Gender/Sex Segregation in Sport

Main Claim

Main Claim: Separating men and women in sports is discrimination and should not occur.

‘It is assumed that, in many sports contexts, it is appropriate to discriminate (distinguish) between women and men and to have men competing exclusively with men, and women competing exclusively with women ...This is strange. If sexual discrimination is objectionable in most areas of our lives, why should it be acceptable in sports?’

Two claims here:

1. This separation counts as discrimination
2. This discrimination is wrong

Consider two uses of the work ’discrimination’.

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Main Argument

• “The reasons for giving up sexual discrimination within sports… is simple. In sports it is crucial that the best person wins. The sexual differences are simply irrelevant. If a female athlete can perform better than a male athlete, this female athlete should be allowed to complete with, and beat, the male athlete. If she cannot beat a certain male athlete, so be it. If the competition was fair, she should be able to face the face that he was more talented. It really is as simple as that. Sexual discrimination within sports does not have any better rationale than sexual discrimination in any other fields of our lives.”

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• Tannsjo’s focus is on countering various arguments for segregation.

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Weight Class Segregation

• Is separating men and women analogous to separating by weight class?
• Tannsjo is ok with weight classes but not with sex discrimination.
• The difference: Weight classes are of ‘immediate relevance’ to the sport in question. But this is not the case with gender.
• ‘there is nothing objectionable about having weight classes in boxing (a sport in which weight is of direct relevance to winning), it is objectionable to have sexual classes (sex is only indirectly and statistically relevant to winning in boxing).’

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Weight Class Segregation

• What does ”immediate relevance” mean? Why is weight immediately relevant to performance in boxing but sex/gender is not.
• “Sexual discrimination is different: it takes place on the ground that, on average, women perform less well than men in certain sports.”
• Two issues:
• (1) Maybe this is due to social factors and could be changed.
• (2) Even if that’s not the case, sex/gender is only statistically relevant to success in boxing.
• But isn’t this true with weight too?
• “If boxing should be allowed at all, it should be allowed in a form where individuals of both sexes can compete safely with each other.”

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Male Aggressiveness

• ‘if some women defeat some me, then this would trigger violent responses from these men, or so the argument goes.’
• But Tannsjo argues we can just deal with the aggressiveness in other ways. We can punish it harshly, for example.
• Also, sports could be modified to make aggression less important. More on this later.

Discouraging Women

“It is true that in most sports there are some women who can beat most men, but it is also true that in many sports some men can beat all women.”

Would this be discouraging?

It depends on whether this is due to social reasons that can be changed and overcome.

If this is true then it might, in fact, motivate certain women.

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Discouraging Women

But imagine that there are differences that cannot be overcome?

If there are some cases where there is some non-social reason why men would win, that still doesn’t give a reason for such separation.

Racial differences shouldn’t cause us to separate sports, for example.

How far does this argument go? Why separate by species? ‘if the differences between men and hunting leopards were merely statistical, so that some men could beat some hunting leopards, then I am not so sure that competitions between men and beasts would seem so outlandish’

Unique Value of Female Sports

Maybe we should keep segregation because of the distinctive value of women’s sport.

Tannsjo thinks that this doesn’t motivate segregation but developing different sports.

“To a considerable an frightening extent, in many sports the male is simply the ideal’.

But we should develop sports that are less focused on traits traditionally associate with masculinity.

How to test?

There are additional reasons against separating come from the difficulty of coming up with a clear criterion of separation and the possible immorality of running the relevant tests.

You could test on the basis of genitalia. But (i) that seems immoral, (ii) there isn’t a clear separation, (ii) in what sense is genitalia relevant to sport?

We could test for chromosones. But there are lots of cases of chromosomal abnormality

We could test for testosterone. But there is a huge amount of variance in that too – how are we supposed to draw the line?