You might enjoy the replies to what I am sure Sport England thought was an innocuous tweet

Of course, despite lived experience and inner identity being the most important thing we do need to remind ourselves that it's only male lived experience and inner identity of a tiny minority.

If you're one of many many women or girls whose physical sex related changes at puberty made you drop out of sport then that apparently doesn't matter.

Even if it is socialisation of girls trans identifying males are not socialised as girls from the outset.

It is a delicate area. If there is no link, highlighting the difference as natural risks reinforcing stereotypes. If there is a link, denial risks leaving women underserved and constantly wondering why they never measure up.

It’s hard to do robust ethical experiments on people that totally account for imposed gender roles, but experiments do show that boys enjoy competition more than girls from a young age and experiments on adults have established a link between competitiveness and sex hormones. So I believe there is a sex link, though it doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty of very competitive women (I’m one!).

But we don’t need to answer that question to improve things for women now. The lack of focus on non-competitive sport fails to serve all the non-competitive kids, male and female, whether their aversion to competition is due to natural inclination, social conformity, or something else. If society treated non-competitive sport as as valid as competitive for everyone then it wouldn’t matter if females were naturally less competitive or not, all the non-competitive people would be more likely to continue to engage in sport.

In my experience you're talking bollocks. I never liked sport because of physical aspects. If anything I preferred to be messy (I'm ashamed to say I fell into the "not like other girls" trap so getting sweaty or looking unattractive wasn't a problem.) No the problem was it hurt!

I was scared of leaking with my period but also, especially back then, it was very painful. Sorry to be graphic but as well as the cramps I got constipation and diarrhea. I got javelin arse. My boobs (huge very early on)ached. Actually, all of me ached. And while I know the line about exercise helping I never found it did any good, I fact it made it worse.
Those boobs I mentioned? They hurt, a lot was growing pains but they then got worse on my period. Running was awful - I couldn't afford a sports bra and normal ones (cheap, we were poor) really were not adequate so the bounce was painful.
I got injured a lot - I now know that as a female my body has weaker periods due to my hormones. Those hormones meant your body changed massively and pretty unpredictably- you could be able to run fast one day and the next nowhere near. Periods are unpredictable at that age and where you are in your cycle affects you so you couldn't even plan around it.

And yes, I hated the way we were sexualised in gym kit or swimming costume but I could deal with that. It wasn't what stopped me - my body did. None of those things connect to gender, they all came down to sex.

It's not about gender stereotypes.
Prepubescent boys outperform prepubescent girls on almost every measure of athletic performance by about 5%. Jump height, leap, speed, strength, etc. Girls are better than boys when it comes to balance and flexibility. This is one of the reasons girls often get into dance rather than sport - they're better at it.

If you win or do well at an activity you are more likely to want to carry on with it and fall in love with it for its own sake.

Most sports were invented by men to display men's strengths. Rhythmic gymnastics is a sport in which women excel because of their greater flexibility but is much harder for men.

Have a look at the chair challenge or the broom challenge online. Men's and women's bodies are different and this has consequences.

Absolutely. When parents indulgently watch their sons climbing trees, while telling their daughters to be careful of their nice dresses (and unsuitable shoes) - yes, even in the 2020s - they are reacting to their children's sex. You might say they are enforcing gender stereotypes, but the stereotype they pick is determined by the children's sex.

Which of course, is one reason why many women, me included, became feminist at an early tree-climbing sort of age. And looking back, I'd now call the young me gender-critical.

My DD stopped being on her swim team when she got her periods which are painful and heavy. She was getting them every 3 weeks and missing - therefore - about 1/3 of training (before you even get to catching normal school diseases). We didn't get reduced fees so it's also a financial issue for parents. Based on sex.

The club was piss poor at doing anything to address the large numbers of girls dropping out once they got their periods. There were lots of them and they did nothing.

Agreed @Manxexile. I only found I enjoyed hard competitive physical sport at University. It would have been nice to find it out earlier. It's also true there are plenty of boys who enjoy non-competitive physical activity. Tbf non-competetive stuff was all that was available at my son's school.

I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you, but isn't that reinforcing gender stereotypes to some extent?

For example, outside imposed gender roles, is it objectively true that young pre-pubescent boys are more likely to enjoy being competitive than young girls are?

@borntobequiet isnt it obvious? Gender stereotypes such as 'it's unattractive to be sweaty' or 'it's unfeminine to be competitive' plus sexist poor provision for girls' and women's sport are the main reasons why so few girls and women participate in sport. There is zero physical reason why women shouldn't take part in sport. The old stuff about not being active while menstruating is another example.

Effeminate boys also suffer from homophobia and abuse that restricts their physical activity. I don't know if there is a higher proportion of boys who transition that were at single-sex schools and were ruthlessly bullied for not being 'manly' enough for not liking team sport, or even for liking it but not looking or acting 'right', but I've certainly come across quite a few. Including a cousin of mine and a few I've met through work.

Of course they would say they were bullied for being trans, whereas I would say they were bullied for being boys who threatened the patriarchy. The bullying was wrong, we'd agree on that.

This is basic feminism, isn't it?

What's also true is that the tweet may not quite mean all this. But it's not wrong.

But I don't have a gender. I am a woman. My sex is female. The misogynistic stereotypes, expectations and limitations that were placed on me as a girl (and, now, a woman) are because of my sex. Nothing to do with my non-existent gender identity. I don't have one.

WTF is this supposed to mean?

The other aspect of sport and female participation generally is that our sports, especially the sorts of sports pushed in school, are designed around testing and developing aspects of male prowess and do so in a way that male hormones respond to better than female.

Boys, even in primary, are more likely to find competing enjoyable. So much of our sport is based around speed and strength and competition. Very little emphasis is put on developing other sport approaches that are more likely to light the pleasure centers in women and girls.

Which isn't to say no women or girls compete or that they shouldn't be catered for in competition, but boys, even when young, are more likely to enjoy competing and there are links to male hormones that indicate there is a sex based aspect to competitiveness and status seeking. So chances are, engagement in sport is likely to be skewed towards boys if the emphasis is on competitive sport with non-competitive sport treated as the poor cousin (as seems to happen in every school I've seen).

What age girls? Once 11, 12 there is a lot of awkwardness around their developing bodies, changing rooms and sports clothes and activity. Periods become a concern, period pain becomes relevant. Male attention and male behaviour make sports less attractive to sensitive girls, ie commenting on their female bodies. These are all due to the girls female sex.

😂.

I think more and more organisations are going to start looking at the responses and realise they need to find a GC employee to review before they publish.

The fact is other demographics also have lower participation rates in sport - older people, people on lower incomes, people with disabilities and people in rural areas. We won't all be sitting around talking about choices and social expectations, we would be talking about the real barriers for them taking part.

But for some reason we're focusing on why don't women and girls choose to play sport. It's all utterly offensive if you think about it.

I think others have already answered this, but my view is that it's the gender role that society etc imposes or prints on girls that is the issue, not their gender or gender identity (whatever those two terms mean) per se.

FWIW apart from some vague and woolly concept like "man and boys are meant to behave and feel like YYYY" and "women and girls are meant to feel like XXXX" I have no idea what gender means.

I happen to be a man but if somebody asked me what it felt like to be a man I'd have to say "No idea really. I just know what it feels like to be me".

Yes actually.

Think periods when doing competitive swimming or running or jumping
Think missing training or important matches because of heavy, painful periods
Think trainingsschedules that don't take the hormonal changes into account that impact the stamina of the female body that fluctuates with those changes
Think of the risk of muscle injury increases significantly before a period.

So yes, sex influences the enjoyment and result of sports as much as gender expectations do

The fact is that both boys and girls drop out of sport at a high rate between 14-16.

Girls drop out at a higher (roughly double) rate than boys.

There are many, complex and interacting factors but key ones are that at that age, children have more choice as to how they spend their time and parents don't have to use sports clubs as pseudo childcare.

To suggest that sex is not a factor in sports participation is utterly ludicrous. It's not just about socialisation (although by the age of 8 girls are more likely to think that sport isn't for them) it's about the whole system of sport, and factors outside of sports such as male violence and personal safety.

Now is not the time to focus less on sex as a factor in sports participation. We should be focusing on it more.

Agree with @Changeandagoodrest

I'm fairly certain the reasons for lower physical activity in girls is nothing to do with their sex.

Well, you're wrong.

It is a proven fact that a large proportion of girls stop playing sports when they hit puberty (that's why successive governments have tried to encourage girls into sport so much). One of the reasons is that they become very conscious of their changing bodies, and of the reaction of boys towards them - mocking their jiggling breasts, if they are well-endowed; mocking their flat chests if they aren't; shouting personal comments about them etc.

But obviously, having the opportunity to change in the same room as male-bodied "girls", and share shower facilitates and toilets with them, they will become much more confident that they aren't being pruriently observed and secretly perved on. They'll be flocking to the sports field in droves.

Many girls are expected to do more chores and caregiving (e.g., look after younger siblings, help with a disabled family member) than boys. They have less free time for sports. Here's one study I found with a quick Google search:
https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/arid-40322318.html

Many parents keep girls on a shorter leash, too. They aren't able to join in informal games on the next block.

Plus, even as young kids, boys tend to be better at sports than girls. E.g., When my kids swam on teams, they separated the boys from the girls even when they were 3 years old. Boys were faster. Young boys run faster, etc. Most ppl spend more time at things they're good at bc it's more fun.