#*segregated sports

[radioactivespiderblood]

The only reason almost all sports are segregated in the first place is misogyny. When women were first allowed to compete in sports they competed against men, the assumption was likely that a woman could not possibly beat a man in a physical contest but they did and it made men very angry. It wasn't long before nearly every sport was segregated and scored in a way that men and women's scores could not be compared. I mean, even chess, a purely mental game is almost always segregated. Why? Because men, especially chess playing men, hate to lose to women.

the fact that any athlete can be subjected to "gender testing" on a whim because osmeone thinks she is too strong, too fast, just simply Too Good to be a woman is so fucking antifeminist, how can these people not see it?

[redstonedust]

its wild watching the telephone game of misinformation happening with imane khelif but tbh i think they 100% could put a man in a boxing ring against a woman and so long as they're in the same weight class i wouldnt give a shit. like there are cis people sharing photos of the fight going ''its SO HORRIBLE to watch a WOMAN get PUNCHED this is an OUTRAGE'' its boxing. thats how boxing works? they signed up to get punched? do you not understand sports?

[roomwithavoid]

trans people in sports/bathrooms

[femmesandhoney]

if u cant answer the question of what human rights trans people as a collective group are lacking its because they already have human rights you dumb fucks have no clue what "human rights" even applies to lmao

[rosethyme]

I competed in Judo as a teenager and it was gender segregated. Every single tournament I went to my weight class was combined with another (usually the lighter weight class, I’m tall) and I’d get creamed by someone smaller and with more experience. I would have had way more opportunity to grow in the sport if I could have had a bunch of matches with boys in my weight class, but the only time I could do that was at the home dojo Eventually quit because I was tired of driving for hours to wait around for hours to loose one match and win a second place (last place) trophy

God, anyone else remember when everyone understood that the correct feminist position about sports was that women should be allowed to compete with men because they're just as capable? When it was a trope in media to have the mysterious star athlete who just blew everyone else out of the water to take off her helmet and reveal that she was a woman the whole time?

Now people are rabidly arguing that supposed "men" (trans women) have inherent insurmountable biological advantages in literally every single possible activity and cis women are too weak and dainty and unskilled to ever compete and must be protected, and then they try to call themselves feminists who are being silenced as if that's not just the mainstream sexist patriarchal opinion

Anyway, desegregate sports. There was never any reason to separate them by gender in the first place

[lizardsfromspace]

As TERFs fall deeper down the transphobia hole they eventually loop around to a level of misogyny typically only seen in MRA pick-up manuals. They start out a bit concerned, and five months later they're shouting about how trans women need to be banned from chess bc AFAB brains are just not as smart as AMAB brains. They slide from "women can do anything men can!" to a level of "women are dainty and must be protected"ness that would make a tradwife blogger blush. They've successfully engineered the belief set of a Reddit incel with nothing but a parasocial relationship with JK Rowling, a incoherent urge to Own the Transes and a box of Tweets Xs

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"The Progressives’ design for the penitentiary did alter the system of incarceration. Their ideas on normalization, classification, education, labor, and discipline had an important effect upon prison administration. But in this field, perhaps above all others, innovation must not be confused with reform. Once again, rhetoric and reality diverged substantially. Progressive programs were adopted more readily in some states than in others, more often in industrialized and urban areas, less often in southern, border, and mountain regions. Nowhere, however, were they adopted consistently. One finds a part of the program in one prison, another part in a second or in a third. Change was piecemeal, not consistent, and procedures were almost nowhere implemented to the degree that reformers wished. One should think not of a Progressive prison, but of prisons with more or less Progressive features.

The change that would have first struck a visitor to a twentieth-century institution who was familiar with traditional practices, was the new style of prisoners’ dress. The day of the stripes passed, outlandish designs gave way to more ordinary dress. It was a small shift, but officials enthusiastically linked it to a new orientation for incarceration. In 1896 the warden of Illinois’s Joliet prison commented that inmates “should be treated in a manner that would tend to cultivate in them, spirit of self-respect, manhood and self-denial. . . , We are certainly making rapid headway, as is shown by the recently adopted Parole Law and the abolishment of prison stripes.” In 1906, the directors of the New Hampshire prison, eager to follow the dictates of the “science of criminology” and “the laws of modern prisons,” complained that “the old unsightly black and red convict suit is still used. . . . This prison garb is degrading to the prisoner and in modern prisons is no longer worn.” The uniform should be grey: “Modern prisons have almost without exception adopted this color.” The next year they proudly announced that the legislature had approved an appropriation of $700 to cover the costs of the turnover. By the mid-1930’s the Attorney General’s survey of prison conditions reported that only four states (all southern) still used striped uniforms. The rest had abandoned “the ridiculous costumes of earlier days.”

To the same ends, most penitentiaries abolished the lock step and the rules of silence. Sing-Sing, which had invented that curious shuffle, substituted a simple march. Pennsylvania’s Eastern State Penitentiary, world famous for creating and enforcing the silent system, now allowed prisoners to talk in dining rooms, in shops, and in the yard. Odd variations on these practices also ended. “It had been the custom for years,” noted the New Hampshire prison directors, “not to allow prisoners to look in any direction except downward,” so that “when a man is released from prison he will carry with him as a result of this rule a furtive and hang-dog expression.” In keeping with the new ethos, they abolished the regulation.

Concomitantly, prisons allowed inmates “freedom of the yard,” to mingle, converse, and exercise for an hour or two daily. Some institutions built baseball fields and basketbaIl courts and organized prison teams. “An important phase in the care of the prisoner,” declared the warden of California’s Folsom prison, “is the provisions made for proper recreation. Without something to look forward to, the men would become disheartened. . . . Baseball is the chief means of recreation and it is extremely popular.” The new premium on exercise and recreation was the penitentiary’s counterpart to the Progressive playground movement and settlement house athletic clubs.

This same orientation led prisons to introduce movies. Sing Sing showed films two nights a week, others settled for once a week, and the warden or the chaplain usually made the choice. Folsom’s warden, for example, like to keep them light: “Good wholesome comedy with its laugh provoking qualities seems to be the most beneficial.” Radio soon appeared as well. The prisons generally established a central system, providing inmates with earphones in their cells to listen to the programs that the administration selected. The Virginia State Penitentiary allowed inmates to use their own sets, with the result that, as a visitor remarked “the institution looks like a large cob-web with hundreds of antennas, leads and groundwires strung about the roofs and around the cell block.”

Given a commitment to sociability, prisons liberalized rules of correspondence and visits. Sing-Sing placed no restrictions on the number of letters, San Quentin allowed one a day, the New Jersey penitentiary at Trenton permitted six a month. Visitors could now come to most prisons twice a month and some institutions, like Sing-Sing, allowed visits five times a month. Newspapers and magazines also enjoyed freer circulation. As New Hampshire’s warden observed in 1916: “The new privileges include newspapers, that the men may keep up with the events of the day, more frequent writing of letters and receiving of letters from friends, more frequent visits from relatives . . . all of which tend to contentment and the reestablishment of self-respect.’? All of this would make the prisoners’ “life as nearly normal as circumstances will permit, so that when they are finally given their liberty they will not have so great a gap to bridge between the life they have led here . . . and the life that we hope they are to lead.”

These innovations may well have eased the burden of incarceration. Under conditions of total deprivation of liberty, amenities are not to be taken lightly. But whether they could normalize the prison environment and breed self-respect among inmates is quite another matter. For all these changes, the prison community remained abnormal. Inmates simply did not look like civilians; no one would mistake a group of convicts for a gathering of ordinary citizens. The baggy grey pants and the formless grey jacket, each item marked prominently with a stenciled identification number, became the typical prison garb. And the fact that many prisons allowed the purchase of bits of clothing, such as a sweater or more commonly a cap, hardly gave inmates a better appearance. The new dress substituted one kind of uniform for another. Stripes gave way to numbers.

So too, prisoners undoubtedly welcomed the right to march or walk as opposed to shuffle, and the right to talk to each other without fear of penalty. But freedom of the yard was limited to an hour or two a day and it was usually spent in “aimless milling about.” Recreational facilities were generally primitive, and organized athletic programs included only a handful of men. More disturbing, prisoners still spent the bulk of non-working time in their cells. Even liberal prisons locked their men in by 5:30 in the afternoon and kept them shut up until the next morning. Administrators continued to censor mail, reading materials, movies, and radio programs; their favorite prohibitions involved all matter dealing with sex or communism. Inmates preferred eating together to eating alone in a cell. But wardens, concerned about the possibility of riots with so many inmates congregated together, often added a catwalk above the mess hall and put armed guards on patrol.

Prisoners may well have welcomed liberalized visiting regulations, but the encounters took place under trying conditions. Some prisons permitted an initial embrace, more prohibited all physical contact. The rooms were dingy and gloomy. Most institutions had the prisoner and his visitor talk across a table, generally separated by a glass or wire mesh. The more security-minded went to greater pains. At Trenton, for example, bullet-proof glass divided inmate from visitor; they talked through a perforated metal opening in the glass. Almost everywhere guards sat at the ends of the tables and conversations had to be carried on in a normal voice; anyone caught whispering would be returned to his cell. The whole experience was undoubtedly more frustrating than satisfying.

The one reform that might have fundamentally altered the internal organization of the prison, Osborne’s Mutual Welfare League, was not implemented to any degree at all. The League persisted for a few years at Sing-Sing, but a riot in 1929 gave guards and other critics the occasion to eliminate it. One couId argue that inmate self-rule under Osborne was little more than a skillful exercise in manipulation, allowing Osborne to cloak his own authority in a more benevolent guise. It is unnecessary, however, to dwell on so fine a point. Wardens were simply not prepared to give over any degree of power to inmates. After all, how could men who had already abused their freedom on the outside be trusted to exercise it on the inside? Administrators also feared, not unreasonably, that inmate rule would empower inmate gangs to abuse fellow prisoners. In brief, the concept of a Mutual Welfare League made little impact on prison systems throughout this period.

If prisons could not approximate a normal community, they fared no better in attempting to approximate a therapeutic community. Again, reform programs frequently did alter inherited practices but they inevitably fell far short of fulfilling expectations. Prisons did not warrant the label of hospital or school.

Starting in the 1910’s and even more commonly through the 1920's, state penitentiaries established a period of isolation and classification for entering inmates. New prisoners were confined to a separate building or cell block (or occasionally, to one institution in a complex of state institutions); they remained there for a two- to four-week period, took tests and underwent interviews, and then were placed in the general prison population. In the Attorney General’s Survey of Release Procedures: Prisons forty-five institutions in a sample of sixty followed such practices. Eastern State Penitentiary, for example, isolated newcomers for thirty days under the supervision of a classification committee made up of two deputy wardens, the parole officer, a physician, a psychiatrist, a psychologist, the educational director, the social service director, and two chaplains. The federal government’s new prison at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, opened in 1932 and, eager to employ the most modern principles, also followed this routine. All new prisoners were on “quarantine status,” and over the course of a month each received a medical examination, psychometric tests to measure his intelligence, and an interview with the Supervisor of Education. The Supervisor then decided on a program, subject to the approval of its Classification Board. All of this was to insure “that an integrated program . . . may lead to the most effective adjustment, both within the Institution and after discharge.”

It was within the framework of these procedures that psychiatrists and psychologists took up posts inside the prisons for the first time. The change can be dated precisely. By 1926, sixty-seven institutions employed psychiatrists: thirty-five of them made their appointments between 1920 and 1926. Of forty-five institutions having psychologists, twenty-seven hired them between 1920 and 1926. The innovation was quite popular among prison officials. “The only rational method of caring for prisoners,” one Connecticut administrator declared, “is by classifying and treating them according to scientific knowledge . . . [that] can only be obtained by the employment of the psychologist, the psychiatrist, and the physician.” In fact, one New York official believed it “very unfair to the inmate as well as to the institution to try and manage an institution of this type without the aid of a psychiatrist.”

Over this same period several states also implemented greater institutional specialization. Most noteworthy was their frequent isolation of the criminal insane from the general population. In 1904, only five states maintained prisons for the criminally insane; by 1930, twenty-four did. At the same time, reformatories for young first offenders, those between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five or sixteen and thirty, became increasingly popular. In 1904, eleven states operated such facilities; in 1930, eighteen did. Several states which constructed new prisons between 1900 and 1935 attempted to give each facility a specific assignment. No state pursued this policy more diligently than New York. It added Great Meadow (Comstock), and Attica to its chain of institutions, the first two to service minor offenders, the latter, for the toughest cases. New York‘s only rival was Pennsylvania. By the early 1930’s it ran a prison farm on a minimum security basis; it had a new Eastern State Penitentiary at Grateford and the older Western State Penitentiary at Pittsburgh for medium security; and it made the parent of all prisons, the Eastern State Penitentiary at Philadelphia, the maximum security institution. Some states with two penitentiaries which traditionally had served different geographic regions, now tried to distinguish them by class of criminals. In California, for instance, San Quentin was to hold the more hopeful cases, Folsom the hard core.

But invariably, these would-be therapeutic innovations had little effect on prison routines. They never managed to penetrate the system in any depth. Only a distinct minority of institutions attempted to implement such programs and even their efforts produced thin results. Change never moved beyond the superficial."

- David J. Rothman, Conscience and Convenience: The Asylum and Its Alternatives in Progressive America. Revised Edition. New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 2002 (1980), p. 128-134

[lastoneout]

I think terfs are a really good example of the whole "far right people can believe seemingly contradictory things without a shred of self-awareness" given that they simultaneously believe women are inherently better than men AND that it's absolutely 100% impossible for a woman to beat a man in any competition at all bcs apparently we just naturally suck at everything.

[thehumantrampoline]

Hey why the FUCK is professional wrestling gender segregated though?

Many people smarter and more articulate than me have gotten into why gender segregated sports are bullshit and I could rant about that too, I did for twenty minutes to my partner this evening lol, but pro wrestling! is not!! a competitive sport!!! It's a television show! They are stunt performers!!! The only useful differentiation in actual wrestling would be weight class but they don't divide the wrestlers that way WITHIN the men's and women's division, it's a very common bit to pit a little guy against a big guy. They are stunt performers in a scripted show where the men's and women's storylines are kept separate because they're playing an imaginary sport and all our real sports are also nonsensically segregated!!!!! Make it make sense!!!

[unknown-lifeform]

I would take anything that vro0m posts with a screenshot with a grain of salt. There's a reason why she's not showing you the rest of those anon asks. In this particular instance of the anon asking why women can't have their own motorsport series where they can achieve the same success as Martina Navritolova, Serena Williams, or Simone Biles. All of these athletes are household names (rightfully so) and only compete with other women. Why is that viewed as a bad thing? Men are NOT superior to women physically. Having a different set of abilities does NOT make women inferior. In the case of gymnastics, women's gymnastics is significantly more popular than men's. Men are not as flexible as women and don't have the same sense of balance, so they can't perform the same gymnastic skills at the same level as women, which makes women's gymnastics popular. Same with cheerleading, which women also dominate.

F1Academy can be successful if the same women supporting F1 did the same for F1Academy. Female athletes can absolutely be successful in their own right, but we have to support them. This is the part of the ask that vro0m refused to share and dismissed with "sure, honey."

I'm absolutely howling in laughter because I have 0 fucking horses in this race. I'm not an F1 fan. I don't give a shit. I saw your ask and it made points so dumb that even I, with 0 stakes in it, couldn't help but point out you sound like an idiot. And since I guess you got blocked you now have to come and bitch at anyone in the replies huh

Yes (cis) men and (cis) women can have different natural skillsets. I used to do martial arts, I did it for close to ten years, I'm aware of how different bodies work, how a different center of mass can give you different advantages, and so on and so fucking forth. And as someone who got their fair fucking share of hits from people of varying age, gender, and size, I will tell you I am 100% in favor of male and female martial artists of the same weight class to be able to compete against each other

Also you absolute buffoon you want to know a statistic about cis women? They are on average shorter than cis men. And you know what being short does? It gives you a major fucking advantage at gymnastics, because short people are more flexible naturally. And also that no one fucking tells teenage boy to do stretches, I remember back in high school how all my male classmates said they barely did any kind of stretching at football or basketball practice, and that many of them regarded physical activity that included regular stretching (gymnastics, yoga, the likes) as a boring girl sport because to them if it didn't involve running after a ball it was a boring girl sport. No fucking wonder some guy that is 1.80 tall and has never done a stretch in his life can't bend as much as a 1.50 girl that does it regularly

Now go clown in someone else's askbox thank you

[synthient]

Greatest feminist minds of our generation are now bringing us "womanhood is a disability"

[2024skin]

This is a classic case of projection but to me being a black champion boxer who was selected by her country to represent them at the Olympics and then having her entire career and presence at the event called into question because some random white people thought she didn't belong there just reeks of the same racist attitude that led to my Bangladeshi father getting arrested and banned from the place he worked at because some white customer saw him carrying an unmarked box around the store and called in a bomb threat on him. he wasn't doing anything dangerous he was literally doing his job and he had been vetted by so many people and had worked there for Years, but some random white lady having a racist panic ended all of that and my father ended up in jail and getting sued for NO REASON...

I just can't help but feel that this is exactly like what happened to imane khelif, who had already appeared and lost badly on the world stage multiple times before, but suddenly when she starts actually kicking ass and beating white competitors Then a bunch of white people sound the alarm. They didnt care about her until they noticed her, and when they did her success caused tension. and because what white people have to say always takes priority over everyone else, suddenly her history doesn't matter anymore and all anyone is talking about is this controversy... and whether or not she should or should not be competing in women's boxing, I can't help but feel like the whole reason imane fell under scrutiny in the first place is because a few racist people went looking for dirt specifically to discredit her

[sillimancer]

I actually think sports shouldn't be segregated by gender at all

[honey-stick]

I obsessively watched American Ninja Warrior growing up. It was my favorite sport, I never missed an episode, and I knew everything about it. One of the reasons I loved it so much as a little girl was that it was extremely empowering- there was no gender segregation (or any segregation!) in the sport. Men & women, disabled & able-bodied people, all competed on the same course and ended up on the same leader-boards. It was co-ed. It did take 5 years until a woman completed a course and made it it to the nationals, and Kacy Catanzaro was incredible for it.

Over time, I realized I'm trans and loved the sport more since it didn't care what gender I was, and, as the years went on, more and more women succeeded at the sport. There were still very few women making it far though, so they added an extra leader-board. If 5 women didn't make it into the top 30 competitors in the qualifiers, then the top 5 women would move on and get another shot. The extra opportunity helped to close the gap, and it seemed like at the rate things were going, they wouldn't need the bonus top 5 women leader-board, since we started to get 4-7 women qualifying in the top 30 regularly.

The sport was proving what we knew, that women are just as strong as, if not stronger than, so many men. They were top athletes, competing at the same athletic level as men and often doing better than a lot of men, knocking them out from competition. In the kids league of the show that they started, girls and boys race against each other all the time! This was a co-ed sport, a sport that started in the 00's with the ethos of 'anyone can try on the same field, athlete or average joe, disabled or able-bodied, any gender.'

I stopped watching for a few years and forgot about this sport that I loved until a couple of days ago. I've been catching up on the re-runs of everything I missed and got caught back up to this year's competition. They changed the rules. American Ninja Warrior is no longer a co-ed sport. Yes, everyone still competes on the same course and has the same time constraints, but women and men are split up in the leader-boards. It's now just the top 12 men and top 4 women that get to move on. When competitors race each other in the second round, those races are gender segregated.

And it's obvious why this change happened. All the trans panic means now it's totally normal to say that women and men shouldn't compete on the same playing field because obviously men are going to outperform women. So they had to separate the races by gender and have a consistent amount of men and women for that separation to happen. But to then limit the amount of women to 3 times less than the amount of men that get through? That's just outrageous.

This was a sport so deeply empowering to me both as a little girl before I came out, and as a trans person after I did, because it's something I always could have competed in and have a place in. Because they're so scared of trans people and gender variance they take what was once a super powerful and progressive co-ed sport, something that was a model for how more sports could be, and changed it into something else. I'm just really sad about it.

[muirneach]

just checked my archive how have i made 708 posts in my sportsball tag wtf. i was expecting like 300. and ive been making sports posts for like 3 months. my god. my apologies to everyone

[reaja]

I rly need y'all to understand that women's sport divisions only exist because girls won things and it made boys cry