not be as awful as you imagine. Why not try to find good ability measures and constitute leagues, see what we get? 1/

We can try running it in parallel to what we're doing now! We don't need the commissar to issue an edict! /fin

Suppose that these anecdotes do generalize and are in fact representative. (That's a big supposition!) 1/

Then if we were to develop direct measures of capability rather than relying on sex as a correlate, we'd end up effectively reconstructing sex-segregated sports, EXCEPT we'd have an ability to place outliers, including spontaneous outliers like Caster Semenya and new outliers like trans people. 2/

Maybe it's a long-term project, and in the meantime we have some muddling through to continue. But why would it not be a desirable project? /fin

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