integration of sports was a mainstream feminist position back when that label actually meant something. now that we’ve just collectively accepted that women can never be equal to men, the only solution is individual striving and a narrow politics of representation.
The experience you accumulated as a man will serve you well. It is experience afforded far less easily to women.
Is this an actual valuable thing though? The “experience” here I mean. If there is one horrible thing perpetuated by that “10,000h makes you an expert” urban legend is that not only that was for music(piano) but one specific point is that bad practice will make you worse.
Essentially you’ll never just bullshit around for 10,000 hours and become a world renowned expert, instead it only means through consistent and thoughtful practice, that is the ballpark time investment required.
In any case if one wanted to talk about natural learning that is just the domain of children anyway, even teenagers and certainly any adult can’t just learn through just experience.
So I don’t want to contest your comment entirely, but I want to make it clear its not that simple at all, shitty experiences and bad practice affords you no actual real advantage at all over someone that spent less time but more productive, focused time.
Shitty practce is part of this scenario. Women get put in the women’s league with other women. As a cohort they aren’t paid as much, and the player pool is smaller, so the overall quality isn’t as high. Then they play against each other, and there you have it, 10k hours playing against people who aren’t posing the same challenges that a men’s league would. The experience isn’t even necessarily hours spent, it’s getting into the sport and staying with the sport in the first place, then playing against players who know all the tricks, and then learning how to counter them or play them yourself. On top of that, if your league gives out more money, then you can get professional mentor/coach.
This makes sense yeah, I was thinking on the amateur literal bullshitter scenario though, person who plays pool once week for 2h isn’t “practicing”. But on the other hand if you’re at a point you’re committed to actualy playing and even join a league then yes its different I agree.
At school I remember the boys could play a game of touch rugby (a bit like flag football) against the girls team, and pretty much walk past them using passing and schoolyard tricks. It wasn’t a strength or speed thing. It was that the boys had all been playing around with a rugby ball since they were 8 years old, while most of the girls had only started playing at the age of 15-16. The boys were essentially fluent in rugby. The girls could run all the training drills they wanted - drills can’t teach you the game psychology that thousands of hours of game time can. Even if they played every day, it could take them years to catch up. It’s different for pool as it’s arguably less nuanced than a team game, but still, comparisons can be made.
Ok I’ll rephrase it, the specific reason I mentioned the 10k hour myth is this scenario:
Person that thinks they’ll have an “advantage” learning to play piano as an adult because they had like 1 lesson a week for 2h during for a couple of years back in highschool or whatever. Unless you actualy reached a profficient level before that it is almost negligible or we can pretend it is. That versus an adult complete beginner age 25-35.
The first person will have an advantage maybe for a the very basic stuff(again assuming the first person didn’t actually achieve anything, its why I said “BS around”) that takes maybe a few dozen hours to catch up, it would make no actual meaningful difference towards becoming a pro.
The biggest sin of the 10k myth is bad practice e.g just repeating and playing the same song over and over. It wont make you better no matter how much you do it. Worse than that without an actual teacher we often just keep practicing bad habits and mistakes become even harder to fix compared to a complete beginner.
This is what that 10k hour myth was all about. People in general tend to behave as if just “doing it” is good enough and end up making exaggerated goals and expectations, but also neglecting the need for real teachers and a real planned and effective practice method/schedule.
Your example is a good point because there is no “wrong way” to play that game, everything they did was useful and a learning experience. This is not true for some other sports and definitely not true for a lot of hobbies etc. You can and most people indeed do spend a lot of time doing stuff that doesn’t improve their skill. I think a blanket statement of “I spent X hours doing Y before therefore I have an advantage” is possibly disingenuous without clarification, like what did you actually do with that time?
in that time there were very few trans medallists. Therefore, no need to make changes.
wait so if trans people win at things they need to be excluded? got it
Yeah this is true but also the pool of trans women playing professional pool has got to be real real small, yeah? Are there any sports where trans women are overrepresented for their gender?
Anyway, if you’ve grown up as a man, you’ve probably been allowed to pursue these male dominated sports pretty unhindered. Sure, you might’ve been an egg the whole time, but outwardly the men weren’t hostile to you, or creepy, or doubting.
This erases the gendered harassment eggs face and is pretty offensive, comrade.
it’s not an on-off switch, and you would be surprised at the amount of people who pick up on ‘queer’ vibes before you yourself have picked up on it harass you accordingly
Consider the following: no one should devote their entire life to pool. It’s an asinine waste of resources
Lol, a semi-uncharitable reading of your comment would just be “don’t have hobbies, or fun”.
Why not devote your life to pool, or any other sport? Seems a lot less of a waste than, like, golf.
how? Golf and pool are at the same level, not skills which apply to other areas, not useful to society, and not in this case creating community. Pool can be a hobby, but a complaint that anyone can’t make a living off of it is absurd.
you keep saying ‘women’ in this comment when referring to cis women, which is the main issue here - it’s not like trans women are winning and then secretly going ‘yes, another victory for men’, but rather it’s cis women who are not seeing trans women as part of the same team. So what if some trans women get socialised in such a way that they have an advantage in pool? The only reason this is an issue is if you fundamentally see a victory for trans women as a loss for cis women. The fact this is being shown as oppositional (and being played as such) is the major issue here - if a cis woman had gone through the same experiences, and had the same advantages, would she also be considered an unfair competitor?
if we’re going down that path, shouldn’t we separate anybody who has had a parent who played pool from people with parents who didn’t play? And then shouldn’t we separate those based on who owned a pool table at home from those who didn’t? At what point are we drawing the line, if ‘might have had a Dad who pressured them into sports’ is an acceptable metric? Not to mention that basing your opinion on ‘tropes’ is how this discussion was started - people who’s only experience is seeing ‘Men In Dresses’ tropes on TV and then developing their opinions on trans people’s right to equal participation in society from that.
This just seems like every just so story explanation for bigotry. Like just because you can come up with a story that sounds plausible doesn’t mean anything, unless you have data showing that trans women have some kind of statistical performance advantage over trans women then nothing else matters. And yeah ofcourse transphobes will come up with plausible stories that make them sound reasonable, few people are so self aware that they are just bigoted because they are bigoted, oftentimes the person the have to most convince is themselves.
