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There are many 15 year old boys who haven't quite hit puberty all the way yet. Presumably none of them on the u16 teams.
You don't need to hit puberty all way to beat a 15YO girl, what are you guys smoking?
I'm smoking about what you'd expect me to smoke at a rock climbing gym, where I routinely see teenage girls run circles around (some of!) their age-peer male counterparts.
Part of which is that when you graduate kids from the non competitive "kids classes" programs to the competitive "team" programs, the boys separate pretty severely: some boys hit puberty hard and fast and get muscular and athletic and turn into stars, some barely hit puberty at all until pretty late in high school and turn all gangly around 15 unable to climb like either a kid or a man. (Girls face a similar set of problems with puberty, in that some get a rack that will not cooperate with a sport built around being light and having great balance).
The idea that men and women are ultimately equal in physical strength and athletic ability is a bizarre feminist political cope.
The idea that any random male can beat every single female in every single sport in every single situation is a bizarre manosphere political cope.
In both cases, evidence is slippery and misapplied.
You say:
Which is a statement about the top end of the athletes of both genders, and then use it in an argument about medians.
Feminists tend to take an obviously true statement like "Caitlin Clark would beat every mottizen in a game of horse" or "no mottizen would hit an oly total of 262kg at 71kg bodyweight" and bootstrap that into "therefore gender does not have any predictive value of athletic performance" which is obviously false.
Climbing is one of the most body-shape dependent sports - it's more like horse jockeying than it is like basketball. It's not height that matters, but frame size and natural muscle build. Almost all non-anorexic post-pubescent women will have too high a body fat percentage to be competitive. Lean-but-strong men dominate.
The reductio-ad-absurdum comparison here is chess: men are just better than women. It requires no physical ability. However, a girl that's been training since she was 6 and has a 1700 elo will kick the holy hell out of a random boy that sits down at the chess board.
Maybe when we're talking at the 5.14+ level of professionals, but at 5.12d and below a variety of body types are pretty common, from 6'2" beanpoles to 5'11" 195# muscular guys who can hang (hi!).
That said, the reductio ad absurdum is probably Golf. Men are way better than women, no women are competitive, it is impossible to imagine a woman ever being competitive with top tier men, it's broadly understood that women use women's tees that are closer to the green...and an LPGA pro is going to absolutely smoke any man over a 5 or 6 handicap, which is roughly your top 10% of male golfers.
The upshot of chess, or rock climbing, or golf, is that if you discriminate based on gender, you'll be right more than you'll be wrong. But you can probably find better tips if you look closely.
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Is that the idea that was being put forward? I thought we were talking averages and percentiles.
This particular subthread starts with our learned friend in argument @anti_dan stating that to explain sexual dimorphism to an autistic 15 year old he would...
And @anon_ (apologies if I'm misstating your point) and I are pointing out that reality is actually a really noisy signal, and that taking your 15 year old autistic boy and making him play sports (which everyone should do anyway) may or may not lead directly into an understanding of sexual dimorphism. Depends on the kid, depends on the sport, depends on the social groupings the kid is involved in. It's not as simple as "every man is stronger than every woman" and human beings are notoriously bad at dealing with percentage chances that aren't 100/0 or 50/50.
Hypothetical: an only child homeschooled 15 year old boy, the rock climbing gym is his PE class. ((I know several kids/families like this irl, the parents are climbers and think it's a great way to get their homeschooled kid both exercise and socialization)) Which factor is going to cleave reality at the joints better to classify human beings by physical ability: whether they have tits, or whether they have their own climbing harness? In rock climbing, having tits will allow me to say with certainty that you aren't in the top 1% of climbers in the gym and you're less likely to be in the top 5%, but beyond that it has little predictive value: plenty of women climb 5.11 or 5.10, plenty of men can't. "Having your own climbing harness" allows you to make a pretty accurate hard cut: people who don't own gear pretty much never climb anything tougher than a juggy 5.10a. Athletic freaks who climbed 5.11 before buying a harness have been much rarer in my life than women who climbed 5.13.
So is our rock climber kid going to classify reality first by male/female, or by climber/civilian?
I do think that athletics is exposure to reality, hence why Plato tells us that Gymnastics is inimicable to Tyranny. Over time a kid will develop a nuanced understanding of the reality of sexual dimorphism. But, you know, it'll take time, and long exposure across multiple fields, and it will probably be quite nuanced.
Rock climbing (which my phone somewhat appropriately tried to autocorrect to rich climbing) is one of the worst possible examples, because the guy doesn't get to realize he could body the girl 5 feet to his left.
If they did 7 seconds of basic wrestling the confusion would disappear.
Yet, no one struggled with this in 1850. So clearly it is a socialized behavior, this learned blindness to sexual dimorphism.
I think your point is getting a bit lost in this discussion. Anyone who can understand basic statistics can look at the relative differences in population averages.
What exactly is the hypothetical autistic teenager supposed to learn by comparing his performance to other women playing the same sport? It’s unlikely for him to be good enough that he can’t find a single woman who’s better than him. How is it supposed to discourage him from transitioning?
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