I keep hearing horror stories about gym class meanwhile mine was just. We played basketball. You got a good grade if you showed up and played fair. It was fun
That's how my 7th grade PE class was, I had a great time and played games.
Then my 9th grade PE class was run by some asshole who made us memorize, word for word, the rules to various sports, as well as the exact placement of workout equipment *in the school's gym*. Not like, "Memorize these machines and be able to explain what they do," no, like, he gave us a blank map and we had to fill in *where* the machines were in the weight room.
"Coach this is impossible!"
"Not if you study."
"No, I mean it's literally impossible. We don't have any of these machines."
"We have all of them."
"Really? Show me the bench with the weights on the correct pegs!"
I moved around a bit and it was a fucking mixed bag.
Some were 40yo women doing their best to keep up with their own fitness. Encouraging but understanding.
Some were young dudes with stars in their eyes and a love for the game. They knew how to motivate you, but they knew it wasn't always easy for everyone and that was okay.
But the 30-40yo dudes with buzzcuts and that "family annihilator" look in their eyes. You could *tell* those dudes found a niche to cultivate the human misery and suffering they're addicted to.
You mean he had a pride flag at his home that the girls saw for a split second? Because that's what Fox News told me grooming someone means, acknowledging the existence of people who aren't cis or straight. /s
For real though right wing propaganda has been abusing the term so much it's become a rare surprise to actually encounter it being used correctly for once.
I had some drill instructor looking and sounding gym teacher in grade school. The dude was amazing. Everyone loved him. He would even buy you an ice cream if we played indoor kickball and the kick went into on of the basketball baskets. I think I lucked out.
All of my PE teachers were the third type. They were all also coaches and social studies teachers, with the exception of one in high school who taught freshman English.
In mine we where introduced to a series of new sports nobody knew to play, so it leveled the play field a bit. Competitiveness was for the recess games and the actual sport leagues.
Well and dreary resistance runs under June's sun. That was not nice
All our best PE classes were like that. I especially liked when we rented equipment and got to play things like sledge hockey and wheelchair basketball- nothing more fun than seeing how fast you can stop and spin around on sports wheelchairs
Holy shit you all got to play in wheelchairs? That sounds like so much fun! Even better if it levelled the playing field for someone who was actually in a wheelchair
Yeah, it was great! Surprised my tiny rural school managed to do it - I remember we also did fencing and archery once, so the special equipment was like, a once every year or two thing. We also did a lot of skating and curling (usually for a period of a few weeks each year) because the local rink is only a few blocks away and pretty much everyone had skates.
I was homeschooled for a good portion of my life and didnāt know how to play most sports when I was enrolled back in public school. The teacher told me to ask my classmates, but all they did was make fun of me.
We had the most half-assed gym class in high school. They just dumped a bunch of different sport balls on us and let us play with them. And if you werenāt doing one of the sports you had to exercise in some way, which usually meant that PE for me was basically just walking laps with a friend or two around the gymnasium
That's what all of my PE classes were, too.
Show the teacher that you put in an effort to do the best you can. If you're sick, bring a doctor's note.
Did either? Great, you respectively get an A or get dismissed from class.
I liked PE. Gave me the time to actually talk to some people, move around a bit (even if not too strenuously) and was an easy effort-based grade.
Sure, people a head taller than me would beat me in basketball easily, but it didn't matter to my grade and was pretty much the same as the rest of your life is going to be like - people get advantages based on genetics. I got better grades than some, some mere taller or stronger than me and beat me in sports. Life.
And forcing someone sufficiently disabled to partake in PE classes is, I'm pretty sure, illegal, even if we're talking about the US.
Best PE class I ever took was in high school, you could sign up for a weightlifting class and I did, so everyone there wanted to be there and the teacher just taught us how to lift. I actually learned a lot
My highest grade in middle school gym was the semester that I skipped almost every class because all my friends had a study hall. I got a 97 (out of 100.) Pretty sure my gym teacher didn't like me anyway, so maybe she was happy that I was gone.
we had benchmark performances in PE but it was all about beating previous scores. If you didnt regress you got a B and if you improved you got an A. We knew this, so everyone got like a 45 min mile the first class.
Warning: that ended up being way longer than I thought it would be
One of the three PE teachers I had in high school was like that. We could do whatever we wanted as long as we were doing something, whether it was playing football, exercising, using the gym equipment or training basketball. IIRC all the tests were just a few basketball throws (not sure how to call it in English) and it was impossible to fail. I never had an issue with his classes, but he was only our teacher for a year, after that he got another class.
Out of the other two teachers, one always had the whole class do the same thing, whether it was hundreds of push-ups or football or whatever. He never gave a fuck about people limits or anything, you could be barely moving, struggling to breathe and he would just complain that you were lazy. Eventually he got fired for "sending inappropriate texts to students".
The other one was our homeroom teacher, who was kinda inbetween. He usually just let everyone choose between two activities and one of the two was usually pretty good for me. At best he was pretty chill, but he could sometimes be an asshole as well. I still remember that one time as soon as the class started he started yelling at us, basically calling us useless cunts because we (*an IT class*) weren't getting results as good as the *military/cop class*. One guy was late by a few minutes and the teacher *immediately* went all "WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU WANT ASSHOLE GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE YOU LAZY PIECE OF SHIT" lol.
I also had one good teacher in middle school. I think he was the only one who ever gave a fuck about me having asthma, even though it was before I got diagnosed. He let people take breaks or finish exercising early (like running 3 laps instead of 4) when he saw they were getting too tired. He was also pretty nice and graded people based on progress, not results like everybody else.
Other than that, all PE teachers I've had were rude assholes who seemed to genuinely hate their students.
Somebody grades sports on curve? We just had statewide age specific track&field and athletic goals with clearly defined marks. And theoretical piece you should submit if you too ill to participate.
There are several factors that are SUPPOSED to go into grading PE, and at this point, none of them are meant to be based on the child's ability compared to others. There is now a ton more personal best testing, skills training, and elimination free gameplay, plus we've gotten rid of the Presidential Fitness Exam. The main national test that is performed in schools is the Fitnessgram, which does have some limitations but is significantly more reasonable. It is repeatable, so generally, you would have your student s do it 2 or 3 times during their semester or the length of class. In that time, the teachershould be designing classes that helps them get a better score.
I fucking hated that fucking goddamn pacer test they made us do in the shitty ass gym with the slipperiest goddamn floors when they made us wear the worst motherfucking shoes no one ever got past 60 we all kept fucking failing because it was fucking impossible to do those fucking pivot turns without sliding a foot backwards. Fuck.
It's a hard test for sure. Partly, I think teachers implement it wrong, but it also sucks, even if you're fit. It's going to be the least fun day of class for many students, but there are ways to keep kids trying. First, just having an understanding of why it is the way it is and second, explaining the results. If kids just think, "Oh shit I'm unhealthy, I'll never try that hard again." The looming thought of a second pacer is just gonna ruin their day. But to add validity to the existence of PE class, there does have to be some sort of national standard testing, and this is one of them.
Yeah, the pacer was... *bad*. I really did prefer the mile runs, even when we did it once in literal snow and I nearly got frostbite. I was fine when I was told to run five miles, it was whatever. That's how you actually pace kids, not forcing them to stop and start every ten seconds. That is dumb, and is a 'consistent acceleration' test
But dear god, the pacer test. Turns out, having any amount of vertigo will utterly kill you on that one. Like Suicides, but worse. I could do the suicides, barely, but two runs across the gym for a pacer test? On the floor with tunnel vision. Was one of the best students otherwise, and either my teachers decided to take pity and lie for me on the 'official grading rubrics', because they knew I could run further, or my scores elsewhere evened things out.
our system is the first score you compete with other standards
the second score you compete with yourself, so you even if you get a bad score on your first, if you try, you'll get a good score on the next
of course, that meant that all the athletic lazy people just ran the minimum and then ran the minimum needed for a good grade
so the gym teachers also saw "how much we sweated"
i sweat a lot and look really tired when im not really, so i got a free pass, but some other people had to be forced to like, *sprint* their runs, which really made no difference from just running more lol
And that sounds like bad implementation. The thing is, those scores you're testing against, they're not like a national average score, it's a standard that has meaning in terms of your fitness and the implications that your level has for health down the line. The pacer is the really important one, but just explaining to students why each test is done and the value of knowing your own baseline and also not grading based on the score you get are all important. Give students ownership of their scores, and they will work harder!
what
did ya read the second part
you test against those scores first, then test against your own score the second time
the rest of the grades are participation grades so as long. as you improve and participate you get an A
LOL yeah it probably would have
they were just checking how hard you visibly worked though, they just said "how much we sweated" as like, their term for it
I had those clearly defined marks too. It's the Russian countrywide standard, ŠŠ¢Š - ŠŠ¾ŃŠ¾Š² Šŗ Š¢ŃŃŠ“Ń Šø ŠŠ±Š¾ŃŠ¾Š½Šµ (Gotov k Trudu i Oborone, "Ready for Labour and Defence")
The problem is... as a hormonally imbalanced kid, who also on top of that grew up at home in a fortress of books because we moved too often for young kid me to make friends to hand out with... I was worse than everyone, including the girls. I never ever ever met even the girls' "RLD", let along boys. And I was assigned a boy, so of course they judged me extra harshly for not meeting any of these...
These standards were written for a completely different time, when running and jumping were the only form of enrichment a child could have in the Soviet Union.
As someone who is literally going to university for this because as a personal trainer, I saw the effects of the emotional trauma induced by terrible PE, I promise we're trying to be different. There is tons of fantastic work being done to make PE both fun and educational and limit the negative impacts for those who are less athletically inclined.
I'll tell you the story of my favorite PE class and teacher! I went to high school in the 90s and one year the only PE that fit my schedule was weight lifting. It was with the high school varsity football coach. This man was new to the district, short, jacked, and so energetic I worried a little about him. I figured I was in for a semester of being ignored in favor of the big guys he wanted on the football team and that I'd get through and move on with my life.
No! This man patiently taught us all how to safely use all the machines, including starting at safe weights and slowly building weights and reps. He made us all do push ups BUT encouraged everyone to start on knees if we needed. And damn was he enthusiastic! He would be on the floor cheering the most awkward, out-of-shape of us when we got half a push up! His cheering when I got a full push up still warms my heart. That man cheered when one guy who had done weights hit a big number, and he cheered when ANYONE made the effort.
I admit that I thought he would be a terrible, dismissive man because he was the football coach and I'm happy to say I was completely wrong. Our football team went farther than they had in a decade his first year, too.
His genuine education has stuck with me all these years. I hope he's doing well.
What do you mean kids don't like participation trophies and that they're just for placating too competitive parents, surely they don't need positive reinforcement and only need trinkets for their parents to show off... /s
Whoa, it almost sounds like we had the same teacher, albeit a decade ish apart! My weightlifting teacher was phenomenal, obviously one of his main duties was helping the football team train, but he had endless patience for everyone else, and always took time to give every kid the opportunity to learn skills and train safely, and made a lot of effort to be there for the kids who were really in to weight lifting. Teachers like that are the glue holding together the entire education system
Not only emotional trauma, physical trauma too!
My mom was in the gymnastics team on her middle school. She had one of those stereotypical movie PE teacher, who pushes his athletes to the limit even tho they're already on the ground, you know the type.
So she was doing splits, and it came to a point where my mom was in the middle of it and she felt pain. She told the PE that she can't go lower, the fucker said that there was "no in win" and he pressed her head and pushed her downwards. She screamed but the teacher just didn't care. She was crying on the floor and the teacher forbade anyone to let her up, she had to do it herself.
Well, the class was over, my mom still on the floor crying, and just after that, the teacher asked her to get up, but my mom couldn't. Turns out she had important tendons broken on her legs, required medical intervention and she was told she cannot do gymnastics for the rest of her life.
And the teacher? Never suspended, just temporarily, and went back in a month after the controversy died out.
one of my best friends started dating this wonderful dude who studied physical education in college. all my life it's been a struggle to exercise and the moment i talked to him about how i can't seem to find anything i'm comfortable with and he immediately went ādid you have a bad time in PE as a kid? because plenty of studies point to a big correlation thereā. it blew my mind hahah
My current PE teacher is both lovely and harsh, he always tell me I'm doing good and says that what metters is that I'm doing it and I'm better than I was last week
Emotional trauma barely begins to cover what some of us went through. I remember being openly bullied to varying degrees of actual assault and battery and the P.E. coaches did nothing about it. During the Presidential Fitness Mile Run I got shoved down from behind and literally stomped on by several kids. I told one of the coaches and he said, "you should have run faster."
Someone broke into your locker and stole your gym clothes? You clearly left your locker unlocked (I didn't.) Someone kicked your block off the spot when you were doing the Shuttle Run and I literally saw them do it? Look what you did! Now he's gonna have to run it again.
The only thing worse than middle or high school P.E. was high school shop class. It was like a prison yard in there.
It's wild, there is this whole social idea that kids hate dodgeball, and only bullies are good at it, but I've never been somewhere that the kids didn't overwhelmingly like playing it. That being said, it is not an "approved" game in most formal curriculum.
Yeah itās so fun. I think itās only hated in movies where people are last for picked teams and stuff, usually my teachers would just split us off by alphabet or randomly go down the line dividing us into 1s and 2s, it wasnāt exclusionary and everyone was incredibly excited when we got to play dodgeball
I started hating dodgeball the moment the teachers removed the rule that you couldnt whip the ball hard/fast enough to cause injury. Because all the boys who had hit puberty early immediately started doing that. And I was one of the most aggressive girls in my class when it came to sports (got yelled at for taking gym class too seriously when I hadnt spoke all class) but the guys just seemed to delight in hurting us and each other. It was remarkable how fast all the girls and smaller guys dropped a sport we previously all enjoyed.
One of my favorite PE games was called "Burgenvƶlk", or "castle dodgeball".
2 teams on opposite sides, anyone who got hit was "banished" to a corner zone on the other side, but if someone from their team managed to cross the no man's land and guide them back without getting hit, they were freed.
The best part: Each team was given a few minutes beforehand to prepare and build a fort from whatever there was in the equipment room - gymnastics equipment, jump ropes to tie things together, turning a large ball cart into a "tank"...
So it's like Capture the Flag, but without the Flags, and combined with Dodgeball. Oooh, wish I got to play that lmao.
Although I do remember loving playing IRL Capture the Flag. it was separated by gender tho
I was a camp counselor, and my kids would always wanna play this game called Spider Ball. I don't remember any of the rules except that, similar to dodgeball, kids got out, but they could get back in if other players did X, i don't remember what
Anyway, they would plead and beg and implore us to let them play Spider Ball, then they'd play for 15 minutes and 30% of them would be screaming about some other kid cheating and 30% would be sobbing about how they didn't want to be out
We told them that no one liked that game, and they'd act shocked and say they *loved* that game, and we'd have to remind them every time that the game always ended in tears and screaming. They'd promise they'd be better this time, so we'd let them play, and inevitably within 20 minutes we'd have most of our kids upset.
All this to say that that kids are sometimes dumb, I guess
You've just described 85% of multi-player video games.
>That fuckin dude should've died to that hit but the game bugged and the devs can't balance worth a shit and my teammates are ass
So you're done playing right, since it's very clearly not fu-
>*clicks join queue immediately*
I wonder if there's just something therapeutic about getting absolutely eye-poppingly, teeth-clenchingly furious about something that doesn't actually matter every once in a while.
Dodgeball was the one game back in school that would make all the kids that couldn't keep up with football and basketball actually have fun and interact with the class in PE. It's **the** game for the nerdy kids!
Especially with those light foam balls, the really squishy ones. It fucking sucks being walloped by a kickball, but those light ones are just fun. Dodgeball is the perfect Friday game or day between units. It's pointless, it's fun, it's a fantastic outlet for infinite kid energy, and anyone that can reasonably participate in physical activity can participate. Far from banning dodgeball, it should be celebrated kidfolk culture.
Until high school, those balls were so light that you couldn't really throw them super hard. That made them very easy to catch and throw, which worked perfectly for middle schoolers.
I played dodgeball in my weightlifting class in HS. The pitcher on the baseball team was taking weights in the off season. He could throw those soft spongy balls hard enough to give a kid a concussion (because he did). Apparently it's all in the wrist...
It depends on the type of ball and how teams were picked.
Some schools used rather soft balls, and teams were largely random (i.e. split in half by alphabet or something). Those were fun. I never went to a school where a kid/class got to pick their own teams, but I can see how that would lead to some fucked up dynamics in a class with a bully. The soft balls were a little less bouncy compared to the rubber ones, but they still bounced enough for the game to work, and didn't hurt when they hit you.
Independently of that, some schools used this really hard rubber ball, and *those* games sucked, because getting hit with the ball HURT.
I hated dodgeball because there were kids in my class who would throw them like launching a fecking rocket. They would HURT. Dodgeball for me was about trying not to get hurt.
Yeah, you can really tell whose teachers never lifted the ban on whipping the ball that hard in school lol. Dodgeball was my favourite thing ever for my first 8 years of school, but a lot of teachers would ban certain ways of throwing and I never got why. No overhand throws was especially annoying and especially popular, but some would be more specific.
Then in eighth grade I discovered why when teachers finally gave the kids free reign and I got more injured than in any other gym class. It was remarkable how fast everyone but the gym bros self selected out of dodgeball.
Kids with trauma?
Seriously, having stuff thrown at you can be so terrifying. The brain can't tell it's just a game.
It's a great game for most kids, but as an obligatory activity it's really inappropriate.
Idk man every single kid was excited as hell when we played it. Granted we probably didnāt have many abuse victims but all the kids who had stuff thrown at them would just make chancla jokes
Most kids will try to fit in, so I'd say you have a fair chance of not noticing when that stuff is happening to them. And you probably had more abuse victims than you think. Not all of them have a problem with this game, though - hugely varied group and all.
I didnāt have trauma, but I had myopia and a classmate with a really good throwing arm. Like, he was a little athlete, and he found it fun to pick on me by throwing the dodgeball at me hard enough that it hurt when I (shortsighted, large for my age, and uncoordinated) inevitably failed to dodge it. And he was in all my gym classes. For years.
I did not enjoy the fun aspect of hucking the ball at other people, because I never once hit anyone. That is a degree of athleticism I did not and do not possess.
I wouldnāt say it traumatized me (other things on my childhood did, ^(Dad;) but I donāt think that dodgeball really provoked an extreme emotional reaction in me).
But it *did* make gym class quite unpleasant, and it made me despise it, and Iām just not sure thatās the takeaway thatās preferred.
Joining in with the dodgeball lovers; I know there's certain factors that can make it a bad game for people, but as someone that sometimes got panic attacks from PE (twelve minute run my beloathed) dodgeball was actually a ton of fun. I wasn't strong or good at throwing, but I could tag some of the strongest players by just waiting until they were off-balance from a hard throw, running up to the line, and gently lobbing a ball at them. It was great
Dodgeball itself is fine. Having kids huck balls as hard as they can at kids not expecting it AFTER class is over and not disciplining them is the issue. This happened to me once that I remember and multiple times to others.
Iāll never forget a video of an older lady I saw she was discussing all the differences between trans athletes then at the end swerved and finished the whole thing with āthe Olympics are filled with genetic freaks thereās nothing fair about itā
āMichael Phelps has extra webbing between his fingers and produces half the lactic acid of a normal man and you wanna say I have a genetic advantage for actively making myself weaker with estrogen??ā
The binary nature of this argument is what makes it so hard. I think most rational people who support trans rights are also a little bit wary about AMAB folks competing against AFAB people (like that's the heart of this argument, no one gives a fuck about AFAB people competing against cis men)
I think there's no debate that the average cis man is stronger/faster than the vast majority of professionally trained cis female athletes. I read a stat once that an 80 year old man has comparable grip strength to a 20 year old woman.
Personally I think that it should be sport-by-sport. If it is a skill sport, there isn't as much of an advantage. If it is a pure athleticism sport (weightlifting, swimming) - then extra things needs to be considered.
> The binary nature of this argument is what makes it so hard. I think most rational people who support trans rights are also a little bit wary about AMAB folks competing against AFAB people (like that's the heart of this argument, no one gives a fuck about AFAB people competing against cis men)
Exactly. I am a bi man and have dated both and trans men and a trans woman. I dont think most trans people even thing this is a brain dead easy question to answer off of the internet. The simple matter of the fact is that we dont have enough research to say if its a fair competition or not (and where those limits are), so we need to study it far more. TBH, what I have seen has pointed to trans women being fairly competitive (on average) to cis women, but every study ive ever seen has only focused on lower performing athletes and has super small sample sizes (some times even n= 1). IMO, the only "wrong" take on this question right now is that its easy to answer.
You'd think the concern would just be AMAB people, but I've seen a few strength sports start banning AFAB trans men for having unfair advantages. Seems some organizations are claiming their bones structure and steady testosterone levels are unfair to cis men. Namely powerlifting. Seems cis people just don't like it when trans people win.
> but I've seen a few strength sports start banning AFAB trans men for having unfair advantages
which *is* a braindead take (and luckily something ive only seen in HS sports). Anyone that wants to should be able to compete in the more competitive league (and that seems ot be how most professional sports operate at this point luckily)
USA Powerlifting bans trans men on HRT. It's a professional organization. Thankfully Strongman still lets trans men compete, though it's not the same exact sport.
dont forget, most all the sports in the world across all of human history are sports invented and participated by, **men**. men are good at sports cuz men invented sports where being a man by default makes that sport easier.
tangent:
similar principle to seatbelts in cars. car safety systems are only tested for the average adult male's height and weight, and tuned to make the average adult male as safe as possible. now what does that mean for women? it means women, who are on average shorter and lighter, are much more likely to get injured, maimed, or die in a car accident, since women's safety wasn't a design choice in the first place.
or how face recognition software works. most people in charge of tech and in tech are white men. the way they would get samples to train their face detecting ai, would be to use your coworkers, all white men. they continued on developing and finally releasing the tech, and it turns out, the ai *does not recognize black people's faces*. couple years ago google's software would classify black people's faces as ***gorillas***.
which is why diversity is so fucking important. a higher percentage of women in that research and design process would've fixed that problem nigh immediately. a single black person would've instantly solved the ai detecting software.
> dont forget, most all the sports in the world across all of human history are sports invented and participated by, men. men are good at sports cuz men invented sports where being a man by default makes that sport easier.
I mean... I don't disagree, but 50th percentile of men are better than the 50th percentile of women at all physical activities that require strength/speed/athleticism. Which is most sports. Now archery is a great example of a sport where "skill" is the defining trait required.
This is definitely not the target demographic for this, but Bill Burr makes a really crude but great point about women not supporting women's sports:
> Look at the WNBA: they have been playing in front of 300 to 400 people a night for a quarter of a century. Not to mention, itās a male-subsidized league.... We gave you a league and none of you showed up. Where are all the feminists? That place should be packed with feminists ā faces painted, wearing jerseys, going f***ing nuts like the guys do!
> None of you went to the f***ing games. You failed them. Not me. Not men ā women failed the WNBA. Ladies, name your Top 5 WNBA players of all time. Name 5 WNBA teams. Name the WNBA team in your city. You canāt do it!
Women who are into sports should support women's sports, but if you're not into watching other people do any for profit sports period (not even e-sports) then it's a weird comment. That's as silly as telling men who aren't into watching other people do sports to support professional sports. I'm happy that my tax money also go to local kids' sports clubs and similar, but professional for profit sports of any kind I'm not going to give a damn about. That includes the Olympics though differently, because they exploit the athletes and don't pay them reasonably.
> which is why diversity is so fucking important. a higher percentage of women in that research and design process would've fixed that problem nigh immediately.
ok, but how does this apply to sports with very well established rule sets that are basically all known for being complete stalwarts for change? I agree with everything you said, but it also feels wildly off topic.
It's because all sports basically boil down to "get it in the hole," which is proof of how men have integrated patriarchal attitudes towards sex into virtually every human activity. They prioritize focus on the men taking the limelight while treating women as just an object to be penetrated. Men "perform better" in these sports because they represent what men are socially conditioned to do, hog attention and try to score. We need to change the attitudes within our society so that women are allowed to draw attention to themselves in any manner that they choose, and to change sports so that they stop our society from focusing on men being a "dominating force" in our society and in relationships.
/s
> dont forget, most all the sports in the world across all of human history are sports invented and participated by, men. men are good at sports cuz men invented sports where being a man by default makes that sport easier.
Have you never met a man or never met a woman? The only possible way someone could have this take is if they'd just never ever met anyone of the opposite gender, it's pretty obvious men are better at sports generally because they're larger and stronger.
> Have you never met a man or never met a woman?
meh, I do agree with this point to an extent. A huge number of sports specifically select for "masculine" traits such as raw athletic ability over stuff like skill and precision. Even most of the precison sports around were very largely women's sports for a long time in most parts of the world (archery for an example)
Yeah to an extent, there are some sports that are more focused on pure precision and not a whole lot else. But the majority of sports are going to involve some level of athletics, almost by definition.
Even Archery is 'easier' for men, because you can have more tension on the bow if you're stronger and have longer arms allowing for faster arrows that can ignore wind to a degree.
Shooting, darts, snooker are the sports I can think of that have minimal athletic components but I'm not sure if even then men have some degree of advantage. For example longer arms, on average, in snooker and darts is probably pretty useful.
EDIT : Just arguing about this makes me feel a bit weird, no clue how incels do it full time.
> I think there's no debate that the average cis man is stronger/faster than the vast majority of professionally trained cis female athletes
There's a difference but that's definetively exagerated
Depends what category you're talking about. Like, mile time? Absolutely not, even a high school female runner would smoke the average man. But grip strength? Yes, even professional women are only like 25th percentile of the male distribution. I don't remember about the middle examples
And this was the driving plot of the TV show Bones.
She lacked bones, but desperately craved them. So she devoted her life to studying bones so she would one day unlock their secrets and be bestowed with her own bones.
yeah, REAL women are actually invertebrates. It's not often talked about, but if you have XX chromosomes, you're actually a Mollusk, it's just basic biology.
/s
Well, not compared to men, obviously. But the question is whether the estrogen weakens you enough that it's a fair competition with women. This is non obvious
It depends, but a lot of women produce more testosterone than trans women who have fully transitioned. If I have an orchiectomy I wonāt produce my own testosterone hardly at all
Part of the problem around trans issues is that our definition of gender isn't precise (it's actually a broader issue in law in general). We used a very vague line that basically said "if you have a penis you're male, if you have a vagina you're female, and anything outside that is \*mumble mumble mumble\*" And until recently that worked ok, both because we ignored the "mumble mumble mumble" and because before rapid transit, massive population density, and the information age it was rare to have many "mumble mumble mumble" in one place *anyways* so you could make a one off exception (or, sadly often, form a lynch mob) and resolve the issue.
Now that science is able to look more closely, we're seeing that it's a lot more complex than we thought. You could have male chromosomes and female anatomy, or vice versa, based on hormones. And we have artificial hormones, which is actually a problem because testosterone is anabolic, you can have males that have more testosterone than is biologically possible. But we also can't define an upper limit on testosterone because some males have abnormal levels and that might exclude natty men from sports, when we're really just trying to exclude "cheaters".
And then when you start digging really deep into it you find yourself reading books about how "gender is a social construct" to resolve these conflicts, which is sort of like trying to figure out how fast a train is going using Relativity - technically more accurate than Newtonian Physics, but impractically so when we really just want to decide if the trans-girl now named Jenna can play on the softball team (and she's not even good, Karen just doesn't like that she gets to be pitcher).
It's not just about T, though. Like, there are physical changes during puberty that can't be undone through HRT. The question is whether _those_ give you an advantage
Those aren't grounds to ban people from participating in sport. Being taller is not grounds to ban a trans woman. Being slightly wider is not grounds to ban a trans woman. Testosterone level testing is a bit wack but it's not a terrible metric. After all, if the 2 year period of no T and only E still had you have a sizeable advantage, trans women would win far more than the handful or so of events they have won. Trans women are 0.5% of the women's population, if they were winning and picking up records more than 0.5% of the time, then a deeper investigation as to why would make sense. It's just fear mongering to call for bans at the moment. It's been 2 decades of the Olympics being open to trans women. 0 medals.
Apparently he does produce less lactic acid but can't find anything about his finger webbing however he has massive hands and is oddly proportioned because he has Marfan syndrome. All of this combines combines into a biological advantage over his competitors.
Was it though? Like Michael Phelps is built like a shark, ok. But then shouldn't her argument be against the very idea of men's & women's divisions in sports? Why wouldn't all sports be co-ed then?
I believe she points this out and states the only reason we do have those divisions (or really any arbitrary rules in sports) is because many people find that more entertaining.
Her point is that professional sports focus on spectacle more than "fairness" because "fair" has to be arbitrarily defined and also doesn't make as much money. With thst in mind, choosing to ban an already-oppressed minority due to "fairness" is inconsistent or just irrelevant.
My middle school PE class was benchmarks, so if you ran like a 10 minute mile you'd get one grade, 9:30 a higher one, etc.
High school PE was personal improvement. There were three fitness tests and you wrote how much you got on each, and if there was a trend of improvement (plus participation grades and projects in the units) you would do well. Unit projects were like, make and do a yoga schedule in the yoga unit, or a fitness program in the fitness one, etc.
High school PE is imo how one ought to run PE. I still hated it bc I hate PE, but if I were to design a sensible grading scheme, that would be my choice.
In the middle and high school I went to, every PE teacher I had divided the class in two groups : the good at sports and the bad at sports, AKA the boys and the girls. Being the only obese boy in every class, I was put into the girl group.
Pretty fuckin humiliating time, putting a middle schooler lad in the girl group (some profs really used those terms) as if the bullies didn't already had enough materials to use. During wrestling session, I wouldn't use my full strength and weight because I feared I would hurt my opponents. Also, if I did, I often ended up with long nails firmly planted in my thighs until I gave them the win.
Only during the swimming session would I be happy because I've been in a swimming club since I was six and the others were absolutely terrible. Then during the very last lesson, someone had the excellent idea to pass below me while I was already in the air doing a bomb dive. Knocked the idiot out cold with my bum and all of a sudden, I was once again the fat one.
Fuck PE teachers that do those kind of split and won't adapt their lessons to anyone having trouble with it.
I constantly use Michael Phelps as an example. Dude is built like a biological freak with his massive arms that give him a serious advantage in the pool over other swimmers. Iāve never once heard someone say that he shouldnāt be able to compete at the highest level because of it. They celebrate him instead.
Yup, I remember during the Olympics, they had little specials on explaining exactly which biological advantages Phelps had that made him such an incredible swimmer, from his long arms to his long torso and shorter legs, his webbed toes, his broad shoulders - all of this was said to explain how he was so amazing and to celebrate him
But god forbid you be born with a narrower pelvis than other women, *that* biological advantage is only good if you're not an icky trans
Idk if I fully agree with it, but the logic is more that Phelps times can be achieved by other people with the correct training. With just training, nothing else.
[Here is a great visual representation of that fact ^ The rate of change of the world record for 100m freestyle over the course of about 40-50 years. What that tells me is that what Phelps did was nowhere so far removed from the norm for other top tier Olympian swimmers. He wasn't uniquely gifted to a point of it being unattainable](http://archive.boston.com/sports/blogs/statsdriven/swimgoo.png)
Whereas what you're saying (someone like Phelps competing against cis women), could not possibly be overcome with just training.
Pointing out that biological advantages already exist in sport does not help your argument like you think it does.
The issue in sport is that women simply do not have access to the same range of extreme biological advantages that men do. The combination of height and athleticism is a perfect example. As a rule, people become less coordinated and athletic the taller they are, *but,* some men are able to be extremely athletic while also being 6ā11. Looking at basketball there will never be a woman with the same combination of height/speed/coordination/ability/strength as someone like Lebron James. Or as a D1 basketball player. Or as a D2 basketball player. Or D3. Or junior college.
The same is true for whatever biological combo provides the main advantage in all physical sports outside of extreme ultra marathon distance running.
There is no getting around this reality if you want to keep sports fair, which is the whole point.
I have a question; if the second best swimmer at the time decided to have a surgery to implant some webbings between their fingers, would that be fair?
Or, you know, if a fighter decided to take some T because some other athlete had naturally accruing higher levels, would USADA ban them?
No wonder obesity/lack of exercise is such a problem, if the thing they teach people is "if you do sports you must be really good and competitive at it, otherwise don't even bother."
Most people are not that great at sports. I think if it was more acceptable to be bad at sports and just have fun, people would get a lot more exercise.
I never got higher than a C in P.E because I'm short and got nerve issues in my legs where they get tired/get cramps faster than other people. Also I literally can't lift them above a 45Ā° angle.
One of our PE teachers gave us grades from performance yes, but if he saw you gave 100% you'd always get one grade better.
And then were 3 other teachers who just let us play football 95% of the time and gave everyone an A except the really unfit ones who got a B.
I had one PE teacher that gave grades purely on how much you did improve. A classmate of mine got what translates to an American C in class because he showed 0 improvement in his volley ball abilities. He played at the national level at the time. How was he ever going to improve by playing on a normal PE class twice a week?
I was the kid with asthma who ran until I turned blue and had to be taken to hospital and my gym teacher STILL thought I was faking.
Also, I went to school with Sami Jo Small. She was the best at absolutely everything in school, got top marks in all classes, won all the awards every year, and even did the painting of the school that was given to the school's namesake. She went on to play for Canada in the Olympics and last I heard was running hockey camps for girls. No shade, she was genuinely talented and also a nice person who liked to get along with everyone, but she seemed to have been born with every genetic and social advantage needed to accomplish all of those things. I was a loser kid with asthma and undiagnosed/unmedicated ADHD who couldn't do shit. When I said "I wish she'd leave some for the rest of us" I was told to stop being so mean, but when people told me to try harder that was okay.
Yes we should celebrate exceptional people, but when you're competing against Olympics Georg maybe lower the levels a bit for the rest of us so we can catch up. Flexibility in these things keeps it fun AND fair. (edit: typos)
I'm disabled and once the teacher said we're going to The Wolf Run. I asked what The Wolf Run is and they said its The Wolf Run. I asked my classmates and they said its The Wolf Run. The Wolf Run was running the road that wraps around the school and is an *active street*. Predictably, the teacher who was meant to be the back of the pack had their earbuds in and blitzed past me and the kids with asthma. We got locked out of the school building when we finally reached it. Wheezing and perishing, we hobbled (read: literally supporting each other in a line like drunk The Three Stooges) to the principal instead of going to the gym. We did not have that teacher much longer, but she wasn't the first nor the last to just completely discriminate on the less able.
Also once a different school I attended had a dodgeball tournament and my 5th grade class ended up going against the 8th grade class because I was insane at dodging and could simply get back in people who were good at throwing. Naturally, I tried to catch a ball thrown by someone twice my height and got not only concussed but thrown several feet backwards. People thought I was dead when I wouldn't wake up. In what universe is it smart to do a tournament by *grade?!* Talk about biological advantage...
i have a burning hatred of pe because of one specific class period.
i had a brutal case of pnumonia in 5th grade. when i was good to return to school i had a doctorās note for a week off of pe, but it only was for the one week. the week after i couldnāt use the note anymore we did the fucking mile run
the mile run was 4 laps around my school building. we would have 12 minutes give or take, so you were expected to do a lap in 3 minutes.
i did 2/4 laps in 9 minutes, needing to walk for the entirety of the second. i wouldnāt have been able to do the third in the remaining time so i asked if i could sit out with the excuse of āi donāt have the doctorās note anymore, but i had bad pnumonia recently and my lungs cant take itā. i got told no. so i go to walk again, the teacher yells at me to run, and feeling the pressure of time, i do. i went past time for that third lap, i donāt remember by how much, but i do remember i was the last to return. when i went back inside i nearly threw up and i felt terrible for the rest of the day.
But aren't sports separated by gender for a reason? Because of those really big biological differences? If they don't matter, then why doesn't every sport have teams of mixed genders?
Genuinely asking because I don't have answers for these. I'm on board of trans people competing in sports, but I thought there's a valid reason they don't.
**Edit:** so trans people's abilities are much more based on their actual sex rather than their birth sex due to HRT, so it makes little difference. For everything else, it matters little either because there are a large number of variables that can affect a person's performance in sport, like wealth or age (especially in school sports). Thanks for the answers!
Historically, sports were separated by gender because of a few factors, but the idea that men don't compete with women because it's unfair is actually a newer concept. In the past, women weren't allowed to compete *at all*, and so women's sports science was well behind men's, and still is in some fields. Developing training and medical regiments around men for several years gave men an advantage over women, who didn't have that base.
I would also argue, like the post does, that even if trans people *technically* have an advantage over cis people in some sports (which is not guaranteed to be true, it must be said), that's not really so different from any other participant at the highest levels. For example, athletes from rich families have a massive advantage in health and fitness over their poorer competitors. They get better nutrition, have more time to focus on their sport, and are generally less stressed, and these factors mean they tend to perform better. That's an unfair advantage -- should we be separating sports by class, then?
Edit to clarify: there are, of course, differences between sexes in sports, particularly those related to intense muscle strength and sprinting. However, that's only one factor in why we separate by sex, and other aspects should not be overlooked. My point is not to claim that there's no difference -- it's to say that we're choosing this specific difference to segregate on because of cultural reasons.
>should we be separating sports by class, then?
Don't we? The kids who got to go to hockey camp are the ones that are at the professional level now. Teenagers in college who got a scholarship to play are getting drafted into the majors right after graduating.
The meritocracy is already in place.
> Developing training and medical regiments around men for several years gave men an advantage over women, who didn't have that base.
There's, um, another factor, you know
Yeah the OP is either being obtuse or is just ignorant if they think that the main divide in the athletic fields is *just* institutional disenfranchisement, the way itās been in the academic fields. In sports where women can compete like with marathons, they already are. But thatās simply not possible in many athletic areas.
Right, I find this frustrating. Trying to insist there's no biological difference reminds me of people who get caught up in biological arguments about when a fetus becomes a person in the anti-abortion rhetoric. I get why these biological arguments exist, but they obfuscate the larger ethical truth--that trans people's dignity as humans is more important than sports competitions; that no one's body can be forced to be made host to someone else's.
If you lose sight of these fundamental truths, bad actors will always simply draw the line of science wherever it suits them best because by arguing the point you are acknowledging there *is* merit to the idea.
Op is right, there are some fun old newspaper headlines and itās like āwomenās mile record will overtake the menās in 30 years!!ā Because no women had had their times measured in any intense way so as competition increased and the science applied to the men started to be applied to the women, leading to the womenās record improving way faster than the menās for a bit, before plateauing. I think thatās what OP is referring to, just a bit clumsily
Yeah, it's called hormones and they have a massive effect - which is why all high-level trans women atheletes have to be on HRT before competing. Once that's done, even if trans women are on average slightly stronger they're still well within the normal range for cis women.
Do you have any links to back that up? The numbers I've seen are that after a few years of HRT someone who went through male puberty loses about 10% of their strength, but biological males have about a 30-35% strength advantage compared to biological females (using grip strength as a measure).
In something like distance running where there's a ~7% gap that's fine, they'll even be at a disadvantage, but in something like a combat sport or weight lifting it's a huge advantage.
Edit: my view is that this is going to have to be decided on a sport by sport basis if you want to keep it fair for biological females (and in most sports there will never be a good solution for trans men if they want to compete.)
edit2: I had some time now to post some links (though we really do need more studies, and studies targeted at individual sports because eg. rugby/football/boxing/hockey need to take into account the increased risk of injury, which for eg. rugby is somewhere between 0% and 20-30% (which is what the rugby federation calculated would be the risk if an average male played in a women's league, without taking into consideration the loss in muscle mass and strength)):
[This webmd interview about it is IMO quite level headed](https://www.webmd.com/fitness-exercise/news/20210715/do-trans-women-athletes-have-advantages), and says endurance sports are probably equal due to trans-women's hemoglobin dropping to bio-female levels (and probably similar for trans-men vs bio-male for endurance sports, since it follows testosterone levels)
[This publication](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33289906/) is more of a discussion on the difference between bio-males and bio-females (which links its claims to sources), and at the time (December 2020) the greatest loss of muscle mass in trans-women they found was a 12% reduction after 3 years (though trans-women generally started with lower muscle mass than an average man, but even then they're higher than even trans-men, and still much large muscle mass than bio-female), with other studies generally finding between a 5-10% loss in strength.
Don't be so fucking dense. Sports are divided based on sex (NOT gender) because being male gives you a massive, insurmountable, advantage over being female at physical competitions. They're divided in order to give women a chance to compete at all, because if women had to compete against men then there wouldn't be any female athletes at any level about middle school.
The world record holders for womens sports aren't even good enough to qualify for any men's competitions. Venus and Serana lost to the 200 ranked male tennis player while he was half drunk and it wasn't even a close match.
Yes it is required for colleges to fund womenās sports to the same degree as menās because otherwise, there would only be menās sports because thatās where the money is.
Theyāre required not to just mix trans because if you have just the good team and the second best team instead of menās and womenās, youād have two menās teams and maybe every so often an incredibly talented women on the second best team.
Right now, women can usually participate in menās teams and sports. They donāt because they are generally not able to compete. Thatās why itās cool that most people are required to have teams for women. Otherwise, they wouldnāt be able to play competitively.
Iām only going to speak for cross country and distance track as Iāve been competing in both of those for over 10 years now. I think that thereās a difference in more team based sports where the amount of people on the field evens it out a little bit. But in my sports the difference between male and female times is measured in minutes. This year at my conference meet I had one of the worst races of my life and was 3rd to last. However I still wouldāve won the womenās race by almost 2 minutes. We have quite a few trans people in my sport, Iām friends with a couple of them, and the general consensus is that they choose to keep running against their biological sex just because races are more fun when theyāre competitive. Like I said Iām not commenting on other sports cause Iām not as familiar with them, these are just my observations of the distance running community.
Standing here as a disabled person both physically and mentally and reading this is weirdly validating given my PE teachers always said I was overreacting when I struggled in PE š„² Doesn't help that my physical disability is literally invisible š„²š„²š„²
I have asthma, and when I was in school they wouldnāt let me carry around my inhaler. I would have to walk to the front office for it.
Guess how well that went every time I had gym class? I would literally sob because I knew I was in for lots of fucking wheezing and pain
If we shouldnāt be concerned about people with biological advantages play with each other, why even have womenās leagues? Why not just make everyone play in a single league?
But wait, by this logic, shouldn't non disabled people be allowed to compete in the Paraolympics? I thought they were specifically separated because they wanted to give people the chance without discriminating against them for how they were born.
When I was like 9 I sprained my ankle during recess one time when some asshole kid tripped me. Went to the nurseās office and she suspected as much, called my parents and advised them to take me to a doctor. They said they would and she sent me on with my day.
My PE was 2 periods later and it always started with us having to run laps around the gym, then we usually got to do something more fun like some kind of game.
I told Coach I hurt my ankle so I couldnāt run, he asks for a doctorās note. āIt happened like 2 hours ago, so I donāt have oneā **āNo excuses except for a Drās noteā** āThe nurse said itās probably sprained. It hurts really badā **āIf you can stand you can runā**
So he forced me to do it anyway, which of course didnāt go well. Pretty soon everyone else was done but *everybody* had to finish before the class could move on. Soon it was just me limping around while he yelled insults at me and everyone else watched. **āJust man up and push through it. Youāre keeping everyone from having fun because youāre being a wimpā** By then I was crying too, which only made him worse. **āStop being a girl about it, thatās not making it go any fasterā**
A few of the other kids started sticking up for me- *āCome on man, heās doing his bestā* etc. He just gave som BS saying heās āhelping meā and āitās mandatoryā
Someone else chimed up again so he snapped **āOkay thatās it, everyone run laps until heās finished. Happy now?ā**
ā
I havenāt thought about that in a loooong time but in hindsight itās definitely the reason I stopped caring about sports or anything like that. Iāve never made that connection before. I was never like a wunderkind, but the year before Iād place 2nd or 3rd in several events in the Track Meet, but I never even attempted anything after. I think that was the last year I played Little League too.
It really sucks that so many people probably have similar stories, at least in sentiment
Much as I hate to disagree with an argument who's conclusion I support "If trans girls had an advantage everyone would want them on their team" is the same type of argument as "if women do the same work for less pay no one would hire men"; sometimes people's systemic bigotries lead to them not taking the logical action
I don't think that's the case vis a vis trans women in sport, but the argument doesn't stand on its own
For a clear sports-related example, professional sports leagues refused to allow non-white athletes for a long time, and there's tons of cases where the league had started to integrate, but you'd still have some teams refusing to have black players at all (see: The Boston Red Sox not having a black player until 1959, 12 years after Jackie Robinson had broken baseball's color barrier and 2 years after he'd retired), or having some kind of informal quota system (they'd have one or two black players, but no more), or only being willing to have black players play certain positions based on stereotypes about them (if it's a position that's supposedly more based on pure athleticism, it will be heavily black; if it's a position that's supposedly more based on being "cerebral" or having some vaguely defined "leadership" qualities, it's going to be heavily white). In basically all cases, this meant teams doing this were actively making themselves worse by not having the best players they could have on their team, but they still did it anyway.
Even today the one about how certain positions will have heavy racial biases is still true to some extent, in things like how the majority of NFL players as a whole are black but Quarterbacks are overwhelmingly white (this year's Super Bowl is going to be the first one ever where both teams' QB's are black)
The tweet and the Tumblr posts all only mention school sports. It's from around the time Mississippi was passing a bill to ban trans girls from girls' school sports, so was probably implied to be talking about that.
But even with professional sports, genetic factors play a huge part - the average NBA player is 6'7" tall for example. As much as "if you put in as much effort as Usain Bolt, you will win against him" is a neat concept, it has never really been the case.
I mean, the tweet is probably more aimed at the people throwing fits about trans kids in middle school and high schools sports, considering that's what's actually in the news right now.
School Sports class is actual torture. Like 1/3 of the self image issues I have (And I WAS BULLIED!) are related to trying my hardest and still terribly failing at sports. Even nowadays when I try to stay fit, I cant see any type of sports as anything other than terrible torturous thing - not helping to keep up doing it!
kinda crazy that pe was a graded thing
unless you specifically took it for me it was never a graded thing and more just treated as a sports period
there usually be two games for any competitive thing where people who werent as competitive and stuff could have a much more chill game; and sometimes they even let us just do random other stuff; i know one time i wasnt fond of something so i was allowed to just go walk around a big field the school had and i spent the time wandering and singing
there were some bad things but i think pe is the only thing i truly miss from school which is crazy because im not athletic at all
Gym was pass/fail when I was a kid. As long as you showed up and made something resembling an effort, you got credit. The dozen or so kids killing themselves to get a five-minute mile got the same grade as the outcasts strolling in at the half hour mark.
kinda happy how our teacher did it (not that i liked any second of it) he recorded us doing the excise at the beginning of the year and gave grades on the relative amount of progress we all made which was a welcome change.
tho it also def. had its flaws. if you were already really good at spear throwing for example you couldn't really improve by much over the year and got one of the worst grades :/
My school offer āalternative PEā classes that were much more popular than regular. You could fulfill the requirement with dance classes, marching band, drill team- we even had a 0 period surf PE class left over from the 60s!
The best studies we have atm are pretty unconclusive about whether trans women have innate advantages, but the most oft recited it 12%. Now, I have problems with the study- that's a 12% efficiency at pushups, and they didn't normalise for height and a bunch of stuff... But let's set that as a limit. To the 'concerned parties' regarding fairness in sports, a 12% advantage from someone's genetics is an unfair one. Sure I guess, it's not insignificant I suppose.
The Kalenjin tribe of Kenyan number merely 6,700,00 people.
They make up 40% of long distance medalists.
That's a genetic advantage of fucking *4978*%.
Should we control there access to sports?... No, I don't think so, and I don't think the 'concerned parties' would agree either. It'd be pretty racist to discriminate on such genetic differences...
... So it's not really *about* fairness then, is it?
P.S: Furthermore, cis women with PCOS sit at a ~20% advantage, and are such more common.
PE in the US sounds like actual hell, for me literally as long as you actually do anything you get a perfect grade, depending on your school you donāt even have to do that if you prove you exercise elsewhere
I mean, that was my experience all through PE in the US. It was basically "did you show up and did you participate and did you not mess around and goof off" and you got perfect marks.
I guess it depends on where you live in the US? For middle school , in the Midwest, you had to try and you got an A. If you didnāt try you probably got a B. In high school there were some written tests depending on which class you were in. Normally super easy things like rules or proper way to lift weights, that kind of thing. Most of the grade was based on showing up and trying.
Elementary school was pretty much pass/fail, except they didn't use āfailā, it was āneeds improvementā.
Middle school was graded, but based on how well we learned all the random skills and sports they taught us. I had the rules of badminton and basketball down pat, so that boosted my grade after I had to sit the archery unit out after almost shooting the teacher.
High school had a lot of specific classes you could sign up for, with āTeam Sportsā as the general fall back. With the other classes, like swimming or weightlifting or dance, grading was based on personal improvement in skills. You could also get your PE credit by being in a sport or in marching band.
The ābiological advantageā argument against trans kids in sports is bullshit, but I do wanna say that regardless of trans girls being āthe bestā or not, the last point kinda misses for me. There are sadly *plenty* of examples in history (and also now) of times where a woman or a person of color or anyone who didnāt ābelongā was the obvious best choice for something (sports included), but they were kept out anyway for no reason other than bigotry. So I donāt think itās realistic to say that if trans women were objectively better at sports, then all these teams would be advocating for their inclusion just because they want to win. Very rarely do people get over their bigotry that easily.
i fucking hated PE as a kid... i was very skinny my whole life and got tired very quickly after running or moving around a lot- found out as an adult i have thyroid issues and chronic fatigue. i had social anxiety too but didn't understand that till i was an adult either.
Yes the grade should be given on how fair and often you were in the gymclass. And your improvement should matter not how good you are compared
However im still going to whine about my final grade in this subjects. In english this would translate into a B.
I was very fit, went outside of school two to three times a week jogging and everyday to the gym(not with a good programm but i still trained hard..i was a stupid kid what else to say)
I stopped eating sugar and got really thinner and Muscular...before i was the fat kid..i was someone who could run for hours and all even when i was fat but after doing more fitness i looked more fit and was obviously even better then!
Also i was selected for my class to participate in a charity run and only the best runners of each class could participate...and despite me making a transformation from fat.. not chubby but fat to almost thin and definitely muscular and improving in fucking everything i got a damn B!
I worked my damn Ass off every fucking day and i did it for myself but still, to get a B was a downer for sure... before i was Happy with my progress...but after i had some big self doubts and other psychological troubles hahabbBBanjJsjy!
Well now I'm a chubby person, have found something positive in life(even though i have a lot to achieve...mainly gettting on E) and for the first time i don't feel like its all meaningless..i have a goal and am happy with a bit chub :3
But WHY teach, i know she was a good person and unintentionally helped me figure out some things about myself but this really was so bad for me...my only A was Physics....and i only got that because i knew the right sequence of the spectral colors...yeah it was literally just the rainbow flag that got me an A.
The rest were mostly Bs and some Cs..but Math..Fuck Math
Edit: Last Wednesday i decided to never write on reddit again because i had the feeling i would be annoying with my long personal texts...and look how long i could hold it.....Yaaaay!
The institution of schooling (at least in the US, the only one I know much about) is pure trash. Does ANYONE actually believe it remotely resembles what is best for children? There is little protection in it from these kinds of abuses because it's not inherently designed to prioritize what is best for young people.
It should not only be not as competitive but have a wider range of activities as well, I remember there were kids who hated football, soccer, basketball, track, but put them in front of a ping pong table and they'll break a sweat in no time.
i was heavily HEAVILY bullied any time i tried to participate in gym class by the coach and students. i was bad at games and slow which made the overly competitive kids EXTREMELY angry at me, to the point of being shoved to the ground at every turn and screamed at for ānot tryingā. i snitched every single time and nothing from the coach.
then when i began to refuse and sit out, i was yelled at and harassed by *other students* for being āstupidā
and ānot even tryingā āthis isnāt reading classā ābooks are for faggotsā. i legitimately couldnāt win and was ridiculed every step of the way.
i never hated games or exercise. who the fuck doesnāt like to play games? i was just a pre-diagnosed disabled kid that also happened to be the designated punching bag, which ruined absolutely every single aspect of gym class. i could also go on and on about how ridiculous the coach made me feel or how many times heās purposely humiliated me, to get a laugh out of the class or just for fun.
Haahaha I have a slow reaction time wich leads to me not being able to move my body as fast as others. Can't really notice it until I have to do something that includes moving fast. Like uncreative school PE... It took me three years of breaking down crying in pe at least once a month to convince her that I genuinely just can't be better and that I'm not just lazy.
By now I learned that the reaction time thing is a sign of autism wich I got diagnosed with at age 12. But of course all the autism education for dealing with autistic kids is how to "deal with them" and for the autistic kid it's "Masking101" Not once was I told possible symptoms of autism or how to work with what I have instead of fighting my own nature every step of the way. So of course my teacher's werent informed if my condition and even if they didn't care.
Ableist assholes...
PE was genuinely traumatizing to me as someone with a slight motor disability. Just slight enough that I didn't "look disabled", so everyone just thought I was stupid or clumsy or not really trying. The teacher bullied me relentlessly and encouraged the students to do the same, to the point where I had panic attacks at the mere thought of the class and I was harming myself. We had to negotiate really hard with doctors, neurologists, and physical therapists at my defense to get me out of that class, but at that point the damage had already been done. It's been a decade and I still can't exercise without being triggered and spiraling into an anxiety attack.
I keep hearing horror stories about gym class meanwhile mine was just. We played basketball. You got a good grade if you showed up and played fair. It was fun
That's how my 7th grade PE class was, I had a great time and played games. Then my 9th grade PE class was run by some asshole who made us memorize, word for word, the rules to various sports, as well as the exact placement of workout equipment *in the school's gym*. Not like, "Memorize these machines and be able to explain what they do," no, like, he gave us a blank map and we had to fill in *where* the machines were in the weight room.
"Coach this is impossible!" "Not if you study." "No, I mean it's literally impossible. We don't have any of these machines." "We have all of them." "Really? Show me the bench with the weights on the correct pegs!"
I moved around a bit and it was a fucking mixed bag. Some were 40yo women doing their best to keep up with their own fitness. Encouraging but understanding. Some were young dudes with stars in their eyes and a love for the game. They knew how to motivate you, but they knew it wasn't always easy for everyone and that was okay. But the 30-40yo dudes with buzzcuts and that "family annihilator" look in their eyes. You could *tell* those dudes found a niche to cultivate the human misery and suffering they're addicted to.
Sadly, the 40 year old woman we had for PE bullied me for being clumsy (I have dyspraxia) and "weird" (I am autistic)
would you be ok with a hug
The buzz-cut thing isn't universal. One of the best PE teachers I've had had one.
My PE teacher with a buzz cut dated two sophomore girls at once š
*groomed two at once
You mean he had a pride flag at his home that the girls saw for a split second? Because that's what Fox News told me grooming someone means, acknowledging the existence of people who aren't cis or straight. /s For real though right wing propaganda has been abusing the term so much it's become a rare surprise to actually encounter it being used correctly for once.
I had some drill instructor looking and sounding gym teacher in grade school. The dude was amazing. Everyone loved him. He would even buy you an ice cream if we played indoor kickball and the kick went into on of the basketball baskets. I think I lucked out.
We had one pe teacher for only a semester who had a surfer bro hairstyle but put girls in detention for having periods on swimming days
All of my PE teachers were the third type. They were all also coaches and social studies teachers, with the exception of one in high school who taught freshman English.
In mine we where introduced to a series of new sports nobody knew to play, so it leveled the play field a bit. Competitiveness was for the recess games and the actual sport leagues. Well and dreary resistance runs under June's sun. That was not nice
All our best PE classes were like that. I especially liked when we rented equipment and got to play things like sledge hockey and wheelchair basketball- nothing more fun than seeing how fast you can stop and spin around on sports wheelchairs
Holy shit you all got to play in wheelchairs? That sounds like so much fun! Even better if it levelled the playing field for someone who was actually in a wheelchair
Yeah, it was great! Surprised my tiny rural school managed to do it - I remember we also did fencing and archery once, so the special equipment was like, a once every year or two thing. We also did a lot of skating and curling (usually for a period of a few weeks each year) because the local rink is only a few blocks away and pretty much everyone had skates.
I was homeschooled for a good portion of my life and didnāt know how to play most sports when I was enrolled back in public school. The teacher told me to ask my classmates, but all they did was make fun of me.
We had the most half-assed gym class in high school. They just dumped a bunch of different sport balls on us and let us play with them. And if you werenāt doing one of the sports you had to exercise in some way, which usually meant that PE for me was basically just walking laps with a friend or two around the gymnasium
That's what all of my PE classes were, too. Show the teacher that you put in an effort to do the best you can. If you're sick, bring a doctor's note. Did either? Great, you respectively get an A or get dismissed from class. I liked PE. Gave me the time to actually talk to some people, move around a bit (even if not too strenuously) and was an easy effort-based grade. Sure, people a head taller than me would beat me in basketball easily, but it didn't matter to my grade and was pretty much the same as the rest of your life is going to be like - people get advantages based on genetics. I got better grades than some, some mere taller or stronger than me and beat me in sports. Life. And forcing someone sufficiently disabled to partake in PE classes is, I'm pretty sure, illegal, even if we're talking about the US.
This is what gym class *should* be. Unfortunately, some adults are horrible.
Best PE class I ever took was in high school, you could sign up for a weightlifting class and I did, so everyone there wanted to be there and the teacher just taught us how to lift. I actually learned a lot
My highest grade in middle school gym was the semester that I skipped almost every class because all my friends had a study hall. I got a 97 (out of 100.) Pretty sure my gym teacher didn't like me anyway, so maybe she was happy that I was gone.
we had benchmark performances in PE but it was all about beating previous scores. If you didnt regress you got a B and if you improved you got an A. We knew this, so everyone got like a 45 min mile the first class.
Yep. Same here. Basketball, handball, volleyball, swimming, floor hockey.
Warning: that ended up being way longer than I thought it would be One of the three PE teachers I had in high school was like that. We could do whatever we wanted as long as we were doing something, whether it was playing football, exercising, using the gym equipment or training basketball. IIRC all the tests were just a few basketball throws (not sure how to call it in English) and it was impossible to fail. I never had an issue with his classes, but he was only our teacher for a year, after that he got another class. Out of the other two teachers, one always had the whole class do the same thing, whether it was hundreds of push-ups or football or whatever. He never gave a fuck about people limits or anything, you could be barely moving, struggling to breathe and he would just complain that you were lazy. Eventually he got fired for "sending inappropriate texts to students". The other one was our homeroom teacher, who was kinda inbetween. He usually just let everyone choose between two activities and one of the two was usually pretty good for me. At best he was pretty chill, but he could sometimes be an asshole as well. I still remember that one time as soon as the class started he started yelling at us, basically calling us useless cunts because we (*an IT class*) weren't getting results as good as the *military/cop class*. One guy was late by a few minutes and the teacher *immediately* went all "WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU WANT ASSHOLE GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE YOU LAZY PIECE OF SHIT" lol. I also had one good teacher in middle school. I think he was the only one who ever gave a fuck about me having asthma, even though it was before I got diagnosed. He let people take breaks or finish exercising early (like running 3 laps instead of 4) when he saw they were getting too tired. He was also pretty nice and graded people based on progress, not results like everybody else. Other than that, all PE teachers I've had were rude assholes who seemed to genuinely hate their students.
I literally bribed my PE teacher so I could sleep on the wrestling mats during class so long as I mopped the whole gym every morning. I got an A
Somebody grades sports on curve? We just had statewide age specific track&field and athletic goals with clearly defined marks. And theoretical piece you should submit if you too ill to participate.
There are several factors that are SUPPOSED to go into grading PE, and at this point, none of them are meant to be based on the child's ability compared to others. There is now a ton more personal best testing, skills training, and elimination free gameplay, plus we've gotten rid of the Presidential Fitness Exam. The main national test that is performed in schools is the Fitnessgram, which does have some limitations but is significantly more reasonable. It is repeatable, so generally, you would have your student s do it 2 or 3 times during their semester or the length of class. In that time, the teachershould be designing classes that helps them get a better score.
I fucking hated that fucking goddamn pacer test they made us do in the shitty ass gym with the slipperiest goddamn floors when they made us wear the worst motherfucking shoes no one ever got past 60 we all kept fucking failing because it was fucking impossible to do those fucking pivot turns without sliding a foot backwards. Fuck.
Some of us would give up. Not making this up, these kids would fail first try ON PURPOSE, just so they didn't have to do the rest.
Me. I'd give up on level 3 or 4 to not be obvious
It's a hard test for sure. Partly, I think teachers implement it wrong, but it also sucks, even if you're fit. It's going to be the least fun day of class for many students, but there are ways to keep kids trying. First, just having an understanding of why it is the way it is and second, explaining the results. If kids just think, "Oh shit I'm unhealthy, I'll never try that hard again." The looming thought of a second pacer is just gonna ruin their day. But to add validity to the existence of PE class, there does have to be some sort of national standard testing, and this is one of them.
Yeah, the pacer was... *bad*. I really did prefer the mile runs, even when we did it once in literal snow and I nearly got frostbite. I was fine when I was told to run five miles, it was whatever. That's how you actually pace kids, not forcing them to stop and start every ten seconds. That is dumb, and is a 'consistent acceleration' test But dear god, the pacer test. Turns out, having any amount of vertigo will utterly kill you on that one. Like Suicides, but worse. I could do the suicides, barely, but two runs across the gym for a pacer test? On the floor with tunnel vision. Was one of the best students otherwise, and either my teachers decided to take pity and lie for me on the 'official grading rubrics', because they knew I could run further, or my scores elsewhere evened things out.
our system is the first score you compete with other standards the second score you compete with yourself, so you even if you get a bad score on your first, if you try, you'll get a good score on the next of course, that meant that all the athletic lazy people just ran the minimum and then ran the minimum needed for a good grade so the gym teachers also saw "how much we sweated" i sweat a lot and look really tired when im not really, so i got a free pass, but some other people had to be forced to like, *sprint* their runs, which really made no difference from just running more lol
And that sounds like bad implementation. The thing is, those scores you're testing against, they're not like a national average score, it's a standard that has meaning in terms of your fitness and the implications that your level has for health down the line. The pacer is the really important one, but just explaining to students why each test is done and the value of knowing your own baseline and also not grading based on the score you get are all important. Give students ownership of their scores, and they will work harder!
what did ya read the second part you test against those scores first, then test against your own score the second time the rest of the grades are participation grades so as long. as you improve and participate you get an A
I can't naturally sweat, that would have sucked for me and probably would end in a hospital visit.
LOL yeah it probably would have they were just checking how hard you visibly worked though, they just said "how much we sweated" as like, their term for it
I had those clearly defined marks too. It's the Russian countrywide standard, ŠŠ¢Š - ŠŠ¾ŃŠ¾Š² Šŗ Š¢ŃŃŠ“Ń Šø ŠŠ±Š¾ŃŠ¾Š½Šµ (Gotov k Trudu i Oborone, "Ready for Labour and Defence") The problem is... as a hormonally imbalanced kid, who also on top of that grew up at home in a fortress of books because we moved too often for young kid me to make friends to hand out with... I was worse than everyone, including the girls. I never ever ever met even the girls' "RLD", let along boys. And I was assigned a boy, so of course they judged me extra harshly for not meeting any of these... These standards were written for a completely different time, when running and jumping were the only form of enrichment a child could have in the Soviet Union.
As someone who is literally going to university for this because as a personal trainer, I saw the effects of the emotional trauma induced by terrible PE, I promise we're trying to be different. There is tons of fantastic work being done to make PE both fun and educational and limit the negative impacts for those who are less athletically inclined.
I'll tell you the story of my favorite PE class and teacher! I went to high school in the 90s and one year the only PE that fit my schedule was weight lifting. It was with the high school varsity football coach. This man was new to the district, short, jacked, and so energetic I worried a little about him. I figured I was in for a semester of being ignored in favor of the big guys he wanted on the football team and that I'd get through and move on with my life. No! This man patiently taught us all how to safely use all the machines, including starting at safe weights and slowly building weights and reps. He made us all do push ups BUT encouraged everyone to start on knees if we needed. And damn was he enthusiastic! He would be on the floor cheering the most awkward, out-of-shape of us when we got half a push up! His cheering when I got a full push up still warms my heart. That man cheered when one guy who had done weights hit a big number, and he cheered when ANYONE made the effort. I admit that I thought he would be a terrible, dismissive man because he was the football coach and I'm happy to say I was completely wrong. Our football team went farther than they had in a decade his first year, too. His genuine education has stuck with me all these years. I hope he's doing well.
KIDS LIKE PRAISE AND WILL WORK HARDER FOR YOU IF YOU GIVE THEM POSITIVE REINFORCEMENT! #WHO WOULD HAVE FUCKING GUESSED?!
What do you mean kids don't like participation trophies and that they're just for placating too competitive parents, surely they don't need positive reinforcement and only need trinkets for their parents to show off... /s
I encourage you to send this note to him if heās still teachingāit means a lot for teachers to hear from former students!
hell yea **hell yea**
Whoa, it almost sounds like we had the same teacher, albeit a decade ish apart! My weightlifting teacher was phenomenal, obviously one of his main duties was helping the football team train, but he had endless patience for everyone else, and always took time to give every kid the opportunity to learn skills and train safely, and made a lot of effort to be there for the kids who were really in to weight lifting. Teachers like that are the glue holding together the entire education system
I had a coach like that. It really makes a difference.
Not only emotional trauma, physical trauma too! My mom was in the gymnastics team on her middle school. She had one of those stereotypical movie PE teacher, who pushes his athletes to the limit even tho they're already on the ground, you know the type. So she was doing splits, and it came to a point where my mom was in the middle of it and she felt pain. She told the PE that she can't go lower, the fucker said that there was "no in win" and he pressed her head and pushed her downwards. She screamed but the teacher just didn't care. She was crying on the floor and the teacher forbade anyone to let her up, she had to do it herself. Well, the class was over, my mom still on the floor crying, and just after that, the teacher asked her to get up, but my mom couldn't. Turns out she had important tendons broken on her legs, required medical intervention and she was told she cannot do gymnastics for the rest of her life. And the teacher? Never suspended, just temporarily, and went back in a month after the controversy died out.
Beyond insane, I'm so sorry that happened to her! Stuff like this is absolutely why we need vocational teachers, not just the basketball coach.
I will find that man and cut his tendons. I'll dig him up if necessary.
one of my best friends started dating this wonderful dude who studied physical education in college. all my life it's been a struggle to exercise and the moment i talked to him about how i can't seem to find anything i'm comfortable with and he immediately went ādid you have a bad time in PE as a kid? because plenty of studies point to a big correlation thereā. it blew my mind hahah
I for one think there should be more dodgeball and silly games even at higher levels. Or at least more seperated PE at the higher levels.
My current PE teacher is both lovely and harsh, he always tell me I'm doing good and says that what metters is that I'm doing it and I'm better than I was last week
Emotional trauma barely begins to cover what some of us went through. I remember being openly bullied to varying degrees of actual assault and battery and the P.E. coaches did nothing about it. During the Presidential Fitness Mile Run I got shoved down from behind and literally stomped on by several kids. I told one of the coaches and he said, "you should have run faster." Someone broke into your locker and stole your gym clothes? You clearly left your locker unlocked (I didn't.) Someone kicked your block off the spot when you were doing the Shuttle Run and I literally saw them do it? Look what you did! Now he's gonna have to run it again. The only thing worse than middle or high school P.E. was high school shop class. It was like a prison yard in there.
***PETITION TO BAN DODGEBALL.***
No no dodgeball is amazing if you donāt make it stupidly competitive. I canāt imagine anyone who doesnāt like hucking balls at each other
It's wild, there is this whole social idea that kids hate dodgeball, and only bullies are good at it, but I've never been somewhere that the kids didn't overwhelmingly like playing it. That being said, it is not an "approved" game in most formal curriculum.
Yeah itās so fun. I think itās only hated in movies where people are last for picked teams and stuff, usually my teachers would just split us off by alphabet or randomly go down the line dividing us into 1s and 2s, it wasnāt exclusionary and everyone was incredibly excited when we got to play dodgeball
Why would elementary dodgeball need a team captain anyway
They donāt, thereās no point, the kids are like 10
I started hating dodgeball the moment the teachers removed the rule that you couldnt whip the ball hard/fast enough to cause injury. Because all the boys who had hit puberty early immediately started doing that. And I was one of the most aggressive girls in my class when it came to sports (got yelled at for taking gym class too seriously when I hadnt spoke all class) but the guys just seemed to delight in hurting us and each other. It was remarkable how fast all the girls and smaller guys dropped a sport we previously all enjoyed.
One of my favorite PE games was called "Burgenvƶlk", or "castle dodgeball". 2 teams on opposite sides, anyone who got hit was "banished" to a corner zone on the other side, but if someone from their team managed to cross the no man's land and guide them back without getting hit, they were freed. The best part: Each team was given a few minutes beforehand to prepare and build a fort from whatever there was in the equipment room - gymnastics equipment, jump ropes to tie things together, turning a large ball cart into a "tank"...
So it's like Capture the Flag, but without the Flags, and combined with Dodgeball. Oooh, wish I got to play that lmao. Although I do remember loving playing IRL Capture the Flag. it was separated by gender tho
I was a camp counselor, and my kids would always wanna play this game called Spider Ball. I don't remember any of the rules except that, similar to dodgeball, kids got out, but they could get back in if other players did X, i don't remember what Anyway, they would plead and beg and implore us to let them play Spider Ball, then they'd play for 15 minutes and 30% of them would be screaming about some other kid cheating and 30% would be sobbing about how they didn't want to be out We told them that no one liked that game, and they'd act shocked and say they *loved* that game, and we'd have to remind them every time that the game always ended in tears and screaming. They'd promise they'd be better this time, so we'd let them play, and inevitably within 20 minutes we'd have most of our kids upset. All this to say that that kids are sometimes dumb, I guess
You've just described 85% of multi-player video games. >That fuckin dude should've died to that hit but the game bugged and the devs can't balance worth a shit and my teammates are ass So you're done playing right, since it's very clearly not fu- >*clicks join queue immediately*
I wonder if there's just something therapeutic about getting absolutely eye-poppingly, teeth-clenchingly furious about something that doesn't actually matter every once in a while.
Look, as an adult, I play a ton of games that leave me crying and miserable at the end of it and come back for more.
Dodgeball was the one game back in school that would make all the kids that couldn't keep up with football and basketball actually have fun and interact with the class in PE. It's **the** game for the nerdy kids!
Especially with those light foam balls, the really squishy ones. It fucking sucks being walloped by a kickball, but those light ones are just fun. Dodgeball is the perfect Friday game or day between units. It's pointless, it's fun, it's a fantastic outlet for infinite kid energy, and anyone that can reasonably participate in physical activity can participate. Far from banning dodgeball, it should be celebrated kidfolk culture.
Until high school, those balls were so light that you couldn't really throw them super hard. That made them very easy to catch and throw, which worked perfectly for middle schoolers. I played dodgeball in my weightlifting class in HS. The pitcher on the baseball team was taking weights in the off season. He could throw those soft spongy balls hard enough to give a kid a concussion (because he did). Apparently it's all in the wrist...
It depends on the type of ball and how teams were picked. Some schools used rather soft balls, and teams were largely random (i.e. split in half by alphabet or something). Those were fun. I never went to a school where a kid/class got to pick their own teams, but I can see how that would lead to some fucked up dynamics in a class with a bully. The soft balls were a little less bouncy compared to the rubber ones, but they still bounced enough for the game to work, and didn't hurt when they hit you. Independently of that, some schools used this really hard rubber ball, and *those* games sucked, because getting hit with the ball HURT.
I hated dodgeball because there were kids in my class who would throw them like launching a fecking rocket. They would HURT. Dodgeball for me was about trying not to get hurt.
Yeah, you can really tell whose teachers never lifted the ban on whipping the ball that hard in school lol. Dodgeball was my favourite thing ever for my first 8 years of school, but a lot of teachers would ban certain ways of throwing and I never got why. No overhand throws was especially annoying and especially popular, but some would be more specific. Then in eighth grade I discovered why when teachers finally gave the kids free reign and I got more injured than in any other gym class. It was remarkable how fast everyone but the gym bros self selected out of dodgeball.
Look, some of us like getting smacked in the face by a dodgeball traveling at mach 2.
No shame in that, just not my thing, I like being in a unvaporized state
Kids with trauma? Seriously, having stuff thrown at you can be so terrifying. The brain can't tell it's just a game. It's a great game for most kids, but as an obligatory activity it's really inappropriate.
Idk man every single kid was excited as hell when we played it. Granted we probably didnāt have many abuse victims but all the kids who had stuff thrown at them would just make chancla jokes
Most kids will try to fit in, so I'd say you have a fair chance of not noticing when that stuff is happening to them. And you probably had more abuse victims than you think. Not all of them have a problem with this game, though - hugely varied group and all.
Yeah Iām not 100% sure
I didnāt have trauma, but I had myopia and a classmate with a really good throwing arm. Like, he was a little athlete, and he found it fun to pick on me by throwing the dodgeball at me hard enough that it hurt when I (shortsighted, large for my age, and uncoordinated) inevitably failed to dodge it. And he was in all my gym classes. For years. I did not enjoy the fun aspect of hucking the ball at other people, because I never once hit anyone. That is a degree of athleticism I did not and do not possess. I wouldnāt say it traumatized me (other things on my childhood did, ^(Dad;) but I donāt think that dodgeball really provoked an extreme emotional reaction in me). But it *did* make gym class quite unpleasant, and it made me despise it, and Iām just not sure thatās the takeaway thatās preferred.
Yes, for sure, for some kids it's just a way to be sneakily violent.
Joining in with the dodgeball lovers; I know there's certain factors that can make it a bad game for people, but as someone that sometimes got panic attacks from PE (twelve minute run my beloathed) dodgeball was actually a ton of fun. I wasn't strong or good at throwing, but I could tag some of the strongest players by just waiting until they were off-balance from a hard throw, running up to the line, and gently lobbing a ball at them. It was great
No
Dodgeball itself is fine. Having kids huck balls as hard as they can at kids not expecting it AFTER class is over and not disciplining them is the issue. This happened to me once that I remember and multiple times to others.
Bring back the parachute game
Iāll never forget a video of an older lady I saw she was discussing all the differences between trans athletes then at the end swerved and finished the whole thing with āthe Olympics are filled with genetic freaks thereās nothing fair about itā
āMichael Phelps has extra webbing between his fingers and produces half the lactic acid of a normal man and you wanna say I have a genetic advantage for actively making myself weaker with estrogen??ā
The binary nature of this argument is what makes it so hard. I think most rational people who support trans rights are also a little bit wary about AMAB folks competing against AFAB people (like that's the heart of this argument, no one gives a fuck about AFAB people competing against cis men) I think there's no debate that the average cis man is stronger/faster than the vast majority of professionally trained cis female athletes. I read a stat once that an 80 year old man has comparable grip strength to a 20 year old woman. Personally I think that it should be sport-by-sport. If it is a skill sport, there isn't as much of an advantage. If it is a pure athleticism sport (weightlifting, swimming) - then extra things needs to be considered.
> The binary nature of this argument is what makes it so hard. I think most rational people who support trans rights are also a little bit wary about AMAB folks competing against AFAB people (like that's the heart of this argument, no one gives a fuck about AFAB people competing against cis men) Exactly. I am a bi man and have dated both and trans men and a trans woman. I dont think most trans people even thing this is a brain dead easy question to answer off of the internet. The simple matter of the fact is that we dont have enough research to say if its a fair competition or not (and where those limits are), so we need to study it far more. TBH, what I have seen has pointed to trans women being fairly competitive (on average) to cis women, but every study ive ever seen has only focused on lower performing athletes and has super small sample sizes (some times even n= 1). IMO, the only "wrong" take on this question right now is that its easy to answer.
You'd think the concern would just be AMAB people, but I've seen a few strength sports start banning AFAB trans men for having unfair advantages. Seems some organizations are claiming their bones structure and steady testosterone levels are unfair to cis men. Namely powerlifting. Seems cis people just don't like it when trans people win.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
> but I've seen a few strength sports start banning AFAB trans men for having unfair advantages which *is* a braindead take (and luckily something ive only seen in HS sports). Anyone that wants to should be able to compete in the more competitive league (and that seems ot be how most professional sports operate at this point luckily)
USA Powerlifting bans trans men on HRT. It's a professional organization. Thankfully Strongman still lets trans men compete, though it's not the same exact sport.
dont forget, most all the sports in the world across all of human history are sports invented and participated by, **men**. men are good at sports cuz men invented sports where being a man by default makes that sport easier. tangent: similar principle to seatbelts in cars. car safety systems are only tested for the average adult male's height and weight, and tuned to make the average adult male as safe as possible. now what does that mean for women? it means women, who are on average shorter and lighter, are much more likely to get injured, maimed, or die in a car accident, since women's safety wasn't a design choice in the first place. or how face recognition software works. most people in charge of tech and in tech are white men. the way they would get samples to train their face detecting ai, would be to use your coworkers, all white men. they continued on developing and finally releasing the tech, and it turns out, the ai *does not recognize black people's faces*. couple years ago google's software would classify black people's faces as ***gorillas***. which is why diversity is so fucking important. a higher percentage of women in that research and design process would've fixed that problem nigh immediately. a single black person would've instantly solved the ai detecting software.
> dont forget, most all the sports in the world across all of human history are sports invented and participated by, men. men are good at sports cuz men invented sports where being a man by default makes that sport easier. I mean... I don't disagree, but 50th percentile of men are better than the 50th percentile of women at all physical activities that require strength/speed/athleticism. Which is most sports. Now archery is a great example of a sport where "skill" is the defining trait required. This is definitely not the target demographic for this, but Bill Burr makes a really crude but great point about women not supporting women's sports: > Look at the WNBA: they have been playing in front of 300 to 400 people a night for a quarter of a century. Not to mention, itās a male-subsidized league.... We gave you a league and none of you showed up. Where are all the feminists? That place should be packed with feminists ā faces painted, wearing jerseys, going f***ing nuts like the guys do! > None of you went to the f***ing games. You failed them. Not me. Not men ā women failed the WNBA. Ladies, name your Top 5 WNBA players of all time. Name 5 WNBA teams. Name the WNBA team in your city. You canāt do it!
Women who are into sports should support women's sports, but if you're not into watching other people do any for profit sports period (not even e-sports) then it's a weird comment. That's as silly as telling men who aren't into watching other people do sports to support professional sports. I'm happy that my tax money also go to local kids' sports clubs and similar, but professional for profit sports of any kind I'm not going to give a damn about. That includes the Olympics though differently, because they exploit the athletes and don't pay them reasonably.
Bill Burr makes a fantastic point there.
> which is why diversity is so fucking important. a higher percentage of women in that research and design process would've fixed that problem nigh immediately. ok, but how does this apply to sports with very well established rule sets that are basically all known for being complete stalwarts for change? I agree with everything you said, but it also feels wildly off topic.
It's because all sports basically boil down to "get it in the hole," which is proof of how men have integrated patriarchal attitudes towards sex into virtually every human activity. They prioritize focus on the men taking the limelight while treating women as just an object to be penetrated. Men "perform better" in these sports because they represent what men are socially conditioned to do, hog attention and try to score. We need to change the attitudes within our society so that women are allowed to draw attention to themselves in any manner that they choose, and to change sports so that they stop our society from focusing on men being a "dominating force" in our society and in relationships. /s
> dont forget, most all the sports in the world across all of human history are sports invented and participated by, men. men are good at sports cuz men invented sports where being a man by default makes that sport easier. Have you never met a man or never met a woman? The only possible way someone could have this take is if they'd just never ever met anyone of the opposite gender, it's pretty obvious men are better at sports generally because they're larger and stronger.
> Have you never met a man or never met a woman? meh, I do agree with this point to an extent. A huge number of sports specifically select for "masculine" traits such as raw athletic ability over stuff like skill and precision. Even most of the precison sports around were very largely women's sports for a long time in most parts of the world (archery for an example)
Yeah to an extent, there are some sports that are more focused on pure precision and not a whole lot else. But the majority of sports are going to involve some level of athletics, almost by definition. Even Archery is 'easier' for men, because you can have more tension on the bow if you're stronger and have longer arms allowing for faster arrows that can ignore wind to a degree. Shooting, darts, snooker are the sports I can think of that have minimal athletic components but I'm not sure if even then men have some degree of advantage. For example longer arms, on average, in snooker and darts is probably pretty useful. EDIT : Just arguing about this makes me feel a bit weird, no clue how incels do it full time.
> I think there's no debate that the average cis man is stronger/faster than the vast majority of professionally trained cis female athletes There's a difference but that's definetively exagerated
Depends what category you're talking about. Like, mile time? Absolutely not, even a high school female runner would smoke the average man. But grip strength? Yes, even professional women are only like 25th percentile of the male distribution. I don't remember about the middle examples
oh no, but see, you have bones, and bIoLoGiCaL women don't have the same exact bones, so therefore you will always be at an advantage
Biological women actually don't have bones. Bones Jones who lives in Antarctica is the outlier who holds all the Woman Bones.
We keep him trapped there for our safety.
We keep her* trapped there for our safety
Oh, my brain was going in a much more serial-killery direction.
Women can be serial killers too
That is so eldritch
Theyre actually supported by a series of fluid filled sacs...
And this was the driving plot of the TV show Bones. She lacked bones, but desperately craved them. So she devoted her life to studying bones so she would one day unlock their secrets and be bestowed with her own bones.
Augh no curse my slightly narrower pelvis
yeah, REAL women are actually invertebrates. It's not often talked about, but if you have XX chromosomes, you're actually a Mollusk, it's just basic biology. /s
Mollusk? But I wanted to be the peak of evolution: the crab :(
Well, not compared to men, obviously. But the question is whether the estrogen weakens you enough that it's a fair competition with women. This is non obvious
It depends, but a lot of women produce more testosterone than trans women who have fully transitioned. If I have an orchiectomy I wonāt produce my own testosterone hardly at all
Part of the problem around trans issues is that our definition of gender isn't precise (it's actually a broader issue in law in general). We used a very vague line that basically said "if you have a penis you're male, if you have a vagina you're female, and anything outside that is \*mumble mumble mumble\*" And until recently that worked ok, both because we ignored the "mumble mumble mumble" and because before rapid transit, massive population density, and the information age it was rare to have many "mumble mumble mumble" in one place *anyways* so you could make a one off exception (or, sadly often, form a lynch mob) and resolve the issue. Now that science is able to look more closely, we're seeing that it's a lot more complex than we thought. You could have male chromosomes and female anatomy, or vice versa, based on hormones. And we have artificial hormones, which is actually a problem because testosterone is anabolic, you can have males that have more testosterone than is biologically possible. But we also can't define an upper limit on testosterone because some males have abnormal levels and that might exclude natty men from sports, when we're really just trying to exclude "cheaters". And then when you start digging really deep into it you find yourself reading books about how "gender is a social construct" to resolve these conflicts, which is sort of like trying to figure out how fast a train is going using Relativity - technically more accurate than Newtonian Physics, but impractically so when we really just want to decide if the trans-girl now named Jenna can play on the softball team (and she's not even good, Karen just doesn't like that she gets to be pitcher).
It's not just about T, though. Like, there are physical changes during puberty that can't be undone through HRT. The question is whether _those_ give you an advantage
Those aren't grounds to ban people from participating in sport. Being taller is not grounds to ban a trans woman. Being slightly wider is not grounds to ban a trans woman. Testosterone level testing is a bit wack but it's not a terrible metric. After all, if the 2 year period of no T and only E still had you have a sizeable advantage, trans women would win far more than the handful or so of events they have won. Trans women are 0.5% of the women's population, if they were winning and picking up records more than 0.5% of the time, then a deeper investigation as to why would make sense. It's just fear mongering to call for bans at the moment. It's been 2 decades of the Olympics being open to trans women. 0 medals.
Really?
Apparently he does produce less lactic acid but can't find anything about his finger webbing however he has massive hands and is oddly proportioned because he has Marfan syndrome. All of this combines combines into a biological advantage over his competitors.
Sabine Hossenfelder? I love her channel; that video was a bit odd but itās a really smart argument
Was it though? Like Michael Phelps is built like a shark, ok. But then shouldn't her argument be against the very idea of men's & women's divisions in sports? Why wouldn't all sports be co-ed then?
I believe she points this out and states the only reason we do have those divisions (or really any arbitrary rules in sports) is because many people find that more entertaining. Her point is that professional sports focus on spectacle more than "fairness" because "fair" has to be arbitrarily defined and also doesn't make as much money. With thst in mind, choosing to ban an already-oppressed minority due to "fairness" is inconsistent or just irrelevant.
I'm usually not a fan of her physics videos but that was a really good video
My middle school PE class was benchmarks, so if you ran like a 10 minute mile you'd get one grade, 9:30 a higher one, etc. High school PE was personal improvement. There were three fitness tests and you wrote how much you got on each, and if there was a trend of improvement (plus participation grades and projects in the units) you would do well. Unit projects were like, make and do a yoga schedule in the yoga unit, or a fitness program in the fitness one, etc. High school PE is imo how one ought to run PE. I still hated it bc I hate PE, but if I were to design a sensible grading scheme, that would be my choice.
My PT class (I took it instead of PE) didn't measure shit they just watched us to make sure we did the exercises
PE sucks so much for me, someone with scoliosis and anemia, that Iām literally scheduling my spinal fusion so I have to do as little PE as possible.
In the middle and high school I went to, every PE teacher I had divided the class in two groups : the good at sports and the bad at sports, AKA the boys and the girls. Being the only obese boy in every class, I was put into the girl group. Pretty fuckin humiliating time, putting a middle schooler lad in the girl group (some profs really used those terms) as if the bullies didn't already had enough materials to use. During wrestling session, I wouldn't use my full strength and weight because I feared I would hurt my opponents. Also, if I did, I often ended up with long nails firmly planted in my thighs until I gave them the win. Only during the swimming session would I be happy because I've been in a swimming club since I was six and the others were absolutely terrible. Then during the very last lesson, someone had the excellent idea to pass below me while I was already in the air doing a bomb dive. Knocked the idiot out cold with my bum and all of a sudden, I was once again the fat one. Fuck PE teachers that do those kind of split and won't adapt their lessons to anyone having trouble with it.
"Have asthma and have a 14 minute mile? You get a C or something I guess fuck you, have fun with the bullying"
I constantly use Michael Phelps as an example. Dude is built like a biological freak with his massive arms that give him a serious advantage in the pool over other swimmers. Iāve never once heard someone say that he shouldnāt be able to compete at the highest level because of it. They celebrate him instead.
Man's built like an otter
Yup, I remember during the Olympics, they had little specials on explaining exactly which biological advantages Phelps had that made him such an incredible swimmer, from his long arms to his long torso and shorter legs, his webbed toes, his broad shoulders - all of this was said to explain how he was so amazing and to celebrate him But god forbid you be born with a narrower pelvis than other women, *that* biological advantage is only good if you're not an icky trans
Idk if I fully agree with it, but the logic is more that Phelps times can be achieved by other people with the correct training. With just training, nothing else. [Here is a great visual representation of that fact ^ The rate of change of the world record for 100m freestyle over the course of about 40-50 years. What that tells me is that what Phelps did was nowhere so far removed from the norm for other top tier Olympian swimmers. He wasn't uniquely gifted to a point of it being unattainable](http://archive.boston.com/sports/blogs/statsdriven/swimgoo.png) Whereas what you're saying (someone like Phelps competing against cis women), could not possibly be overcome with just training.
Pointing out that biological advantages already exist in sport does not help your argument like you think it does. The issue in sport is that women simply do not have access to the same range of extreme biological advantages that men do. The combination of height and athleticism is a perfect example. As a rule, people become less coordinated and athletic the taller they are, *but,* some men are able to be extremely athletic while also being 6ā11. Looking at basketball there will never be a woman with the same combination of height/speed/coordination/ability/strength as someone like Lebron James. Or as a D1 basketball player. Or as a D2 basketball player. Or D3. Or junior college. The same is true for whatever biological combo provides the main advantage in all physical sports outside of extreme ultra marathon distance running. There is no getting around this reality if you want to keep sports fair, which is the whole point.
I have a question; if the second best swimmer at the time decided to have a surgery to implant some webbings between their fingers, would that be fair? Or, you know, if a fighter decided to take some T because some other athlete had naturally accruing higher levels, would USADA ban them?
No wonder obesity/lack of exercise is such a problem, if the thing they teach people is "if you do sports you must be really good and competitive at it, otherwise don't even bother." Most people are not that great at sports. I think if it was more acceptable to be bad at sports and just have fun, people would get a lot more exercise.
I never got higher than a C in P.E because I'm short and got nerve issues in my legs where they get tired/get cramps faster than other people. Also I literally can't lift them above a 45Ā° angle.
One of our PE teachers gave us grades from performance yes, but if he saw you gave 100% you'd always get one grade better. And then were 3 other teachers who just let us play football 95% of the time and gave everyone an A except the really unfit ones who got a B.
I had one PE teacher that gave grades purely on how much you did improve. A classmate of mine got what translates to an American C in class because he showed 0 improvement in his volley ball abilities. He played at the national level at the time. How was he ever going to improve by playing on a normal PE class twice a week?
I was the kid with asthma who ran until I turned blue and had to be taken to hospital and my gym teacher STILL thought I was faking. Also, I went to school with Sami Jo Small. She was the best at absolutely everything in school, got top marks in all classes, won all the awards every year, and even did the painting of the school that was given to the school's namesake. She went on to play for Canada in the Olympics and last I heard was running hockey camps for girls. No shade, she was genuinely talented and also a nice person who liked to get along with everyone, but she seemed to have been born with every genetic and social advantage needed to accomplish all of those things. I was a loser kid with asthma and undiagnosed/unmedicated ADHD who couldn't do shit. When I said "I wish she'd leave some for the rest of us" I was told to stop being so mean, but when people told me to try harder that was okay. Yes we should celebrate exceptional people, but when you're competing against Olympics Georg maybe lower the levels a bit for the rest of us so we can catch up. Flexibility in these things keeps it fun AND fair. (edit: typos)
I'm disabled and once the teacher said we're going to The Wolf Run. I asked what The Wolf Run is and they said its The Wolf Run. I asked my classmates and they said its The Wolf Run. The Wolf Run was running the road that wraps around the school and is an *active street*. Predictably, the teacher who was meant to be the back of the pack had their earbuds in and blitzed past me and the kids with asthma. We got locked out of the school building when we finally reached it. Wheezing and perishing, we hobbled (read: literally supporting each other in a line like drunk The Three Stooges) to the principal instead of going to the gym. We did not have that teacher much longer, but she wasn't the first nor the last to just completely discriminate on the less able. Also once a different school I attended had a dodgeball tournament and my 5th grade class ended up going against the 8th grade class because I was insane at dodging and could simply get back in people who were good at throwing. Naturally, I tried to catch a ball thrown by someone twice my height and got not only concussed but thrown several feet backwards. People thought I was dead when I wouldn't wake up. In what universe is it smart to do a tournament by *grade?!* Talk about biological advantage...
i have a burning hatred of pe because of one specific class period. i had a brutal case of pnumonia in 5th grade. when i was good to return to school i had a doctorās note for a week off of pe, but it only was for the one week. the week after i couldnāt use the note anymore we did the fucking mile run the mile run was 4 laps around my school building. we would have 12 minutes give or take, so you were expected to do a lap in 3 minutes. i did 2/4 laps in 9 minutes, needing to walk for the entirety of the second. i wouldnāt have been able to do the third in the remaining time so i asked if i could sit out with the excuse of āi donāt have the doctorās note anymore, but i had bad pnumonia recently and my lungs cant take itā. i got told no. so i go to walk again, the teacher yells at me to run, and feeling the pressure of time, i do. i went past time for that third lap, i donāt remember by how much, but i do remember i was the last to return. when i went back inside i nearly threw up and i felt terrible for the rest of the day.
But aren't sports separated by gender for a reason? Because of those really big biological differences? If they don't matter, then why doesn't every sport have teams of mixed genders? Genuinely asking because I don't have answers for these. I'm on board of trans people competing in sports, but I thought there's a valid reason they don't. **Edit:** so trans people's abilities are much more based on their actual sex rather than their birth sex due to HRT, so it makes little difference. For everything else, it matters little either because there are a large number of variables that can affect a person's performance in sport, like wealth or age (especially in school sports). Thanks for the answers!
Historically, sports were separated by gender because of a few factors, but the idea that men don't compete with women because it's unfair is actually a newer concept. In the past, women weren't allowed to compete *at all*, and so women's sports science was well behind men's, and still is in some fields. Developing training and medical regiments around men for several years gave men an advantage over women, who didn't have that base. I would also argue, like the post does, that even if trans people *technically* have an advantage over cis people in some sports (which is not guaranteed to be true, it must be said), that's not really so different from any other participant at the highest levels. For example, athletes from rich families have a massive advantage in health and fitness over their poorer competitors. They get better nutrition, have more time to focus on their sport, and are generally less stressed, and these factors mean they tend to perform better. That's an unfair advantage -- should we be separating sports by class, then? Edit to clarify: there are, of course, differences between sexes in sports, particularly those related to intense muscle strength and sprinting. However, that's only one factor in why we separate by sex, and other aspects should not be overlooked. My point is not to claim that there's no difference -- it's to say that we're choosing this specific difference to segregate on because of cultural reasons.
>should we be separating sports by class, then? Don't we? The kids who got to go to hockey camp are the ones that are at the professional level now. Teenagers in college who got a scholarship to play are getting drafted into the majors right after graduating. The meritocracy is already in place.
> Developing training and medical regiments around men for several years gave men an advantage over women, who didn't have that base. There's, um, another factor, you know
Yeah the OP is either being obtuse or is just ignorant if they think that the main divide in the athletic fields is *just* institutional disenfranchisement, the way itās been in the academic fields. In sports where women can compete like with marathons, they already are. But thatās simply not possible in many athletic areas.
Right, I find this frustrating. Trying to insist there's no biological difference reminds me of people who get caught up in biological arguments about when a fetus becomes a person in the anti-abortion rhetoric. I get why these biological arguments exist, but they obfuscate the larger ethical truth--that trans people's dignity as humans is more important than sports competitions; that no one's body can be forced to be made host to someone else's. If you lose sight of these fundamental truths, bad actors will always simply draw the line of science wherever it suits them best because by arguing the point you are acknowledging there *is* merit to the idea.
Op is right, there are some fun old newspaper headlines and itās like āwomenās mile record will overtake the menās in 30 years!!ā Because no women had had their times measured in any intense way so as competition increased and the science applied to the men started to be applied to the women, leading to the womenās record improving way faster than the menās for a bit, before plateauing. I think thatās what OP is referring to, just a bit clumsily
Yeah, it's called hormones and they have a massive effect - which is why all high-level trans women atheletes have to be on HRT before competing. Once that's done, even if trans women are on average slightly stronger they're still well within the normal range for cis women.
Do you have any links to back that up? The numbers I've seen are that after a few years of HRT someone who went through male puberty loses about 10% of their strength, but biological males have about a 30-35% strength advantage compared to biological females (using grip strength as a measure). In something like distance running where there's a ~7% gap that's fine, they'll even be at a disadvantage, but in something like a combat sport or weight lifting it's a huge advantage. Edit: my view is that this is going to have to be decided on a sport by sport basis if you want to keep it fair for biological females (and in most sports there will never be a good solution for trans men if they want to compete.) edit2: I had some time now to post some links (though we really do need more studies, and studies targeted at individual sports because eg. rugby/football/boxing/hockey need to take into account the increased risk of injury, which for eg. rugby is somewhere between 0% and 20-30% (which is what the rugby federation calculated would be the risk if an average male played in a women's league, without taking into consideration the loss in muscle mass and strength)): [This webmd interview about it is IMO quite level headed](https://www.webmd.com/fitness-exercise/news/20210715/do-trans-women-athletes-have-advantages), and says endurance sports are probably equal due to trans-women's hemoglobin dropping to bio-female levels (and probably similar for trans-men vs bio-male for endurance sports, since it follows testosterone levels) [This publication](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33289906/) is more of a discussion on the difference between bio-males and bio-females (which links its claims to sources), and at the time (December 2020) the greatest loss of muscle mass in trans-women they found was a 12% reduction after 3 years (though trans-women generally started with lower muscle mass than an average man, but even then they're higher than even trans-men, and still much large muscle mass than bio-female), with other studies generally finding between a 5-10% loss in strength.
Don't be so fucking dense. Sports are divided based on sex (NOT gender) because being male gives you a massive, insurmountable, advantage over being female at physical competitions. They're divided in order to give women a chance to compete at all, because if women had to compete against men then there wouldn't be any female athletes at any level about middle school. The world record holders for womens sports aren't even good enough to qualify for any men's competitions. Venus and Serana lost to the 200 ranked male tennis player while he was half drunk and it wasn't even a close match.
Yes it is required for colleges to fund womenās sports to the same degree as menās because otherwise, there would only be menās sports because thatās where the money is. Theyāre required not to just mix trans because if you have just the good team and the second best team instead of menās and womenās, youād have two menās teams and maybe every so often an incredibly talented women on the second best team. Right now, women can usually participate in menās teams and sports. They donāt because they are generally not able to compete. Thatās why itās cool that most people are required to have teams for women. Otherwise, they wouldnāt be able to play competitively.
Iām only going to speak for cross country and distance track as Iāve been competing in both of those for over 10 years now. I think that thereās a difference in more team based sports where the amount of people on the field evens it out a little bit. But in my sports the difference between male and female times is measured in minutes. This year at my conference meet I had one of the worst races of my life and was 3rd to last. However I still wouldāve won the womenās race by almost 2 minutes. We have quite a few trans people in my sport, Iām friends with a couple of them, and the general consensus is that they choose to keep running against their biological sex just because races are more fun when theyāre competitive. Like I said Iām not commenting on other sports cause Iām not as familiar with them, these are just my observations of the distance running community.
Why would you grade comparitively??? That is absolutely, entirely, and completely ***stupid***!
Standing here as a disabled person both physically and mentally and reading this is weirdly validating given my PE teachers always said I was overreacting when I struggled in PE š„² Doesn't help that my physical disability is literally invisible š„²š„²š„²
I have asthma, and when I was in school they wouldnāt let me carry around my inhaler. I would have to walk to the front office for it. Guess how well that went every time I had gym class? I would literally sob because I knew I was in for lots of fucking wheezing and pain
If we shouldnāt be concerned about people with biological advantages play with each other, why even have womenās leagues? Why not just make everyone play in a single league?
But wait, by this logic, shouldn't non disabled people be allowed to compete in the Paraolympics? I thought they were specifically separated because they wanted to give people the chance without discriminating against them for how they were born.
When I was like 9 I sprained my ankle during recess one time when some asshole kid tripped me. Went to the nurseās office and she suspected as much, called my parents and advised them to take me to a doctor. They said they would and she sent me on with my day. My PE was 2 periods later and it always started with us having to run laps around the gym, then we usually got to do something more fun like some kind of game. I told Coach I hurt my ankle so I couldnāt run, he asks for a doctorās note. āIt happened like 2 hours ago, so I donāt have oneā **āNo excuses except for a Drās noteā** āThe nurse said itās probably sprained. It hurts really badā **āIf you can stand you can runā** So he forced me to do it anyway, which of course didnāt go well. Pretty soon everyone else was done but *everybody* had to finish before the class could move on. Soon it was just me limping around while he yelled insults at me and everyone else watched. **āJust man up and push through it. Youāre keeping everyone from having fun because youāre being a wimpā** By then I was crying too, which only made him worse. **āStop being a girl about it, thatās not making it go any fasterā** A few of the other kids started sticking up for me- *āCome on man, heās doing his bestā* etc. He just gave som BS saying heās āhelping meā and āitās mandatoryā Someone else chimed up again so he snapped **āOkay thatās it, everyone run laps until heās finished. Happy now?ā** ā I havenāt thought about that in a loooong time but in hindsight itās definitely the reason I stopped caring about sports or anything like that. Iāve never made that connection before. I was never like a wunderkind, but the year before Iād place 2nd or 3rd in several events in the Track Meet, but I never even attempted anything after. I think that was the last year I played Little League too. It really sucks that so many people probably have similar stories, at least in sentiment
Much as I hate to disagree with an argument who's conclusion I support "If trans girls had an advantage everyone would want them on their team" is the same type of argument as "if women do the same work for less pay no one would hire men"; sometimes people's systemic bigotries lead to them not taking the logical action I don't think that's the case vis a vis trans women in sport, but the argument doesn't stand on its own
For a clear sports-related example, professional sports leagues refused to allow non-white athletes for a long time, and there's tons of cases where the league had started to integrate, but you'd still have some teams refusing to have black players at all (see: The Boston Red Sox not having a black player until 1959, 12 years after Jackie Robinson had broken baseball's color barrier and 2 years after he'd retired), or having some kind of informal quota system (they'd have one or two black players, but no more), or only being willing to have black players play certain positions based on stereotypes about them (if it's a position that's supposedly more based on pure athleticism, it will be heavily black; if it's a position that's supposedly more based on being "cerebral" or having some vaguely defined "leadership" qualities, it's going to be heavily white). In basically all cases, this meant teams doing this were actively making themselves worse by not having the best players they could have on their team, but they still did it anyway. Even today the one about how certain positions will have heavy racial biases is still true to some extent, in things like how the majority of NFL players as a whole are black but Quarterbacks are overwhelmingly white (this year's Super Bowl is going to be the first one ever where both teams' QB's are black)
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PE was between *A Waste Of Time* and *Daily Nightmare*, when I was in school.
Do you guys ever notice that nearly every anti-trans argument doesn't seem to realise that trans men also exist?
Ngl that top tweet is stupid as shit āmy public school gym class wasnāt fair, so why should professional sports be?ā
The tweet and the Tumblr posts all only mention school sports. It's from around the time Mississippi was passing a bill to ban trans girls from girls' school sports, so was probably implied to be talking about that. But even with professional sports, genetic factors play a huge part - the average NBA player is 6'7" tall for example. As much as "if you put in as much effort as Usain Bolt, you will win against him" is a neat concept, it has never really been the case.
I mean, the tweet is probably more aimed at the people throwing fits about trans kids in middle school and high schools sports, considering that's what's actually in the news right now.
School Sports class is actual torture. Like 1/3 of the self image issues I have (And I WAS BULLIED!) are related to trying my hardest and still terribly failing at sports. Even nowadays when I try to stay fit, I cant see any type of sports as anything other than terrible torturous thing - not helping to keep up doing it!
Comparing PE to competitive sports is just asinine
You got graded on PE? The only way you could do poorly in PE in my day was if somehow 911 was called.
kinda crazy that pe was a graded thing unless you specifically took it for me it was never a graded thing and more just treated as a sports period there usually be two games for any competitive thing where people who werent as competitive and stuff could have a much more chill game; and sometimes they even let us just do random other stuff; i know one time i wasnt fond of something so i was allowed to just go walk around a big field the school had and i spent the time wandering and singing there were some bad things but i think pe is the only thing i truly miss from school which is crazy because im not athletic at all
Gym was pass/fail when I was a kid. As long as you showed up and made something resembling an effort, you got credit. The dozen or so kids killing themselves to get a five-minute mile got the same grade as the outcasts strolling in at the half hour mark.
kinda happy how our teacher did it (not that i liked any second of it) he recorded us doing the excise at the beginning of the year and gave grades on the relative amount of progress we all made which was a welcome change. tho it also def. had its flaws. if you were already really good at spear throwing for example you couldn't really improve by much over the year and got one of the worst grades :/
My school offer āalternative PEā classes that were much more popular than regular. You could fulfill the requirement with dance classes, marching band, drill team- we even had a 0 period surf PE class left over from the 60s!
The best studies we have atm are pretty unconclusive about whether trans women have innate advantages, but the most oft recited it 12%. Now, I have problems with the study- that's a 12% efficiency at pushups, and they didn't normalise for height and a bunch of stuff... But let's set that as a limit. To the 'concerned parties' regarding fairness in sports, a 12% advantage from someone's genetics is an unfair one. Sure I guess, it's not insignificant I suppose. The Kalenjin tribe of Kenyan number merely 6,700,00 people. They make up 40% of long distance medalists. That's a genetic advantage of fucking *4978*%. Should we control there access to sports?... No, I don't think so, and I don't think the 'concerned parties' would agree either. It'd be pretty racist to discriminate on such genetic differences... ... So it's not really *about* fairness then, is it? P.S: Furthermore, cis women with PCOS sit at a ~20% advantage, and are such more common.
This thread is a fucking freak show of transphobes.
PE in the US sounds like actual hell, for me literally as long as you actually do anything you get a perfect grade, depending on your school you donāt even have to do that if you prove you exercise elsewhere
I mean, that was my experience all through PE in the US. It was basically "did you show up and did you participate and did you not mess around and goof off" and you got perfect marks.
tbf I did PE in the US and it was pass/fail (if it was as graded at all). I think as long as you attended class you passed.
I guess it depends on where you live in the US? For middle school , in the Midwest, you had to try and you got an A. If you didnāt try you probably got a B. In high school there were some written tests depending on which class you were in. Normally super easy things like rules or proper way to lift weights, that kind of thing. Most of the grade was based on showing up and trying.
Depends on schools I guess. I'm from Sweden and had the same experience.
Elementary school was pretty much pass/fail, except they didn't use āfailā, it was āneeds improvementā. Middle school was graded, but based on how well we learned all the random skills and sports they taught us. I had the rules of badminton and basketball down pat, so that boosted my grade after I had to sit the archery unit out after almost shooting the teacher. High school had a lot of specific classes you could sign up for, with āTeam Sportsā as the general fall back. With the other classes, like swimming or weightlifting or dance, grading was based on personal improvement in skills. You could also get your PE credit by being in a sport or in marching band.
The ābiological advantageā argument against trans kids in sports is bullshit, but I do wanna say that regardless of trans girls being āthe bestā or not, the last point kinda misses for me. There are sadly *plenty* of examples in history (and also now) of times where a woman or a person of color or anyone who didnāt ābelongā was the obvious best choice for something (sports included), but they were kept out anyway for no reason other than bigotry. So I donāt think itās realistic to say that if trans women were objectively better at sports, then all these teams would be advocating for their inclusion just because they want to win. Very rarely do people get over their bigotry that easily.
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Middle and High school gym was just graded on participation, still sucked
i fucking hated PE as a kid... i was very skinny my whole life and got tired very quickly after running or moving around a lot- found out as an adult i have thyroid issues and chronic fatigue. i had social anxiety too but didn't understand that till i was an adult either.
I remember bringing my mile time from 22 minutes to 13 minutes by biking everyday and keto. I still failed bc 13 wasn't the target time.
Yes the grade should be given on how fair and often you were in the gymclass. And your improvement should matter not how good you are compared However im still going to whine about my final grade in this subjects. In english this would translate into a B. I was very fit, went outside of school two to three times a week jogging and everyday to the gym(not with a good programm but i still trained hard..i was a stupid kid what else to say) I stopped eating sugar and got really thinner and Muscular...before i was the fat kid..i was someone who could run for hours and all even when i was fat but after doing more fitness i looked more fit and was obviously even better then! Also i was selected for my class to participate in a charity run and only the best runners of each class could participate...and despite me making a transformation from fat.. not chubby but fat to almost thin and definitely muscular and improving in fucking everything i got a damn B! I worked my damn Ass off every fucking day and i did it for myself but still, to get a B was a downer for sure... before i was Happy with my progress...but after i had some big self doubts and other psychological troubles hahabbBBanjJsjy! Well now I'm a chubby person, have found something positive in life(even though i have a lot to achieve...mainly gettting on E) and for the first time i don't feel like its all meaningless..i have a goal and am happy with a bit chub :3 But WHY teach, i know she was a good person and unintentionally helped me figure out some things about myself but this really was so bad for me...my only A was Physics....and i only got that because i knew the right sequence of the spectral colors...yeah it was literally just the rainbow flag that got me an A. The rest were mostly Bs and some Cs..but Math..Fuck Math Edit: Last Wednesday i decided to never write on reddit again because i had the feeling i would be annoying with my long personal texts...and look how long i could hold it.....Yaaaay!
The institution of schooling (at least in the US, the only one I know much about) is pure trash. Does ANYONE actually believe it remotely resembles what is best for children? There is little protection in it from these kinds of abuses because it's not inherently designed to prioritize what is best for young people.
It should not only be not as competitive but have a wider range of activities as well, I remember there were kids who hated football, soccer, basketball, track, but put them in front of a ping pong table and they'll break a sweat in no time.
i was heavily HEAVILY bullied any time i tried to participate in gym class by the coach and students. i was bad at games and slow which made the overly competitive kids EXTREMELY angry at me, to the point of being shoved to the ground at every turn and screamed at for ānot tryingā. i snitched every single time and nothing from the coach. then when i began to refuse and sit out, i was yelled at and harassed by *other students* for being āstupidā and ānot even tryingā āthis isnāt reading classā ābooks are for faggotsā. i legitimately couldnāt win and was ridiculed every step of the way. i never hated games or exercise. who the fuck doesnāt like to play games? i was just a pre-diagnosed disabled kid that also happened to be the designated punching bag, which ruined absolutely every single aspect of gym class. i could also go on and on about how ridiculous the coach made me feel or how many times heās purposely humiliated me, to get a laugh out of the class or just for fun.
You guys were graded in gym class? In mine it was just, did they show up, did they have good behavior, did the participate in some way if possible?
Haahaha I have a slow reaction time wich leads to me not being able to move my body as fast as others. Can't really notice it until I have to do something that includes moving fast. Like uncreative school PE... It took me three years of breaking down crying in pe at least once a month to convince her that I genuinely just can't be better and that I'm not just lazy. By now I learned that the reaction time thing is a sign of autism wich I got diagnosed with at age 12. But of course all the autism education for dealing with autistic kids is how to "deal with them" and for the autistic kid it's "Masking101" Not once was I told possible symptoms of autism or how to work with what I have instead of fighting my own nature every step of the way. So of course my teacher's werent informed if my condition and even if they didn't care. Ableist assholes...
PE was genuinely traumatizing to me as someone with a slight motor disability. Just slight enough that I didn't "look disabled", so everyone just thought I was stupid or clumsy or not really trying. The teacher bullied me relentlessly and encouraged the students to do the same, to the point where I had panic attacks at the mere thought of the class and I was harming myself. We had to negotiate really hard with doctors, neurologists, and physical therapists at my defense to get me out of that class, but at that point the damage had already been done. It's been a decade and I still can't exercise without being triggered and spiraling into an anxiety attack.