Interesting real life stats on boys/girls sports

There are separate percentile growth charts for babies by sex too.

Meant to add, "truth" to the current teenagers can be that you can change sex.

Depends what they've been told/ taught/ seen on YouTube.

I think the differing shape of male and female pelvises makes a difference. Male pelvises are better shaped for running

(The children I work with have additional learning difficulties too. But sometimes as a result of not being able to engage with mainstream school
Systems. Or rather, mainstream school systems don't meet their asd needs)

If there's one thing I do know it's that no one child with autism is the same as another. And many are very sociable and do want to be the same as and be included with peers.

But also, how much of that experience is a result of the current culture? As a teen of the 90's, I knew that I could wear and do what the boys did. Gender non conformity was cool, for the boys too. It seems to be very different these days.

It's no coincidence to me, as a teacher of children with autism, who are sometimes not interested at all in what peers are doing or interested in, that they're more likely to be immune to the sex/gender stereotypes in fashion and interests.

This one intrigues me, because it seems that it can go either way.

I feel my basic response to this gender stuff is a kind of light autistic trait - I can't handle untruths, and can't really relate to the sort of peer things, and that's like you describe. I've seen a fair few people here talk about how as autistic they find stuff like being expected to not "misgender" very difficult. It's hard to not say what they see.

But autistic people are hugely overrepresented in the trans community. Some autistic people latch onto gender as a path to explaining something. It's a "sorting box" for them to make sense of themselves of the world.

I wonder what explains those two different paths.

My eldest boy was always more sociable if very hyper, and liked the little people in the cars rather than the cars that peer boys would line up. He never did that. Second boy does do that. Eldest had only female friends till school as he preferred their imaginary games.

Second boy likes house work and routines. He is calm and likes to sit and draw. Eldest is teaching him to "fight" and play ninjago etc, if it weren't for him I don't thing he'd be interested in any of that. He loves his baby doll and push chair and goes "shopping."

The thing is, as mum to two boys, the gender stereotypes from the outside world start influencing young children very early indeed.

Humans are very social and relate to peers and older peers very early on, including tv etc.

Baby boys clothes in 2012 were horribly dull and tractor covered in M and s, I vividly remember. The girls had lovely tones of purple and teal and stylish flowers. I found it really hard to find colourful clothes for him. Things have been different for my now 3 yr old.

They pick up on gendered stereotypes quickly. My son was looking at a book with weird stylised animals going into space and labelled the mummies and daddies based on things like eyelashes or broad shoulders (amusingly his own are enormous!)

I noticed birthday gifts for my son's age 4 party were devoid of crafty things, full of fast cars and junior Lego whereas my friend's with girls had umpteen bead threading kits, glittery sticker things etc. It was similar at age 3 parties.

It's no coincidence to me, as a teacher of children with autism, who are sometimes not interested at all in what peers are doing or interested in, that they're more likely to be immune to the sex/gender stereotypes in fashion and interests.

I'm already having the pink is for boys two argument with my 3 yr old, even pointing out his older brother's pink tee shirt!

I think they've found some sex biology differences in things like sight and brain processing of sight; Lisa Mosconi says that on average girls see a wider range of colours that boys and elsewhere I've seen research that says boys react more to fast moving images, but the key thing is that you'll always get outliers, it doesn't mean they're not the sex they are, nor can't study or follow opposite stereotyped pursuits.

Gina Rippon explores this a lot in the gendered brain.

AvaCallanach - 100% agree with everything you’ve said there.

One of my issues with (my interpretation of) GC feminism is that my experience of having children of both sexes is that there IS an innate difference between them. I would place behaviours on overlapping bell curves of distribution, not two completely different sets of behaviours of course, but in my experience whilst all my toddlers had dolls and a buggy my dd was much more interested in the nurture play. She did play with the train track and cars occasionally, but those were a favourite of the boys. She made her little characters whole lives and told stories as she moved them around the dolls' house; the boys played with it every now and again if I joined in but rarely chose it. She was more tuned in and interested in domestic routines from being tiny, and by 18 months she would try on new clothes and twirl in the mirror in a way her brothers just didn't. This doesn't mean the boys don't help around the house - they do - or cook - they do, and she climbs trees and had long since outgrown princess dresses. One of my sons loves fashion - happiest in a tie and velvet smoking jacket, obviously doesn't wear it to school but would love to!

So despite me being determined that gender was entirely imposed and buying my kids a range of toys, from babyhood my children followed different pathways that were sex predictable. My sister's kids are just the same and she was even more radical about the imposition of gender on girls than me. I could have prevented my daughter from having princess dressing up clothes (she also had a doctor's outfit, a spiderman, a zombie etc ) but why would I, when I, for example, bought Thomas the Tank Engine toys when my ds1 loved them? She has spotted the passivity of many disney princesses now she's older!

Of course this doesn't mean that some males prefer traditionally female toys, roles, activities and vice versa and like many I don't perceive that this "makes them" really a girl, or a sporty active girl is "really" a boy. But I do perceive that by and large there are gender manifestations and these are innate. It makes sense to me as presumably females are biologically programmed to nurture babies and children and males are biologically programmed to be fond enough of the kids not to want to hurt them, but also to be driven to hunt etc.

And that's lung capacity that developed from birth, no lowering of testosterone will change that.

I developed late onset asthma so was shown the peak flow chart (lung capacity) at the surgery when they were trying to work out if I had it and was always struck by the difference between the lines for male and female, and also how they don't start anywhere near a similar point at age 15.

A 15 year old boy will have a better lung capacity than a woman at her peak, around 30. Even a 14 year old boy.

You can mentally track back a few years.

For children it's based on height but there's a few charts showing a difference between girls and boys from age 7. Very slight though and not helpful for tracking their peak flow for asthma management.

Female and male bodies obviously operate differently somehow as the difference is so very big but it clearly does make a difference.

My experience of b/g twins is the exact opposite. From a baby my son was always stronger than his sister. Having been brought up with only female siblings and a girls school education, the differences between them astounded me . Moreover I had always firmly believed that boys were only more rumbustious than girls because they were encouraged to be so and girls were treated differently. Boy did I have a rude awakening.

This is interesting. I didn't realise the differences were there so early either. I have B/G twins at primary school and dd is easily able to beat her brother in a race despite him being the sportier child. Obviously she is the exception rather than the rule. It makes it even more infuriating that the discussion around this seems to be entirely based on testosterone levels which are only one factor we should consider.

Media representations of tiny actresses beating up men do not help.

I've never seen a game (video or other) where male and female characters have different stats, and I think I've played quite a lot of games. It's only ever a visual difference.

You can understand the creators' logic - players would be pissed off about being "penalised" for wanting to have a female avatar, and aren't going to want "female" to be "slightly-harder mode".

So misleading.

Although then again, you maybe still wouldn't register the difference properly unless you had played both male and female in one game, or it was a directly competitive game.

But with them being always being the same, I think the repeated reassurance from each game that avatar choice doesn't affect anything can bleed through into general thought if you're not stopping to think about it.

Okay, now I'm wondering - I've never done any sports games since Daley Thompson's Decathlon. Presumably they're largely avoiding total nonsense by making your avatar's sex match that of your competitors? Always male in a lot of cases.

A quick Google suggests FIFA 21 has women's football teams. Do they at least have some overall female/male performance difference, so the games play differently, or is it just a reskin so a top-ranked female player performs the same as a top-ranked male player? Does Rapinoe (rating 93) perform like Messi (93)?

I have to say having children has made me rethink boys and girls and their relative strengths. I have a ds who is one school year younger than his sister and they are yr 3 and yr 4. They have spent the last year or so doing exactly the same activities, thank you lockdown.

I’ve had to have a conversation with him that because he is a boy he can’t play rough and tumble like he wants with his sister(s) - he has two - because theyre not as physically capable or wanting to as him.

I’ve had to explain to my upset dd that even though I’ve banged on and on about how boys and girls are equal since she was born, that eventually boys are stronger and faster than girls.

I’ve been honest and said to them both I didn’t think it would materialise before puberty. I feel like on some level I’ve been fed a myth and I’ve passed it on.

In the wake of the me too scandal I’ve made sure to explain how strong boys can scare girls to my son. That showing off strength between boys when they play can scare girls. I’ve had to tell him he has to use his strength to help his sisters not hurt them. Which so far has improved their play but is making my stomach turn in knots that I’ve basically turned my kids into stereotypes of boy = hero, girl = pathetic princess who needs rescuing. The latter more so his younger sister who he will escort, carry, assist in all matter of things, despite my efforts to get her to help herself.

So I do think that if we don’t acknowledge this difference in ability at a younger age, a lot of boys are going to grow up unaware of their natural physical abilities over girls. Perhaps on some level why teens and young people think there is no problem in trans people competing in women’s sport is because they have been educated to believe there is little difference in the sexes that can easily be remedied by medication.

I’m in my 30s and I grew up believing I could do anything a man could because I am tall and quite broad framed. I went into a physically demanding career and it rapidly became apparent I’d have to work ten times harder just to be average. I wish I’d really truly known this at 18 and Perhaps saved myself a lot of misery believing myself to be useless.

In trying to pursue equality for the sexes we seem unable to have a proper dialogue with children (who grow up into adults) about the fact that men on the whole are stronger than women. I knew of course that big, strong males were always going to be stronger. I was that naive to think that much shorter men would not be stronger than me. Media representations of tiny actresses beating up men do not help.

But yes I totally get where you are coming from. It’s not until you see it for yourself with your own children do you finally see the truth about the difference between the sexes.

Certainly by Tanner stage II, there is no overlap in testosterone levels between boys and girls - levels are already in different ranges.

Quick summary of the point in the video - boys and girls of the same age are only close in performance in a specific start-of-pubescence time window, when the girls are on average further into puberty than boys, so are more developed.

But before and after that window, boys are further ahead.

People are misled by charts/studies which show the male/female gap increasing from puberty, and assuming the small difference at age 11 applies through the entire pre-puberty period. It doesn't.

This study refers to the study they did on Australian school kids.

link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40279-020-01389-3

Iirc the boys showed advantages from around 6 years old.

Why are Pre pubescent boys significantly faster runners than Pre pubescent girls?

Here's a good discussion on the subject, with Emma Hilton and Linda Blade.

Linda Blade discusses her own experiences and stats of children at similar ages.