[PaulDavisThe1st]

I have competed in reasonably high level sports, and my wife was US Masters duathlete of the year a few years ago (with me as her coach). I think you're wrong, though it's easy to see why.

Currently, with sex-based categories, a woman can be declared "the best in the world" and most people won't waste much time on the question "yeah, but could she beat the best men?" (granted, some will). They will accept that, e.g. she has the fastest time over 26.2 miles in the world right now, even though a few hundred or a few thousand men worldwide are faster.

If you use performance based metrics to create the categories (the way that road cycling does, for example, though still within gender divisions), that "title" would go away, and likely a woman would only be "the best in the world in division X", other than in (as you noted) some endurance, climbing and gymnastics sports where an elite subset of women could potentially be the best of "top" category.

It isn't completely obvious that this is a negative - how much of a change it would be would depend on a lot of other changes (or lack thereof) in how sport was organized. Certainly if it continued to focus on only the top division, then women would be shut out of most opportunities to be professional. But that's not inherent in the design. I do concede, however, that it is quite a likely outcome of such a category structure.

[wstrange]

If we are talking about amateur sports where the stakes are low, the concept of slotting athletes into divisions makes sense.

In elite sports, no one wants to see "best in division X". They want to see the best hockey players, the best golfer, the best skier, etc. The money incentives are considerable.

This would destroy women's professional sports.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

Implicit in what you're saying is that they want to see the best sex-identified athletes in a given sport. If that wasn't true, women's sports would have no audience and we know now (finally!) that this is not the case.

I personally think that we'd live in a much better world where you compete against others who broadly speaking are in the same performance category as you.

But I do appreciate that the transition to such a world would, indeed, destroy women's professional sports, and thus I do not attempt to really advocate for that transition. If it could happen overnight (it cannot), perhaps I would, but that's not where we live.

[machomaster]

WNBA is being sponsored by men's NBA and they would not have survived without.

The merr existence is not an evidence of success.

Kids' little leagues also exist, but can't be compared, with actual professional men's sports.

Where is women's American football? Women's baseball? Crickets...

Women's icehockey is in such a state, that there are only 2 decent countries dominating everybody, and they would get destroyed by men's amateur players.

There are only few women's sports disciplines that are actually popular on their own. Like figure skating and tennis. And the athletes would get annihilated by their male counterparts.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

The world's best female ultradistance runners, rock climbers (particuarly sport and bouldering, but lead also), ultradistance swimmers, are all on a par with their male counterparts and occasionally better.

Since I personally don't have any interest in team sports of any type, I have nothing to say about your observations, though I will continue to wear my "I'm here for the women's race" t-shirt whenever I can.

[s1artibartfast]

> I have nothing to say about your observations, though I will continue to wear my "I'm here for the women's race" t-shirt whenever I can.

Yet you would hapilly abolish them and think the world a better place? Im genuinely confused.

Would you wear a "division 2" or "slow bracket" shirt with similar gusto?

[PaulDavisThe1st]

I said that I would only abolish them if we could get to the endpoint overnight. Which clearly is impossible, ergo, I would not happily abolish them at all.

I'd happily wear a "I'm here for the D2a race" shirt in such a system.

Most people's paths as sports participants (not spectators) is that they enter a tiered system and remain there. Only a tiny percentage of people rise through that system to become truly national or internationally competitive.

One of the central problems here is that there are conflicts between what's good for the participants and whats good for fans/spectators. They are not always in conflict, but in several important ways, they truly are. 99.99999% of people who run marathons are not Eliud Kipchoge, and are not interested in a system that is designed around his level of performance and competition. But 90%+ of the people who would pay to watch marathons have little interest in a system that isn't built around talents like his. The same is true of almost all sports - solo or team - but it doesn't show up for 80% of them because there is no market for paid viewing of them. Or rather ... there wasn't until YT became what it is today. "The Finisher", a film about Jasmin Paris, the first woman to finish the infamous Barkley Marathons, has had 1.8M views, something it would never have achieved in "legacy" media.

[kelseyfrog]

Why would you name it "division 2"? If you're going to test for SRY as the way to assign participants, then you should name the divisions "SRY-pos" and "SRY-neg". At least that would be correct.