Unpopular Opinion

Go lookup why japan (and a few other) have women only train cars.

I’ve never understood why bathrooms or sports are segregated by gender.

Sports aren't entirely divided by gender. There are female competitions, which are only for women, and 'male competitions', which are open to everybody. Though women rarely enter the latter, because, aside from chess, they get obliterated due to unfair physiology.

For the former. I don't give a single fuck what's between your legs while you're using the stall.

Just wash your goddamn hands when you're done mucking about with it!

Bathrooms are segregated because arsehole men won't behave

Bathrooms are segregated by gender because victorians thought women deserved better than unsanitary holes in the ground, so they made actual bathrooms for them when women started to work in factories.

By the time enough men realized they wanted indoor plumbing at work too, the tradition had been established that women had separate facilities and so the separation stuck.

(And now it's just the slow process of redoing every public bathroom on the planet to be gender neutral. Which is harder than it should be since transphobes love telling horror stories about trans women so they can police all women.)

For team sports, segregation would happen regardless. The vast majority of women just can't keep up with men, and the team would need to choose men over women to be competitive, leaving women to play with themselves.

For individual sports like running, etc. women would almost never appear on the podium, unless you introduce classes, in which case, you might as well just segregate them.

Bathrooms and locker rooms do not need to be segregated by law, but I suspect most women would choose segregated given the choice.

I'm not aware of any top-tier professional team sports league that says "women can't play on the men's team."

Some individual sports are totally segregated, but there are no rules that say Premiere League* teams or NHL teams can't have a woman. The fact that no "mens" teams do play women says quite a bit about the level of physical separation at that top level. Even if it happens one day, and I think it will, it will be single digits per year, max, for a long, long time.

If women want to have a chance to play those sports at the top level, they need their own league.

* Maybe a bad example, I'm not actually familiar with those rules, but sub in any of dozens of other pro leagues around the world that aren't segregated by rule, but are by pragmatism.

I like the "split open bathroom" design. The sinks are connected to both in the middle (and the entrance/exit is connected to the sinks only), and I'm one direction there's urinals and a few toilets and the other just toilets - but there's no signs.

Also, seems men wash their hands more often (with soap even) when women are also present I've noticed.

As a man, I don't really care if a woman comes into the same bathroom as me or faces me on the football field. Whatever "threat" they might pose to me, men already do that times five.

What I worry about is the reality it leads to. I'm afraid that in sports it ends up with only men's teams, and the only women who qualify are genetic outliers that the vast majority of women in the world can't relate to at all. It's like me looking up to Shaq O'Neal and thinking someday I'm going to be like him - not going to happen.

Men have nothing to lose here, whereas women have everything to lose.

I agree here. We have various competitive levels to sports. I can go to a triple A ball game.

I'm fine with the bathroom being combined as long as we still can have one if those guys that's hands out towels.

I agree. People are not molesting & raping each other in bathrooms and locker rooms. If they get frisky it's because they want to but that's incredibly rare in restrooms & locker rooms. Those are unsexy environments designed uncomfortably for their rigid function purposes. And even as things are now with gender segregation, sometimes people are homosexual so by our traditional segregation logic, shouldn't they be segregated if we're segregating based on sexual preference & gender identification? Nope because you're right, gender segregation is unnecessary. We need to abolish gender segregation.

Edit: wait, I just read your post more closely, I still think sports SHOULD be segregated by gender because biologically males and females perform differently and at different levels in their given sports.

On my first read somehow I thought you were talking about sports locker rooms 🤷🏼‍♀️

Two separate issues.

For sports, testosterone plays an enormous effect. I fully support segregation where there’s a way for the less-testosterone endowed to have competition. In all honesty it leads to better games. Women’s basketball for example is a lot more entertaining once you get past the “3pt+drive for the dunk” game

If the women are okay with it, then I'm probably okay with it.

For sports, we spend all our lives saying that victory is not the goal of sport, then we separate by gender so victory feels fair

I also think we should not separate by gender, and instead have multiple tiers of experience at the Olympics.

But there is some truth on those who argue that having women's sport encourages women to play sports in general, as less women play sports than men (I think). Even if there was no measurable general difference between the biological sexes, males would still generally outperform just out of statistics, because there is more of them.

So the deal is actually cultural. Society needs to abandon the idea that gender has anything to do with sports. Just like we do for skin color or height. So that when a girl sees a football match with 18 men, 3 women and 1 nonbinary, she doesn't feel like football isn't for her out of gender.

Like, I myself like volleyball, but all throughout my experience I've noticed how I had to struggle far more than my peers simply because I was short and physically weak (struggles eating during teenage). I also did Judo for a bit, there are tiers by weight, meaning I competed with 10yo children as a 14yo. What I mean is that while I can agree a child would notice differences out of gender, it's not like this is something new, acknowledging physical differences and accepting them is a key part of personal growth in sports already, gender would be just yet another element.

Every sport is going to be different. I don't think any of us know enough to say that all sports should or should not be segregated. The decision should be made by the governing bodies of each individual sport.

For powerlifting though, I do think we can get rid of gender segregation, and also weight classes. Just use the GL score and add a factor to the expression for some testosterone level proxy measurement.

Please elaborate.