Women's sports awards and scholarships are DEI

[Elliott]

You know how the MAGA argument against trans women in womens sports is that it disenfranchises women because male is the superior sex in sports, that's MAGA DEI right? Giving women scholarships for sports even though if they competed against everyone for the scholarships they wouldn't get them.

[Shodburrito]

@Elliott

Well, see, this is exactly where the conversation gets completely tangled up in itself because people want to draw lines between what is and isn’t "fair" without realizing that fairness is always a constructed system that exists within the parameters we choose to set. Women’s sports exist because we, as a society, decided that biological differences matter in competition, but then when the conversation shifts to trans athletes, suddenly it’s as if those distinctions either don’t matter at all or matter so much that they completely break the system. It’s like trying to argue both for and against competitive balance at the same time while ignoring the fact that competitive balance is, at its core, an arbitrary distinction based on what we decide is important in a given moment.

And scholarships? That’s a whole different layer of selective structuring because if you really break it down, scholarships already exist within a framework that prioritizes certain traits over others—athleticism, academics, financial need, whatever—and none of those things are purely meritocratic in the sense that people like to pretend they are. So if we say women should get scholarships because they compete in a category created to level the playing field, then it’s no different than any other structured advantage we allow for the sake of inclusion. But then you introduce the idea that trans inclusion somehow undermines the system, and suddenly, the whole thing loops back on itself because now we’re debating whether fairness means exclusion or accommodation, and that just proves how much of this whole debate is really just about where people arbitrarily decide to draw lines rather than any objective standard of fairness.

[Elliott]

@Shodburrito

Very insightful.

Wouldn't the elimination of sex segregation make it objectively fair? In regard to scholarships, just make a certain level of college free, for example 2 years of community college and do away with scholarships, or have other types of competitions that are more favorable to females, for scholarships.

If you were to try to level the playing field in any sort of competition, even in competing for jobs, there's no end until everyone scores the same amount of points, You can always find a disadvantage to compensate for, Have basketball divided up by height, sex, race even, and hormone levels, divide job applicants up by parents IQ, what neighborhood they grew up in, medical history, and how clean their drinking water is.

You could argue scholarships going to better student athletes is more fair than free community college because college may be a waste for some people, but colleges could also create courses that would be helpful for more types of people.

[Salvijus]

19 hours ago, Shodburrito said:

@Elliott

Well, see, this is exactly where the conversation gets completely tangled up in itself because people want to draw lines between what is and isn’t "fair" without realizing that fairness is always a constructed system that exists within the parameters we choose to set. Women’s sports exist because we, as a society, decided that biological differences matter in competition, but then when the conversation shifts to trans athletes, suddenly it’s as if those distinctions either don’t matter at all or matter so much that they completely break the system. It’s like trying to argue both for and against competitive balance at the same time while ignoring the fact that competitive balance is, at its core, an arbitrary distinction based on what we decide is important in a given moment.

And scholarships? That’s a whole different layer of selective structuring because if you really break it down, scholarships already exist within a framework that prioritizes certain traits over others—athleticism, academics, financial need, whatever—and none of those things are purely meritocratic in the sense that people like to pretend they are. So if we say women should get scholarships because they compete in a category created to level the playing field, then it’s no different than any other structured advantage we allow for the sake of inclusion. But then you introduce the idea that trans inclusion somehow undermines the system, and suddenly, the whole thing loops back on itself because now we’re debating whether fairness means exclusion or accommodation, and that just proves how much of this whole debate is really just about where people arbitrarily decide to draw lines rather than any objective standard of fairness.

This is poetry