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by txrx0000 77 days ago
Grouping based on skill would achieve what you describe and then some. It would eliminate every kind of advantage, not just sex-based advantage.
2 comments

Sport does that already. The Olympics is the very top skill tier.

So you're just suggesting making everything mixed-sex, and having very few women at the Olympics?

> So you're just suggesting making everything mixed-sex, and having very few women at the Olympics?

Yeah. It would work like video game rankings. Top-ranked players are top-ranked because of skill, and if they happen to be mostly men for most games, so be it.

But I get your point. The crux of the problem is most people don't want to see skill-based matchmaking. They want to see the best man, the best woman, or the best disabled person, etc. The categories are already defined in people's minds as cultural constants. The trans people don't like this because they feel excluded by both male and female categories, so they argue in bad faith that there's no physical difference between females and trans-females or males and trans-males. Our long-term options as a society are to either 1) change culture so that people get used to skill-based matchmaking like in video games, or 2) ignore trans people and wait for this issue to disappear when future tech allows a man to transfer his consciousness into a female body and vice versa.

Since 2) is quite far out technologically, I propose 1).

If we can admit of best male, best female, best disabled, best under the age of 18, etc, we can certainly admit of best trans-male; best trans-female.
That's a possible compromise, but a high maintenance one. It would set a precedent for other groups, and then we'd have to add a new category every time people complain.

I think we should just make the Olympics universal and let anyone compete for the title of absolute best in the world, no qualifiers. Detach the existing categories too, like men-only or women-only. Make all category-gated games a separate deal, like Paralympics. Each group can organize their own variant if they want.

However, the point is not to group by advantage. It is to create a separate category for women to compete in where women can win. Any grouping that failed at this purpose misses the mark