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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.
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.
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.
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.
That's a common experience. But no. I wouldn't recommend modeling anyone with so little nuance, regardless of what they insist upon. I think it's common for people to oversimplify one another in general. If you can get a good model out of starting with a gendered cluster then listing divergences from that cluster that's great. I find it's easier to start with a sub-cultural cluster.
Realistically, everyone has more eccentricities than they show the world, and if you want to really get to know someone, you're going to end up personally tailoring a model to them. Moreso with people that won't or can't slot into neurotypical norms, where it might be best to just start out that way.
Negotiating norms is a more complex matter. You certainly have to do less modeling if you're in a subculture with a tight set of well delineated standards for how people ought to behave. You don't have to negotiate how you treat each person, and get to have a tight standard for misbehavior. But you also get less versatility with regards to what interactions can occur and how you can ask to be treated.
It sounds like in the case of the most masculine cis-identified woman you know, your social circle is giving a lot of leeway to her. I'm not sure how the rest of your circle feels about this- what each of their perspectives are on this woman being a git. It sounds like she is effectively playing the game on both the feminine and masculine side of the spectrum and gaining the benefits of both sides. I think this is the most interesting version of the social game, but I get that it's frustrating that your social circle doesn't have your back on the things that annoy you about her. You might have an easier time of it if you bonded more closely with the members of your circle. But if they won't let you do that- Obviously you're at a disadvantage if you yourself are not permitted to use the synthesis of masculine and feminine social techniques and she is.
You realise that what you’re saying is not really much of a response to @raggedy_anthem, right?
She’s noting (via anecdote) that male humans and female humans, in fact, act qualitatively differently and are more accurately modeled separately, notwithstanding how “masculine” a woman is or “feminine” a man is.
You’re essentially replying “we need to treat individuals on a person-by-person basis” and nothing else (even defaulting to the standard modeling of “man” and “woman!”), which…doesn’t relate to her statement at all except in a bullshit non-answer way that conveniently sidesteps any actual response to her point.
(Edit: I appreciate that there are passages that have substance — that “playing both sides” can garner an advantage, for example. But I don’t think that changes the gist of my comment — from my perspective, you didn’t actually respond to the point of the comment you were replying to in favour of superficially analyzing the anecdote.)
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