3 places where I feel like gender separation doesn’t really make sense
Sports
Separation of men and women in sports is fairly admirable as it gives people a chance to showcase their skill that would otherwise be outcompeted. It additionally is nice as women are a group that are often discriminated against and exposure in previously limited areas is nice. However, I don’t think that a strict gender separation is really necessary. I think that an ideal system would allow anyone with higher skill to go to the top of their league, relative to the physical ability determined by their genetics. I’m not very into sports, but I get the impression that people’s enjoyment often comes more from people’s character and effort than the absolute magnitude of their ability. Short v.s. tall people in basketball are one example that comes to mind; a shorter person would require much more skill to reach the same level as a taller person currently. I’m not much of a wrestling person, but I think this is addressed there through weight classes. A possible wider idea is be some meta-classification into classes based on the characteristics that cannot be changed with more practice or other self-improvement.
Bathrooms
this is basically a summary of this very silly 2kliksphilip video
Urinals are more space-efficient than toilets, but typically only are found in men’s restrooms. Therefore, with equally sized men’s and women’s restrooms, the men’s restroom gets higher throughput assuming an equally sized demand, and has under-occupied stalls compared to the women’s room. Even if both are perfectly sized for average demand, there will still be inefficiencies when outlier groups come in. There’s really no reason other than tradition to not just separate out the urinals (if desired) and unify all of the stalls, with full height walls if you think it isn’t private enough (Really, as a 6 foot 2 guy, it’s silly how low stall wall tops usually are).
Pronouns
I was working on a thing recently and had to refer back to someone in a sentence that already included 2 men. I know that some other languages have primarily gender neutral pronouns, but a concern that I have had is that it would make it harder to tell who someone is talking about. I think there are some alternate systems that are better at resolving general ambiguity though, like having different pronouns for the person most recently named vs. 2nd most recently named, etc. There might be languages that do this already, idk, I just speak English and a teeny bit of Spanish lol. I haven’t put all that much thought into this but I’m sure there are ways that could make this problem in communication even easier than it is currently. If we could ever get an opportunity to modify common speech.
These are great suggestions, would also suggest posting to [email protected] as well so people there can discuss this.
why not crosspost yourself?
Ok, done.
Gender in sports historically has only been because men don’t like being beat by women. Weight/skill classes make way more sense.
The whole bathroom thing is insane, just fucking make private stalls/rooms for everyone. Nobody should be seeing/smelling any of it.
The pronouns thing is already resolved. If you use a pronoun, you’re referring to the most recently mentioned person. If you need to switch people, just mention the other person’s name again. If people don’t get that, they should go back to fucking grade school.
So yes I agree with you on all points but also I’m just fucking tired.
The entire “gender separation in sports” argument stops making sense as soon as you ask yourself why archery is gender segregated.
Weight class is the only relevant separation in sports where muscle mass is important. For everything else, the differences we see in attainment by gender come down to something much more sinister.
Imagine for a moment that you took two groups of babies, and raised them in controlled environments. Each group is an equal mix of assigned genders. One group is actively, even aggressively encouraged to take part in sporting events, and encouraged to only play video games and other entertainments that rely on reaction time.
The other group is actively discouraged from participating in those activities, and repeatedly taught that, biologically, they will always be at a fundamental disadvantage if they do. This apparent disadvantage is so great that you won’t even allow them to play with members of the first group.
Which group, regardless of assigned gender, do you imagine would produce more successful athletes?
I think it was specifically when the subject of the sentence was not the most recent name that it seemed the most ambiguous.
As in "bob disliked joe because he … " and if the context doesn’t make it explicit who ‘he’ is then you just can’t tell.
yeah, you could just use names when it might be ambiguous, which isn’t all that often anyways, but i don’t think pronouns really need to be that limited
just idle conversation tho because obviously replacing a language on demand requires a huge amount of effort which isn’t going to happen anytime soon for such relatively little gain
Yeah, I do understand your issue with it and that it’s frustrating to have to use the noun again rather than pronoun for clarity, but I’m curious how would you resolve that?
Like if we could just change the language on demand, would you add more pronouns? Remove pronouns all together?
If you use a pronoun, you’re referring to the most recently mentioned person. If you need to switch people, just mention the other person’s name again
The other day I went to My friend’s house for dinner. While I was there, I played with her dogs.
Did you notice how I didn’t follow your advice? I used the pronoun “I”, even though the most recent person I mentioned was My friend. Let’s try that story again, following your advice.
The other day I went to My friend’s house for dinner. While Grail was there, I played with My friend’s dogs.
Much less natural sounding, I think your advice was counterproductive. I love having different pronouns for different people. And there’s never any ambiguity when someone refers to Me in a story, because I have capitalised pronouns. If more people had unusual pronouns like Mine, we’d run into the Gay Spock problem a lot less often.
That’s not the context I was referring to though. What I’m talking about and what I think the OP was talking about is when the pronouns used are the same and therefore the statement is ambiguous.
For example, say in your statement, we are talking about you both in the third person and you both use she pronouns.
The other day Grail and Alice had dinner at
herAlice’s house [the collective nouns used prevent us from being able to use her clearly in this case]. While Grail was there, she played withherAlice’s [can’t use her because Grail was the last person mentioned by name] dogs.This isn’t really advice, it is the way the English language works and we all already do it without thinking about it for the most part.
Hmmm, no, I don’t think I like being lowercase she/her’ed even for an example.
Well, okay, again assuming you both use the same pronouns:
The other day Grail and Alice had dinner at
TheirAlice’s house [again, using the name because its unclear based on grail & alice being collective in this sentence). While Grail was there They played withTheirAlice’s (Grail was the last person mentioned by name so need to repeat Alice’s name) dog.My point is that my example only makes sense when both subjects use the same pronouns. The rule doesn’t apply otherwise.
I have a simple solution to the whole thing. Everyone should use neopronouns.
Sports only need to be divided if strength/speed is the deciding factor even sports that depend on strength don’t need to be divided if strength isn’t why you win. For example, a woman is just as capable of throwing a perfect 12 in the caber toss as a man is.
Most newly built bathrooms in Norway are single stall rooms and gender neutral. It works fine.
Farsi doesn’t have gendered pronouns. They seem to get on fine without them. Seems it doesn’t do much for gender equality though. Also Portuguese is a very gendered language and Portugal and Brazil are the probably the most accepting of trans people in Europe and south America respectively.
I agree with you on all points, but I’d also like to add that there’s an argument the current system in sports discriminates towards women.
In many sports, there’s a top league for men and a top league for women. Since men on average perform better, the men league is almost always favored, meaning there’s more money from advertisement and sponsorships, providing more lucrative contracts for the players.
Even if a woman would be among the very best in a sport, she’ll never be able to actually play in the top league in the best teams with the most lucrative contracts, which I think is 100% sexist.
That’s not correct, in many it’s actually a top league for women and an open top league. For example, no rule prohibits a woman from playing Major League Baseball. There are women playing in professional baseball right now, in the independent leagues, where they perform from mediocre to bad. To be clear, this puts them in the top 1% of people who play organized baseball. We might see a woman in the affiliated minor leagues within the next few years.
I doubt people favor the men’s teams because they perform better, they’re not even playing against women’s leagues so viewers don’t have an automatic comparison of performance. If every basketball player’s free throw percentage went down by half, I don’t think people would enjoy the sport that much less, because I think people care more about the rankings etc than the absolute value. So I think the problem is mostly that the men’s teams came first and already built up a following, and it’s more fun to follow a team with a bigger following, so everyone just follows the men’s teams. There probably isn’t that much of a solution to this, because even with some meta-classification thing like i’m proposing people might still mostly follow the top absolute performance league which would be mostly men (depending on how much of an advantage gender gives in a specific sport). in the ideal society where gender stops mattering as much, then it could become ‘just another factor’ like height and weight that the people in the leagues with less potential performance would have
i don’t know, i don’t think there is a perfect solution or even a very good solution
In response to your section on pronouns:
As you identify, it’s useful to have multiple different pronoun sets to refer to different people to reduce ambiguity when speaking and writing.
We could hypothetically base these categories on anything: we could have one set pronouns each for men and women, but we could also set that dividing line somewhere else. Maybe we use one set of pronouns for family and a different set for non-family. Maybe the dividing line is rich/poor. Dog person / cat person. Personality type. Horoscope. Favorite color. Color they’re currently wearing. How recently they entered the conversation.
Some of these sound pretty reasonable and others sound really useless. A gender-based pronoun has problems, but it’s useful in that it’s often a useful differentiator between any two random people. This wouldn’t be the case for a hypothetical rich/poor pronoun system.
Now that I think of it, a Chinese zodiac calendar-based pronoun system would be really cool. The 60-year sexagenary cycle would give us 60 different pronoun sets for each year people are born, allowing each pronoun (fire dog, metal rat, etc.) to gain their own associations over time, though constantly changing as people from each cohort get older. Because people don’t really live more than 120 years, you would also only ever have two generations of each birth year. So there would be an “elder fire dog” and “junior fire dog” and it could be so interesting and artistic and poetic with two very different groups sharing a common pronoun… So much room for symbolism and reflection 🤤
But anyway, snap back to reality. Neo-pronouns already exist in colloquial English, especially online. I’m not talking about xe/xim, I’m talking about bestie, oomfie, anon, homie, my guy, my brother in Christ, girlypop, etc.
We should recognize these for what they are (pronouns) and normalize their use. They all have different contexts, connotations, and use-cases, but they are absolutely usable sets of pronouns. Some of them are still gender-specific, but the important thing is that gender is no longer the primary relevant factor in pronoun selection. Let’s have 100 different pronouns, and everybody can use any of them depending on the context. It would be awesome.I love your take on pronouns. If we used western astrology concepts we could go full Battlestar Galactica. A lot of people don’t realize how elective western astrology actually is, especially when you bring up how much of modern soft / pop psychology is based on it. The Meyers Briggs correlates directly to the four humors / classical elements. Literally pull your Natal chart up and find a conjunction that symbolizes who you are right now in your life and you can make some pretty cool representative glyphs and if you can’t finds anything good on your tropical chart get the sidereal drawn up and it’ll be straight rotated like 30° ish and give you a whole different set to work with. The glyphs are super pretty and have so much history going as far back as Babylon and as recently as homestuck. Fuck your sun sign if you don’t vibe with it go sidereal and get a different one or be a Jupiter in Taurus in the 3rd house.
Hard disagree on the sports part. Men and women are different, and those differences are huge at competitive levels in most sports. It’s bad that women’s teams and leagues are less respected and lower paid, but the alternative in reality is not an integrated league with both men and women, but one where women don’t have a chance to play professionally.
You can see this historically. Most women’s leagues are a new thing. The world cup started in 1930, the women’s world cup started in 1991. Profesional basketball leagues in the US started in 1935, and the first american women’s league started in 1978, which lasted 3 years. At which point there was no women’s league until the WNBA in 1996.
We have 61 years of football without women’s divisions, and 58 years of basketball to look at. Despite no statutory ban on their participation, women didn’t get a chance to compete without their own segregated league. They are needed.
Every sport is different, and some work fine with intergrated leagues. But for those that are not, a lack of a women’s division is a de-facto ban on half the population. That’s a bad thing.
I still don’t understand how in certain sports, GOATs have been outside the norm of the “peak athlete” expected for that sport, but women haven’t reached that skill level. Gretzky was the GOAT forever for ice hockey (I don’t even watch , I just read his stats/articles) and the biggest part of his success is game and space strategising, which shouldn’t be a gendered thing. Also stamina, but women are also better than men at ultramarathons (although not marathons for some reason 🤔)
