Could be
A new discovery lights up the headlines.
Study shows sex could be a better predictor of sports performance than gender identity
Ya think???
Sex may be a more useful explanatory variable than gender identity for predicting the performance of athletes in mass-participation races, a new paper has found.
A new paper has found what everyone has always known. Humans are sexually dimorphic.
Outside of purely biological outcomes and criminology, little empirical work has been done to test the theory that gender identity is more important than biological sex as a cause of gender disparities in outcomes.
Surely they mean sex disparities in outcomes.
More to the point, what theory? There’s a theory that gender identity is more important than biological sex as a cause of gender disparities in outcomes? How could that be? I thought the theory was just that men who claim to be trans have found an easy way to cheat.
This follows their papers finding that sex is a more useful explanatory variable than favourite colour, political affiliation, choice of ice-cream flavour, direction of hair part, musical preferences, where they squeeze the tube of toothpaste, and astrological sign. We’re lucky that gender identity made it into the top ten of the first round of the near infinite number of things that are less useful explanatory predictors. They’ve got to rule out ali the other variables, right?
No, I’ve seen this being seriously argued. The idea is that men are faster, stronger etc than women because they have stronger encouragement to do sport, better coaches, more resources etc. Which is why it’s so important to let male people barge in and hog the meagre resources that female athletes DO have. /s
I read the paper and it’s actually quite funny in a way—it reads like an assignment given to undergraduates so that they can demonstrate statistical methods. What I think they’ve done in this paper is the gender equivalent of The Art of War. A lot of people read that book (there’s this peculiar idea that it’s useful in business management) and come away thinking it’s all too bleeding obvious. Understand your enemy, focus on his weak points, big whoop. But Sun Tzu was specifically writing a how-to guide for inbred idiotic noblemen whose family connections meant they were leading an army with no idea what they were doing, and he needed a basic handbook to throw at them (possibly literally). There’s a definite sense of “FINE, I’ll actually codify these extremely basic and obvious principles so you don’t lose ANOTHER thousand men in another rout…”
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