Scrolling through X, formerly Twitter, two items caught my eye. The first, from the publication laughingly referred to as Scientific American, where we are told, in no uncertain terms:
I’ll give you a minute to process that. Let it roll around your mind. And do note the loaded, rather question-begging word inequity.
The second item, some terribly modern sporting news:
A trans-identified male student seized the title of "Fastest Sophomore Girl" at a cross country championship in Maine this past weekend.
Soren Stark-Chessa, who beat the female racers by 90 seconds, previously ranked 172nd in the Freshman Boys category.https://t.co/xiwRuPJI2J
— REDUXX (@ReduxxMag) October 23, 2023
In videos of the race, several spectators can be heard shouting, not without cause, “Way to cheat, bro.”
In sports that are dependent on skills other than speed, endurance, and raw power – say, archery or shooting – the difference in peak male and female performance may be negligible. But where such things are decisive – as in most sports – to not concede the obvious requires a feat of ideological contortion – a kind of learned stupidity.
And as seen by the inclusion and near-inevitable triumph of Mr Stark-Chessa, our “Fastest Sophomore Girl,” pretending at an Olympic level is very much in fashion.
As performance coach Steve Magness notes here,
None of this is meant to disparage the phenomenal women athletes at the top of their game. But if we stopped dividing sport by sex, elite women’s sport as we know it could cease to exist.
And cheating, as seen above, would presumably become an applauded norm. Or a heckled farce. I suppose it could go either way:
Professional martial artists Jayden Alexander and Ansleigh Wilk said that they were made to fight against a male with no prior warning… “When I saw him, I was so shocked I didn’t know how to respond.”
But hey, pride.
It turns out that those inherent biological differences are quite important. In terms of elite sprinting and endurance running, they result in a male advantage of around ten or twelve percent. Ditto cycling, swimming, high-jumping, skating, and many other sports, where performance differences by sex range from around five percent to, in long-jumping, around twenty.
For elite male and female weightlifters – in the same weight class – the difference in performance is around thirty percent. It’s also worth noting that men have greater grip strength than similarly trained women, about sixty percent more, and have vastly greater punching ability – more than double.
As Mr Magness adds here,
But as we’ve seen – and seen quite vividly – we mustn’t expect too much from the current, scrupulously woke, editor-in-chief of Scientific American.
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