Unpacking
This person is an applied health scientist, with a primary focus on injury prevention and safeguarding in sport settings.
Rude. Rude way to begin. It’s not a “narrative.” That’s an insulting label.
No we don’t. She offers a few illustrations but they’re all (of course) from the few sports where size and strength don’t make a difference.
Shooting…where size and strength don’t make the difference.
Endurance and balance: size and strength not the deciders.
“Narrative” yourself.
She used the example of women’s football leagues. Not the example of women playing on teams with men. Figure Skating from 90 years ago when doing a single axel was a big deal? Figure skating used to involve “figures”, making specific patterns on the ice, going over the pattern 3 times in total. How perfectly the figure was formed, and how exact each tracing was determined the score. As jumping and athleticism became more important, and the most impressive free skaters lost because they were crappy at figures, they were eliminated as part of competition. If Johnny Weir decided to transition tomorrow and come out of retirement to compete as a woman, he could beat all of them. Men have huge advantages with narrow hips and no breasts.
But if her point is sports should be co-ed, what is the problem with transwomen staying on the men’s teams?
Anyone who says this shit is either lying or knows fuck-all about sports.
All you have to do is look at the sports where there are easily quantifiable comparisons. Look at race times, weights lifted, distances/heights jumped, etc. Also anyone who’s played competitive sports on any level.
Women might even have an advantage as jockeys. That doesn’t mean they can play football, rugby, soccer, swimming, or biking…or running, especially sprinting…equally with men.
And it doesn’t make women small to say so. Women are small, at least in comparison to men. And we do no one any good to point out that the largest woman is larger than many men. Yeah, so? The largest woman is not going to be competing against the smallest man, for sure. She’s going to be competing against men who are as large, and with more muscle mass. And, as indicated, no breasts to get in the way.
So odd that she avoided track and field, swimming races, lifting, and combat sports…!
Also the article she cites in tweet 11 is introduced misleadingly. It looks as if the title of the article is “Yes, Women Really Are Better Endurance Athletes Than Men”, but not only is that not the title (The Longer the Race, the Stronger We Get), that is not at all what the article claims. The point of the article is actually about the catching-up that women are making in endurance events. Because women were excluded from endurance races and ignored by sports research for a long time, women are really only in the earlyish stages of entering those sports and body of research and so are improving in times much more rapidly than men, who have to compete against much more mature records and data.
Importantly, the article brings up earlier claims that women will overtake men’s performance in such events, and points out that they did not come true. Women’s performance in endurance events is better than previously predicted, it is closer to men’s performance than in many other more explosive races, and it is closing in… but there is no prediction that there will be an overtake. The closing point is more open ended than that – we don’t yet know where it will stabilise.
Endurance sports, huh? Let’s take a look at the most recent Olympic marathon results:
Women:
POS BIB ATHLETE COUNTRY MARK
1 2756 Peres JEPCHIRCHIR KENKEN 2:27:20 SB
2 2761 Brigid KOSGEI KENKEN 2:27:36 SB
3 3891 Molly SEIDEL USAUSA 2:27:46 SB
4 1839 Roza DEREJE ETHETH 2:28:38 SB
5 1238 Volha MAZURONAK BLRBLR 2:29:06 SB
6 2110 Melat Yisak KEJETA GERGER 2:29:16 SB
7 1344 Eunice Chebichii CHUMBA BRNBRN 2:29:36
8 2666 Mao ICHIYAMA JPNJPN 2:30:13
9 1392 Malindi ELMORE CANCAN 2:30:59 SB
10 1054 Sinead DIVER AUSAUS 2:31:14 SB
Men:
1 2776 Eliud KIPCHOGE KENKEN 2:08:38
2 3024 Abdi NAGEEYE NEDNED 2:09:58 SB
3 1188 Bashir ABDI BELBEL 2:10:00 SB
4 2769 Lawrence CHERONO KENKEN 2:10:02 SB
5 1799 Ayad LAMDASSEM ESPESP 2:10:16 SB
6 2707 Suguru OSAKO JPNJPN 2:10:41 SB
7 3584 Alphonce Felix SIMBU TANTAN 2:11:35 SB
8 3965 Galen RUPP USAUSA 2:11:41 SB
9 2886 Othmane EL GOUMRI MARMAR 2:11:58
10 1199 Koen NAERT BELBEL 2:12:13 SB
The women’s gold medal winning time of 2:27:20 was almost 19 minutes slower (about 14.8%) than the men’s. That time would have been good for 71st in the men’s competition. Honestly, I’m surprised it’s that high.
Again, they either know nothing about sports (and are too lazy to spend 30 seconds Googling) or they are lying.
Or is willing to let apologetics overwrite existing knowledge, as we see and have seen theists do time and again. Preservation of the faith takes priority over all else, because that’s just how cognitive dissonance works.