Mixed-sex sports
Mixed-sex sports in informal settings are typically groups of neighbours, friends or family playing without regard to the sex of the participants.
Mixed-sex play is also common in youth sports as before puberty and adolescence, sport-relevant sex differences affect performance far less.
When sex is a major factor in a competitor's performance, sports will typically split men and women into separate divisions, but there may be mixed-sex team variants, such as mixed doubles.
In artistic judged sports, these physical differences play a key role in performances, as demonstrated in pair figure skating and acrobatic gymnastics.
In sports where these differences are less linked to performance, it is standard practice for men and women to compete in mixed-sex fields.
These open-class sports prove accommodating to intersex athletes, who challenge sex-defined rules of both single-sex events and mixed-sex teams with distinct male and female composition.
In equestrian sports, male and female riders compete against each other in eventing, dressage and show jumping disciplines.
Beyond the human athletes, male and female horses are found in racing, with a roughly 60/40 split at the top level between colts and fillies.
[4] In hard court bike polo, players, regardless of sex, compete against each other, in teams of 3, in every day play and in tournaments.
About 1/3rd of mushers in the Iditarod are female, and finishers in the top ten are proportionately split by gender.
In these sports/events, the male and female participants physically work together (often to music) to jointly produce an artistic athletic performance.
Mixed doubles are events where two mixed-sex pairs directly compete (that is, all four competitors are in open play as two teams).
[8] Separate male and female performances may also be scored then added to produce mixed team results in such sports as diving.
In professional wrestling, mixed tag team matches do not explicitly alternate in a turn-based manner but each wrestler only faces their opponent of the same sex (switching occurs at players' discretion).
The Cyclo-cross mixed relay event is also a mixed age category event where each relay team consists of three men and three women riders where a set amount of riders are from Junior and Under-23 age categories.
In a number of countries, club underwater hockey is mixed-sex with any ratio of sex allowed.
Two women competed against men in equestrian events,[17] the croquet competition was mixed-sex,[18] and Hélène de Pourtalès was the sole female sailor, achieving the Olympics' first mixed-sex team champion as part of the gold medal-winning Swiss team.
[19] The sole time Olympic motorboating was held (1908), Sophia Gorham took part in a mixed British team.
[25] Shooting at the Summer Olympics continued on a mixed basis in several events from 1968 to 1992, before competitors were restricted by sex.
[30] In the 2020s, in response to transgender controversies in sports, several international and national sports federations prohibited transgender athletes from competing in the female category and (sometimes) created a separate "open" category to allow for transgender, non-binary or cisgender male athletes to participate, including the British Triathlon Federation,[31] International Swimming Federation (FINA)[32] and British Cycling.
