[fxwin]

> It’s also mighty interesting how it’s always the male division that’s open, until you happen to have a sport where women are beating men at it, and then suddenly it’s the women’s division that’s the open one! (See shooting.)

Just in case you're referring to Zhang Shan winning Gold in 1992: the decision to bar women from competing in the 1996 Olympics was made before Zhang had won her medal. [0]

> Until men with genetic anomalies are equally banned from sports (for example, being an outlier in height for basketball)

We don't have height categories, we have categories based on sex. We have categories based on sex because there are physical difference caused by difference in sex that lead to advantages in sports competitions. As such, people who have physical advantages over others based on their difference in sex (e.g. going through male puberty vs. female puberty) shouldn't be able to compete in the category created to protect participants from precisely those differences.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhang_Shan#cite_ref-nyt_4-0

[jakeinspace]

I would argue that it's the formerly presumed binary nature of sex/gender that made it a logical split for all sports. While marital arts and weightlifting tend to seperate by weight as well, that is because those particular events are particularly biased toward muscle mass and height/reach by proxy. Most sports are less clearly advantaged by size (soccer, for example). You just can't practically divide entire team sports by gradations of height, because there aren't enough players in a school for more than a few squads.

If you wanted to divide by height or weight in a binary fashion to reduce the number of teams, then obviously you'll just have some sports where everyone in the under-6' team is 5'11.5, which seems not optimal and unfair.

I wish there was a good solution.

[gorgoiler]

The sports in which I’ve competed — cross country cycling and cross country running — also have handicaps for age. I always liked that type of system because it also gives both the open results and results by category, and there are lots of categories. W20 can thrash an M30, and plenty of M20s too, even if the overall winner is likely to be an M20.

It was simplistic for sure but gender identity was only a proxy for the handicap that impacted performance: the genetic disadvantage of not having been through a natural male puberty. If we can no longer rely on gender identity as the proxy then it makes sense to either drop the handicap system altogether, or refine it to look at the performance enhancing impact of genetics rather than what your pronouns are.

s/W(..)/F$1/; # Women -> Female

[kixiQu]

> We don't have height categories, we have categories based on sex.

I mean, we do have weight categories in combat sports, right? I don't see why we couldn't come up with similarly neutral categories if we think it's good to segment people out by physical advantages. The parent comment is making a good point, though: it feels like some people care a lot about physical advantages that map onto gender stuff they care about, and not a lot about weird genetic anomalies that provide physical advantages that aren't gendered.

[fxwin]

We could do that! I'm just trying to say that given categories based on (biological) sex, we should find some criterion based on biological sex to sort people into said categories, which the OC decision seems to do (at least better than the alternatives I have encountered). I don't have a problem at all with finding different ways of defining categories for competitions.

Re: anomalies - I think this is just unavoidable in any sort of category system, and I don't have a good solution for it except to consider frequency and severity.