yes, the idea feels good to a lot of people, so they found a handful of examples to support it, and the thrill of being validated does the rest of the work, despite the many, many, MANY obvious counterexamples

Among other things, most major sports leagues are not actually gender segregated. The NHL and NFL both allow women. However, these are the absolute top of the top athletes, and no woman has performed at that level in these sports.

I think there was talk about the Mavs having Brittney Griner try out, and Lusia Harris got drafted by the Jazz, although she never played and it was a bit of a stunt.

The *much* narrower version of the original claim that has some truth to it is that we don't get to see how well someone like Griner could do because it is more lucrative for her to be one of the best WNBA players than scrap for an NBA roster spot

I mean, that's not really the case though for Griner (it might be now for like, Caitlin Clark) the NBA minimum salary was way way bigger than what she was pulling down in the W, which is why she was in Russia in the first place.

With Griner you're probably right more from a social perspective. Her life as the most overanalyzed 15th player off the bench fighting for blowout minutes against way bigger and stronger dudes is probably way worse than being the Shaq of the WNBA, even if the money might have been better

Yeah you're right my first post was probably overstating what I meant. We don't get to see what Griner's career looks like if she were just a player playing in mixed-gender leagues because that's what everyone does, as opposed to jumping from women's to men's.

People saw the one place where this is true, in that one Olympic shooting competition, and decided it was true everywhere.

Like we know with absolute certainty that women would be wiped out of every single track and field and swimming event in mixed leagues. The times and distances are measured! There are also zero competitive women's athletes fighting for integrated leagues. It's a bluesky delusion.

It's true that the pools of recruitment for women and men are different due to social factors, but it's not true that the gap in measured performance is best accounted in this fact, and people arguing otherwise are engaging in magical thinking freed from the burden of having to think it through.

This whole argument was brickbat fodder that pinged around right-wing spaces a few years ago (2022ish) to illustrate how divorced from reality the liberals are as a sort of strawman of what most social liberals actually think. I'm surprised that it's back, on Bluesky, mostly with sincere defenders.

BlueSky is for Twitter Refugees who wanted a more leftwing social media network Of course it’s going to include some of the crazier lefties

There are almost certainly cases where women have been segregated out in order to protect male egos (archery and shooting probably) Overwhelmingly the reason of course is to simply have a welcoming place for women to actually compete. Fencing is an interesting example where there aren't

Enough competitors for separate male and female events usually (in the US at least) and a 40 year old man might get his ass handed to him by a 14 year old girl (I've read commentary on exactly that from a member of a fencing club who says a 14 year old girl in their group is utterly lethal with a

Rapier. Very fast and agile, and also feared in competition)

"Men should not be in women's sports." bsky.app/profile/atru...

There is no chance this will be accepted as broadly true, probably not even on Bluesky anymore

I think US soccer is the best argument against this. Soccer took off for girls even more than boys in the 90s, and girls start young, train equally hard, and typically play and even dominate in co-ed for the first few years. Then puberty hits and the girls are at immediate and clear disadvantage.

I mean, i think the issue with sports is that it's an observable material reality that is broadcast to billions of people. Nobody who watches sports could ever believe something like this, and billions of people do.

If we had ESPN, but for like, statisticians collecting employment and wage data, and random dudes shot the shit about like sample sizes and methodologies, people probably couldn't debate basic economic facts, either.

Most gender-segregation is to protect the patriarchy.

I think this must be repeated a lot in some branch of academia- I see it a lot and very confidently asserted