Is A Gender Free World Possible?

From all the way back during ancient Greece, humans have played sports. However, in said sports, men and women have been separated into 2 separates groups, not being able to play against each other. Which is why, many people thought to change this system by eliminating the segregation between men and women. I think this vision of a gender-free society (in sports anyways) is desirable. Basing myself on an article intitled “Sex typing for sport” by Alice Dreger, as well as trying to give you a picture of how it would play out, if we did in fact live in a gender free society (in sports) and why we should accept it.In the article “Sex typing for sport”, the author, Alice Dreger, supports the idea of a gender free-world. As she described a scene, where South African runner Caster Semenya had her sex questioned by the International Olympic committee, after she was able to destroy her competition in that sport. This gender verification test brought a lot of negative news media which lead Semenya into hiding. These tests come way after the competition is over, which doesn’t allow them to know if they were disqualified in the first place or not. However, this verification is madebecause of fairness. Since, according to the article, men have a competitive advantage in sports, that reward speed and strength, which is because of their higher level of androgens. The author proceeds to show how flawed how a new policy based analysing the level of functional testosterone of the athlete to identify someone’s gender is flawed in a lot of case such as doping as well as the committee itself not being able to reach a consensus on who can compete as a woman even though they had a meeting on “gender verification policies”. The author concludes that sex and gender have too many variables to analyse and that we can’t be constantly fair because of that.

I support the author’s position, since I think that to be able to include all the in-between or non-conforming genders, we would have to consider too many variables and still might not result in a perfectly fair game which is the main concern for dividing the genders into 2 groups. Therefore, to create a gender-free world (in sport), we should not class people by gender but by eliminating that and replacing it with a skill level typing. This is already done for some sport within their own gender categories, all we have to do is to eliminate that gender barrier and rank the players depending on their skill level. This would allow the athlete to play against people of similar skill level and so making it fairer. On top of that we won’t have fake men trying to cheat their way in the women’s division in order to get an edge, since they will be in the same competition. All the hassle of trying to identify and to prove everyone’s gender will be eliminated since there is no gender separation.

To conclude, a gender-free world (in sports) would be ideal since it would eliminate a lot of issues involving gender, since we will be removing them, by eliminating the distinction between them ,when looking at the game categories. To do this we would create a new system to separate people in sports instead of using gender which doesn’t really show how good a player is and requires a lot a trouble to know what gender they are so with a system revolving people skills level, the sports will be much fairer for people in the same rank. This system could still have flaws like not having the privilege of playing with only their own gender.