Yes, Men's Athletics Are Objectively More Physical than Women's
Pointing That Out, Along with Why Transgender Athletes Shouldn't Be in Women's Sports, Does Not Make Someone a Bigot.
I saw this tweet on Sunday morning:
The backlash against it was swift and severe. They tended to fall into two camps:
Pointing out Armstrong’s history of cheating via steroid and blood doping in his career winning seven Tours de France1. The hypocrisy here is pretty glaring.
The more savage responses openly pushed this as bigotry and transphobia.
It’s this second point I want to talk about, because there is a growing virulence in society about this and it is resulting in outright denialism. If you care about facts, science and the truth, which many of the people advocating that position claim to do, there genuinely has to be a moment of reflection that clarifies it.
Whether it wants to be admitted or not, there are physical differences between the sexes. It’s why when doing any scientific study the results have to be controlled for sex along with other physical features. Along with those differences are certain attributes that can be considered advantages or disadvantages considering the situation. This is not talking about gender differences, or perceptions of society imposed on genders. This is specifically about objective physical attributes.
One of those, pointed out by Richard Reeves in his book, “Of Boys and Men,” is women’s earlier maturity and development than men in puberty. Girls hit their growth spurt earlier, socially mature earlier and intellectually develop earlier. It can be considered a notable advantage in schools and careers. Indeed, today now nearly 2/3 of all college students are women, 75% of all class valedictorians and the majority of students in medical and law schools.
For boys, one difference they have is the natural production of testosterone. Testosterone increases physicality, aggressiveness and muscle production. It’s one of the reasons excessive amounts of it are screened for in competition as it can be abused as a performance enhancing drug, even though it is natually occuring. In fact as the number of women’s sports began to take off in the ‘60s an ‘70s, natural and synthetic testosterone were given to female athletes in former Eastern Bloc countries to give them an advantage.2 The physical issues many of them encountered continue today.3
So when the issue of a transgender athlete, Lia Thomas, arose in the last year, in which a male transitioned to a female, competed collegiately in women’s swimming and broke most all women’s swimming records, red flags began being waved about the fundamental fairness involved in it. A lifetime of built up male development gave a huge fundamental advantage as it related to women’s sports. It should not need to be pointed out that had a woman injected the amount of testosterone Ms. Thomas had in her body naturally over their lifetime, they would have been disqualified for using performance enhancing drugs.
Now, there are only two ways you can look at this situation, which is really what I see as the overarching issue people are blowing their tops over:
Either women and men are completely equal in all things including physicality and development and the separation of men’s and women’s sports are an arbitrary distinction imposed by society for various reasons. Or;
Women’s sports are at a level inferior to men’s sports in terms of physicality, aggressiveness, ability and competition, and the distinction is there to allow women an opportunity to compete on a level playing field among other people controlled for sex. Separating women into their own dichotomy is advantageous to everyone since it provides a level of fairness, competition and opportunity to all (both men and women) in each of their own sectors.
For many, particulary the most hardcore liberals and feminists, they want to believe adamantly in the first item above. It’s one of their biggest arguments for equal pay for female athletes even though women’s sports draws less spectators and lower ratings. The problem with this position is that if that were the case, there would be no need for Title IX in sports, no need for separate women’s leagues altogether and we should just let women compete for positions in the men’s sports leagues and eliminate the sex distinctions altogether.
The prospect of that would be detrimental to women in sport entirely. You may get a few women able to compete at that level in individual sports4, but the bulk of the positions would still go to men. As an example, the 800m Freestyle Swimming World Record for women is 8:04.79. In the most recent Tokyo Olympics, every male competitor in both the semifinals and finals heats beat that time. Another example is when both Venus and Serena Williams, two of the greatest female tennis players ever, lost to a man ranked #203 pretty handily on the same day back in 1998.5 Needless to say, this position would result in less women engaging in sports and losing the opportunities that go with that.
So the first item is objectively erroneous, no matter how much some people want to believe it. Which leaves us with the second. And that’s fine. People like women’s sports and competition. Title IX in this regard is a good thing. Providing women an opportunity to compete with other women on an even playing field fulfills the entire idea of sports and fair competition.
It’s just too bad that too many toxic activists don’t get that and choose instead to call those that point the objective facts out as bigots or transphobes.6
PurpleAmerica’s Obscure Fact of the Day
Instead of focusing on the men playing in the women’s sports, let’s go through the looking glass and focus on the exceptiional women athletes playing with the men. I already mentioned Manon Rheaume, but here is a page containing more professional women athletes playing in men’s professional leagues.
https://worldcrunch.com/culture-society/best-women-athletes
PurpleAmerica’s Cultural Corner
One of the best documentaries on the use of performance enhancing drugs came out in the late 2000s titled “Bigger, Stronger, Faster.*”
What’s particularly interesing as it relates to this discussion is that it gets into the history of the use of PEDs, including the public sentiment against them. Much of it goes back to that East German Swimming team and the US opposition to it (largely because the East Germans crushed the Americans).
Which brings up the question: If the purpose of sports is to see who can do things better, stronger or faster, than isn’t the ban on PEDs rather arbitrary? We don’t regulate what food goes into our bodies but that can have as much of an impact. Certain protein compounds are illegal, while others are perfectly fine to ingest. Certain diet supplements are banned not because they are effective performance enhancers, but specifically because they have been known to mask the use of particular PEDs.
So why don’t we allow men and women to ingest whatever they choose in the name of getting the most out of human physical achievement? Its an interesting question.
PurpleAmerica’s Final Word on the Subject
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Footnotes and Fun Stuff
He was eventually stripped of these titles once his steroid use became disclosed.
This culminated in the 1976 Montreal Olympics when the world cried foul, mostly American and western nations that called it tantamount to cheating. Since then, performance enhancing drugs have been banned from international competitions and screened for in most all events.
https://globalsportmatters.com/health/2019/11/07/ex-east-german-athletes-struggle-with-health-problems-due-to-the-consequences-of-ped-taking/
This always reminds me of Manon Rheaume, a female goalkeeper that played in the NHL and a pioneer that helped open the door to Women’s Hockey being an accepted separate sport.
https://www.essentiallysports.com/when-serena-williams-and-venus-williams-lost-to-a-male-tennis-player-at-australian-open-wta-tennis-news/ Serena commented that she was making shots that were clear winners on the women’s circuit but that the man had no trouble running them down.
In my opinion, the use of these words in this context diminishes their value. There is legitimate discussion and debate on this topic and if the only defense is to slur their opponents, those advocates have already lost. If everyone is a bigot or transphobe for pointing out the inherent unfairness of this, and the objective facts, then nobody is. Continuing to point a finger and yell “Bigot” only alienates more people who agree with their cause when it comes to other more important matters.