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Notes -
Gender Identity and Sports - Once More Around The Track
There has been ample discussion regarding whether trans women should be able to compete in women’s sports, ranging situations as unpopular as Fallon Fox celebrating the bliss of fracturing women’s skulls in cage fights to the silliness of the Boston Marathon extending women’s qualifying times to anyone that says they’re non-binary. For better or worse, some of this is starting to wash out to actual policies at the highest levels of sports, with World Athletics banning trans women from competing as women in the Olympics. Personally, I would regard this as an obvious and easy decision, with no reasonable debate to be had. For the other side, here’s trans sprinter Halba Diouf’s feelings on not being allowed to compete as a woman and here is Science
insistingarguing that the null hypothesis should that be trans women don’t necessarily have an advantage.This is sufficiently well-worn territory that I don’t really expect anything fresh to be said at this point. Instead, I want to focus on something that I’ve always personally thought was quite a lot more difficult to judge correctly, which is athletes that were assigned female at birth, but have conditions that cause them to have abnormally high testosterone, such as XY chromosomes. In recent years, this seems to be coming up more often, possibly because of awareness of it being a thing that happens, possibly because the increased money and visibility of women’s sports has begun to select for increasing levels of biologically unusual people, or possibly because of something that’s not occurring to me. The first one I was aware of was Castor Semenya, who I’ve always had a soft spot for because it seems like a really tough break to have been born labeled as a girl, lived your life as a woman, competed and won at the highest levels, then get told, “nope, sorry, your chromosomes don’t match, so you’re banned in the future”. I hope that regardless of my positions on these issues to always extend that basic level of empathy to someone who truly was not at fault in the creation of a difficult situation.
I recently bumped into an article tying the plight of Diouf to a Senagalese sprinter who turned out to have XY chromosomes and high T, resulting in a ban from the Olympics and this is what gets to the heart of the matter:
First, I’d like to note that this objectively is discrimination and that takes us right to the heart of the point - having a women’s category in sports is inherently discriminatory. That’s the whole point, to discriminate men from women and create a category that is feasible for the best women to win, hence we must determine what a woman is for the purposes of that competition. That a policy is discriminatory simply cannot suffice as an argument against it, particularly when the whole point of the category is to implement a form of discrimination!
Second, I think Coe’s answer is correct and neatly covers all of these scenarios. I used to have a tough time with them, precisely because of the desire to be fair to women like Semenya, but the reality is that Caster Semenya simply isn’t a female and the whole point of women’s sports is to allow women to compete on equal footing against other women. That this will feel unfair and exclusionary to some tiny percentage of the population that has either a gender identity disorder or chromosomal abnormality is barely an argument at all - elite athletics isn’t actually an inclusive activity, it is exclusive and filters for the absolute best in the world for a given ruleset. Within track, use of performance-enhancing drugs is strictly monitored, with spikes in biological passports used to ban athletes even if what they used cannot be identified. With such tight constraints and rules on what physical specifications athletes are allowed to have, I no longer favor something so inclusive as to allow XY or other gender-abnormal athletes to compete - the women have to be actual women competing against other actual women. If nothing else, Lia Thomas has helped provide me some clarity on the absurdity of muscle-bound, testosterone-fueled males in women’s sports.
Do people on both side of the debate actually care about women's sports, or is it just an excuse to wage the culture war? I don't care about sports one bit so I'm perhaps biased, but it's fairly obvious that testosterone is a (natural) performance enhancing drug with permanent effects, and that you're not separating by sex/gender as much as by hormonal level - it's not "women's sports" as much as "women with T levels below X sports", otherwise women with endocrine conditions wouldn't be barred. I assume if a female took T during her teenage years but later detransitioned and then had normal female hormone levels, she would still be barred from women's sports - otherwise isn't that a huge loop-hole?
In the more general case, I also assume if there was a doping agent that had permanent effects even if the athlete stopped taking it and had undetectable levels during drug testing, they would also be banned from competing.
As a compromise, I think trans women should compete in sports where there testosterone does not give you an advantage, such as long-distance swimming, fast climbing, equestrian sports, shooting, etc.
I love sports and I love women's mma but otherwise I have zero interest in women's sports.
I do, however, care about living in reality and living in a world that acknowledges some truths.
One of those truths is someone who went through male puberty will always, in every single case, have a competitive advantage over a woman.
I don't even really care that some weightlifting record has been broken or some high school girls might lose a scholarship. If anything, I think it's funny.
I just care that people are pretending about the realities of this situation.
Are you saying that every single person who went through male puberty can beat any woman, including top-level female athlete? That would be blatantly false. Obviously the average male beats the average female, and top-level male beats top-level females, but a top-level female will beat the average male. See average mile run times: 6:30 for top 1% of males, 7:48 for top 1% of females, 8:18 for top 50% of males, 9:51 for top 50% of females. Interestingly enough, the female mile run record is 4:12.33 while the male world record from 1913 was 4:14.4 - the advantages of modern nutrition, sports science etc. can outweigh male puberty without it.
The extreme of rightist gender essentialism is just as wrong as leftist blank slatism, humans aren't that sexually dimorphic a species that you can make such blanket absolute statements. Personally, I went through male puberty, but in high school the female athletes routinely trounced me in every sport or measure of physical fitness. In phys ed I even remember having to play with the girls because I had 0 chance with the boys. This is despite me working out a decent amount - I just didn't have the bone structure or metabolism the other teen boys did.
So basically an average male is closer to a top1% woman than a top 1% woman is to a top 1% man? I imagine it is probably like what the top 1/3 of men outperform the top 1% of women?
There is a large sizable difference between men and women.
That seems like what that data would indicate and is pretty consistent with casual observation. On the other hand, those top 1% times look suspiciously slow to me. My wife's mile time is like a minute faster than that putative 1% and she's never particularly close to the top of local races. Maybe these are supposed to be the top 1% across the entire population, regardless of age or training? Hey @rae, where did the numbers come from? I'm not trying to be argumentative, I'm genuinely curious because I've previously had this conversation with people about where exactly I think I rank among runners in the general population and those numbers would imply that I'm much, much higher than I would have thought.
They looked suspiciously slow to me as well until I thought about it. I ran XC in high school and I usually hit the mile mark in a little over 6 minutes while pacing myself for 5k on a hilly course (hills take their toll because not only are you slower going up them but you have to pace yourself before you get to them and you're gassed coming off of them). Had I been running a straight mile on flat pavement I probably could have shaved a good 30 seconds off my time. My 5k times were usually in the low 20s and I never broke 20 minutes, which meant that I was barely good enough to qualify for varsity and my times never counted towards the team score.
But I ran all the time. Several years later, after a summer I spent almost entirely outside engaged in some form of athletic activity but during which I had made a pact with friends to never run unless it was one of three times reserved for emergencies, I decided to go back to the park where our XC meets were held and run a mile on flat pavement. I can't remember my exact time, but it was definitely over seven minutes and probably over eight. Long enough that I was disgusted with myself, despite otherwise being in close to the best shape of my life. A reasonably fit person who doesn't run all the time is going to have better times than an unfit person but it's going to be difficult for them to beat a person who actually trains, even if that person isn't really any good.
Now go to your nearest Wal-Mart and take a look at you average American. How many of these people do you think could run a mile in 6:30 or faster? Keep in mind that even reasonably fit teenagers probably won't hit this unless they run all the time (there were plenty of reasonably fit teenagers on my XC team who couldn't hit this even though they did run all the time). So while that number may seem ridiculous at first glance, it's at least plausible.
I think you're right and I've just gotten too used to numbers in the running world and always comparing myself to guy the in front of me rather than the people behind me. I just went back to Strava to go look at where I was when I first started running, and yeah, it turns out that an all-out mile for me back then was apparently just a bit faster than 8 minutes. This is easy to forget because even a few months later, I was a shade over 35 minutes for an 8K. That was off of what I would consider very light training, but it's still quite a lot more than most people are doing. I just recently helped a buddy pace his first sub-20 5K and that was for a 145-pound guy that's had a couple years of running, including a full marathon cycle behind him. I forget that getting down to those sort of paces takes real, distance running-specific training for most people. So sure, I can buy that only one in a hundred men in the United States can lace 'em up and run a 6:30.
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Those look like percentiles for general population to me, though I have no idea of the source. For college aged population the Health related physical fitness test manual by the American Alliance for Health, Physical Education, Recreation, and Dance has some tables. For the 1980's era publication it puts the 99th percentile male college student norm at 5:06, 99th percentile female norm at 6:04, 80th percentile male 6:05, 50th percentile male at 6:49, and the 50th percentile female at 9:22. The exact percentile levels are very sensitive to selection, there's a 30 second gap in the 99th percentiles they give for different college aged males for example.
Eyeballing these, they still just make a ton more sense to me. If I was looking at a random college-aged sample, I would expect an average guy to be able to gasp out a sub-7 mile, a pretty fast guy to be right around 6 minutes, but only guys that either ran, played soccer, or did some other endurance-heavy sport to get close to 5 flat. The women's numbers look really slow, but most women (even young women) aren't really in any kind of running shape, so that makes sense. I would think looking at college-age numbers are more instructive for discussion of athletic ability because there isn't much reason to care how fast the septuagenarians are (although I bet it predicts their remaining lifespan pretty well).
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No
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I wanted to add a follow-up to @KMC 's comment, where he beat me to pointing out the straw-man.
Sex differences do confer tremendous advantages for the median male over the median female in sports. For example, one well-cited study suggested: "The results of female national elite athletes even indicate that the strength level attainable by extremely high training will rarely surpass the 50th percentile of untrained or not specifically trained men".
The difference in athletic distribution between males and females is so great that not only is the combined distribution bimodal, it's qualitatively different. Given tail effects and a roughly bell-curve distribution, this competitive advantage is only exacerbated at the tails.
It's basically a dog-bites-man story nowadays each time some regional-level mid-teens boys team defeats a professional, even-Olympic-level, women's team. Hockey and football/soccer have provided a regular reminder.
Aside from mandatory PE classes, throughout my teenage years I rarely played any sports with girls due to the gulf in athleticism between teenage boys and girls. The limited times that I did was generally because a local girl's team was competitive on the national-level, and thus invited a given team of mine for a friendly to help them prep in giving them better competition than a local girl's team could.
We'd be instructed by our coaches and asked by the girls to play normally, but it was tough. We would basically treat the girls as fine china, playing tentatively and being extra careful not to hurt them. Chivalry runs deep. It felt weird playing in a friendly against opponents who were, on average, so much smaller, slower, and weaker than us. They even seemed to have slower reaction times, like they were running on constant lag. Maneuvering or dribbling around the girls wasn't all that more difficult than doing so around traffic cones.
It would quickly devolve to us going 1 on N_sport against them on offense ("your turn" then "my turn" to solo and shoot), and 0-2 on N_sport on defense (we'd lazily jog or walk back), where N_sport is the number of players typically on the court/pitch/field/or whatever, depending on sport. Our coaches would typically reduce the numbers of players on our side until the play became more balanced. It'd generally have to get under 0.5*N_sport until things got more interesting.
Fair point, that was a straw-man. My uncharitable interpretation was perhaps motivated by my own personal experience of being in the >95th percentile of teenage boys and not being able to match my overweight, untrained male classmates despite going to the gym 3x a week and trying to average around 3k calories a day. I didn't feel like my male puberty had given me much competitive advantage when I would get beaten in arm wrestling by random female classmates or the teacher assigned me to play football with the girls in PE, so while I agree that the male/female athleticism distribution is bimodal, overlaps do exist.
You were an exceptionally small/weak male that drew the short straw in the genetic lottery.
I wonder what would happen if you got a freaking animal of a woman in here…6’2”, 200 pounds, national champion swimmer who could bench 225. I’m guessing this animal would be more likely to shrug and say that she wasn’t that much weaker than the guys…
She would compare herself against freaking animals of a man that she saw at the national swimming championship. Yes, Katie Ledecky is a swimming monster, but she know that past 400m the differences between her and equally qualified male swimmers start to look insurmountable even to untrained eyes.
Yeah. I don’t know if she’d compare herself to Joe Average, though…our puny hero from before compared himself to both Joe and Jane Average. The fact that most men are far stronger than most women didn’t sink in quite as much for this guy, due to his not personally experiencing that. The puny guy didn’t compare himself to exceptionally small/weak/scrawny women…
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Are we using the same sign for the quantile direction? There's virtually no overlap of the top 5% of male athletes and female athletes.
Seems like you were also adversely selected for arm wrestling. Like weight makes a huge difference when comparing with male classmates, not just because being bigger makes it easier to carry more fat free mass. Fat leverages make a big difference in strength sports. I would also assume female classmates willing to arm wrestle are not random? Like they were probably in the top quartile of self assessed strength and that's why they would participate in such a challenge. I can't think of any instance where I've seen a petite woman seriously challenge a man to arm wrestling in person.
I sort always had the implicit assumption that much of the culture war aspect of the issue comes down to the elite levels. It's not clear to me that the local D level rec-league shouldn't just be an open league. For individual sports no one cares if you win the novice, 35-40 yr old, 65-70 kg, nearsighted division of your local park run. Like if it matters to someone, anyone can find a "competition" where they hand our participation trophies.
I didn't mean overlap in the athletes (unless you're comparing modern-day female athletes to early 20th century male ones) but the general athletic level of the population. As for the arm wrestling, I was beaten by a highly athletic female classmate, and then it was a challenge against one that wasn't particularly athletic as far as I know, not petite but fairly average build, perhaps top third to top 50%. There's a possibility I have mild endocrine issues, I have signs of low prenatal androgen exposure (and paradoxically high T levels despite low masculinisation, suggesting some compensation for lowered androgen sensitivity).
Which is another reason that I'm favouring the hypothesis that endocrine disruption is responsible for the surge in transgender identification, and that the focus should be on that rather than nebulous concepts of gender identity, along with waging the culture war over what should be purely a medical issue.
Most of the attention is on elite levels sure, but the laws in Kansas block transgender girls from playing in public school and college sports, which as far as I know aren't elite. The culture war debate extends to the trans girl that wants to play on her high school soccer team as well as the top echelons of women's sports, although in both cases the number of trans athletes is still extremely low.
I was thinking of slide 33 of the presentation of the USAPL report I had referenced down thread. That sample is best raw total for elite powerlifters 2011-2018. People often cite the grip strength study in untrained people, but I would have thought it was less applicable to trained individuals participating in sport. I think the quantile cuts are similar though. For virtually any otherwise equal selection, the strongest woman is about as strong as the average man.
Your situation makes a lot more sense now that you've explained a bit more. I do think that prenatal androgen exposure is a more important factor in athletic performance than most people realize. At least on par with puberty effects and free testosterone. It seems to dominate neuromuscular efficiency effects in animal models. That neuromuscular efficiency is what really separates elite athletes from mere mortals. It also effects androgen sensitivity which in turn effects how well people respond to training.
I do consider college sports to be elite. Even a D III player is on a totally different level than an average person.
I was imprecise by the implication that highschool level didn't matter. It sort of depends on what the purpose of scholastic sports is, but doesn't fit into the same bucket as elite levels to me. In the US most highschoolers that are eilite enough to get to the colleget level play club as their most competitive team. I guess that belongs to the same category as college? For the sports sponsored by the school, I'm sympathetic to the notion that trans girl want to play. On the other hand there are plenty of regular cis-boys that aren't good enough to even play on the JV team. Are school sports supposed to be accessible to literally everyone? I don't think they are at most high schools. I say this as someone who's best chance at a varsity letter would have been convincing my school to add a scholastic bowl team. I also don't think the institutionalization of sports for youth has been a positive development. The neighborhood sand lot games seem better to me at accommodating a variety of skill and strength levels.
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Yeah. I think there’s something to the idea that atrazine is making the frogs gay…and the humans queer. And trans.
Lots of confounders: but are trans people more likely to have grown up near like farms using lots of pesticides or plastic bottle factories or something?
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One thing that's really striking to me about this is how the advantage grows when it's multi-dimensional sports like football, basketball, hockey, soccer, and so on. When there is just one dimension to focus on, the best women are very good, with elite female runners coming up only ~12% short of what men accomplish at pretty much every distance from sprinting to marathoning. Suffice it to say, the result is that very few men are even close to the best women. In stark contrast, those multi-dimensional sports demand strength, speed, size, reaction times, hand-eye coordination, change of direction, and so on, making each dimension one where the best women won't be close to the men and even the women that are best at one thing are greatly inferior to male peers along others.
From a personal experience standpoint, I'm a smallish guy that grew up focusing on basketball (bad choice, whatever), then adopted endurance sports in my mid-20s. I'm a better runner than I was a basketball player due to my size and this makes me just barely good enough to beat most local women in a 10K, but still slower than D1 athletes. In contrast, when I'd play basketball, the physical gap is enormous, just absolutely ridiculous that it takes an incredibly skilled woman to even make it close. Even as a slender guy, the strength, coordination, aggression, and leaping are just so large of advantages.
I don't suppose I have a specific point other than that men and women are obviously very different and that I think people that deny this are basically just lying through their teeth or have absolutely no experience with physicality.
Crazy that I hadn't actually thought about this specific point until you made it.
I mean, I get that men having greater muscle density results in them being more physically capable across the board. So same conclusion.
But that is really it. A woman who is a genetic freak might be able to train some specific skill to the point she's actually a notable elite at that skill. Kicking, throwing, running agility routes, SOMETHING.
But her overall utility to a team is based on a whole package of skills, and if she minmaxes so she's competent at one, she'll end up radically deficient in the others, so she'd almost by definition be a liability.
This is even demonstrated in the relatively simplified sport of gymnastics. Females compete in four different categories, men in six.
https://gamerules.com/mens-vs-womens-gymnastics/
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Yeah, it’s always reminded me of (the inverse of) Lewontin’s Fallacy.
Among a pool of athletic women, a given woman might only be somewhat slower and slower-reacting than a given athletic man in those two individual dimensions—and almost certainly much smaller, weaker in the dimensions of size and strength (among others)—thus, as a result, the median athletic woman in terms of overall athleticness is a universe away from the median athletic man when evaluated via the first principal component.
That's also true for psychometric traits and gender expression as well. Women and men overlap massively in each psychometric trait or each way they express gender, but if you look at them all at once in a higher dimensional space the gulf between them is massive and binary. It's why all these claims that gender is really a spectrum fall flat on me. It's easy to tell these 'non-binary' people are really binary if you look at all their behaviors at once.
As someone with the letter X on their driver's license, I find this a little funny. Let's assume you're correct, and I fall smack dab in the middle of the side of a high dimensional bimodal distribution with other AMABs.
It still comes off as weird and subversive that I eat estrogen pills for breakfast no? The doctor is still going to be confused if I tell him I'm a man and hand him my hormone test results. TSA still stops Trans girls for having a dick in their pants.
If some of the dimensions of your gender expression are off the charts outliers, I think it still makes sense to make room for the term 'non-binary' in relevant contexts, if not as a personal identifier.
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"has an advantage" != "is better". Two different competitors will always have a multitude of different advantages and disadvantages relative to one another. It just happens that the results of male puberty have a very strong advantage over the results of female puberty for almost all sports.
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Nope, that's a straw man. You can have a competitive advantage and still lose. Male puberty gives you a competitive advantage, not a guaranteed win. You even make the same point yourself:
There are other advantages. That does not negate the puberty advantage.
I competed in swimming, and I was slow, often slower than many of the women, who were straight up better swimmers than I was. Yet the shorter the race, the closer I came to the fastest women, the greater advantage my sex gave me, the less being a better technical swimmer could overwhelm being bigger and stronger.
What do you mean by competitive advantage? It sounds like you're saying males have a raw physical advantage (e.g. being bigger and stronger) against females in every single case but that females can have better techniques/training, which is what I disagreed with. Male puberty by itself gives you larger and stronger bones, increased muscle mass, higher circulating hemoglobin, etc., but you can still end up with a weaker physique in absolute terms than a genetically lucky female with access to the best nutrition and sports science while growing up. What competitive advantage do you have then?
You can argue that male puberty gives you a competitive advantage all else being equal - same environment, same nutrition, but different sex - but in absolute terms, you don't necessarily have an advantage because you went through male puberty. What competitive advantage does a 5'4 twink with slender body type (narrow shoulders, small joints, etc.) have against say, Brittney Griner? I doubt any amount of training could bridge that gap.
I mean, sure, maybe that 5’4” scrawny dude would lose a one-on-one contest to freak of nature Brittney Griner. Maybe.
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I don't want to speak for KMC, but is the commonly understood usage of the term "competitive advantage" not generally understood to apply to the performance gap between the n percentile man and nth percentile woman? Like you might define it as a factor that positively affects performance in a given discipline. In that definition an 80 kg lifter has a competitive advantage over a 70 kg lifter, even though the 70 kg lifter might be stronger. Or as another example, you could take an average amateur cyclist and dope them to the gills with EPO and they would still get instantly dropped by the worst Tour de France rider. That doesn't mean EPO isn't a competitive advantage for a cyclist.
At the risk of getting bogged down in semantics, the "in every single case" clause in KMC's comments was what made me raise an eyebrow - while sure male puberty (or EPO) is a competitive advantage, the way it was phrased could be interpreted ambiguously as meaning people who went through male puberty are at an advantage by always being bigger and stronger while female athletes can have superior technique/training - see KMC's subsequent comment. Best to clarify to avoid a potential motte and bailey.
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I wrote up this whole musing about how I thought you were wrong, only to realize that I’d misread you as saying “comparative” advantage.
Anyway, I still want to chime in and say that I read Mihow as making the extreme claim: any man would have an advantage over any woman. Not necessarily an overwhelming one, but that we’d expect the man to win more than 50% of the time.
This seemed hyperbolic to me, and I think your read makes a lot more sense.
Maybe but it is far closer to the truth than people realize.
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