So, I’ve had moments in the past where I might have spent 30 seconds thinking about this subject but ultimately I don’t give a fuck about competitive sports so my analysis usually ends up being, all competitive sports should be banned because competitive sports are dumb. Which is admittedly a neanderthal take.
But yeah, now the global athletic showdown is going down and seemingly everyone in my immediate vicinity keeps clutching their pearls and I guess I’m sick of not being able to advocate for trans comrades appropriately and articulate a proper response.
So what’s a better response besides, “who cares?” Am I missing something? Like, if all things were equitable, what would or should competitions look like?
Help me out. I honestly have no idea.
That’s only going to serve to remove women from professional sports, moreso than they already have been. Formula 1 does this already, with f1 being the highest skill class and then f2, f3 and f4 below it. The sport has always been de jure coed and there’s no reason women can’t succeed in motorsport. For example Michelle Mouton and Sabine Schmitz are two incredible drivers that have performed excellently, so motorsports would be a perfect testing ground for this idea, and they are already doing it. It’s going terribly. Most women end up in f4 and occasionally make it to f3, two series that nobody watches and they hardly pay. This is because if you don’t have women at the top competitive tier (the only one people will care about), you don’t have inspiration for girls to enter the sport and then you’re stuck in a loop of women only being in f4 and f3. There’s so talent pool because girls aren’t interested because there’s no representation at the top tier because there’s no talent pool. Keep in mind this is a sport that doesn’t really depend on physical strength, so women don’t have an advantage. The FIA needed to create a women’s league to fix this (still in f4 machinery and with no progression path, but it’s a start) and it’s kind of working. Academy certainly has inspired more people than formula 4.
i don’t disagree, but you’re just addressing the overall misogyny of society at that point. as you note, the division in f1 is literally nonsense and still exists. if it were the case that interest in equalizing women and men in sport could be solved by simply having womens and mens leagues then it already would have been the case. the representation in sports argument i don’t think makes sense because there are male dominated sports like boxing where there’s still professional interest at weights other than heavyweight. i think you’re ultimately correct about the issue being more to do with statistical interest across the population and then access to entry into the sport for formula 1.
put another way, i guess my point would be to ask why they aren’t just in F1 if they’re incredible, and is the answer simply that teams have decided not to hire them? because if so, that’s an issue of objectified hiring and a disinterest in correcting the historical wrong of inclusion. what it sounds like is needed is “reparations” for women in sport rather than the explicit segregation of women into their own, lesser class. similar to how making HBCUs and then never making up for the history of slavery didn’t actually make formerly enslaved black people and their descendants equals to white settlers. separate and intentionally unequal.
It is the case. They recently made F1 Academy which is the women’s league and it’s certainly a step up above formula 4.
Mouton was a group b rally driver and the skills don’t carry over. She was a strong performer in rally cars but going between the two is like putting Usain bolt in a 5k and hoping he wins. Schmitz also didn’t have experience in single seaters and was more of a Porsche driver and really loved one track that wasn’t on F1 (her name is now written all over the track surface in paint now to memorialize her). Teams would absolutely hire a woman if she was performing well on f2 because it’s a hype driven sport. It’s not that the teams are misogynist, it’s that there aren’t any female drivers who could perform in F1 right now because there isn’t a talent pool. The concern with putting women into seats in f2 or F1 today is that they’d probably be backmarkers even in top machinery because they aren’t quick enough yet. If would just be setting them up to fail.