daf bit: Bava Metzia 117

In a previous mishnah (116) we learned that if two own a house, one owning the ground floor and the other the upper floor, and it collapses, they share proportionally in the stones, timber, and earth. (There is an aside that if one recognizes his particular stones he can claim them. I wonder how often that comes up.) The present daf discusses issues with rebuilding, and then raises the question: what if neither has the wherewithal to rebuild? How is the land divided? Rabbah says that the owner of the lower story gets two-thirds of the land and the owner of the upper story one-third. Why isn't it proportional, as in the previous example? Because the upper story impairs the value of the lower story (by forcing it to bear the load), so the owner who bore that burden gets more. (117b)

err, what?

The winner of a major women's footrace is being required to prove her gender. Err, what? But it gets weirder -- tests are being done and it will take some days or weeks to get the results.

The back-story is that the woman (age 18) beat her previous record by a noticeable margin and has a masculine build. So just to make sure, somebody wants to check. There's a rather straightforward way to do that, but that's not what they're doing so they must not believe it would answer the question. So what's going on -- do they suspect that a teenage athlete might have had major surgery in order to win a race?

This got me thinking about gender and sports more broadly. It's common to have men's and women's divisions, presumably out of a belief that men and women are sufficiently different that it's not fair to make them compete. Does this mean that the division is intended to be by birth status, that a transsexual person would compete in the "wrong" (by appearance) category? In which category does a hermaphrodite compete? When these kinds of sporting events were being invented these would have been deemed frivolous questions, but I imagine that some people have had to wrestle with these issues by now.

Is gender segregation the best way to achieve balance among entrants? I would think that, all other factors being equal, in a race a woman who's a foot taller than me would have much more of an advantage over me than a man of my height does (longer stride). Isn't it time for the short-person division? (Ok, now I'm being frivolous...)