To think that women don't just need to try a bit harder in order to beat men at sport?

[SportySpice18]

From this Woman's Hour clip:

www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p06tmhr3

The first interviewee is arguing that initially transwomen (ie males who identify as being women) should compete in women's sport (which is already happening) but that ultimately single-sex sports should be abolished and sport should become gender neutral. This would mean all men competing against women (if any women qualify) and sports teams not just being mixed sex but not taking into account sex differences (e.g. at the moment a mixed-sex sports team normally has to have 50% women playing but in 'gender neutral' sports, the strongest players would be selected, irrespective of their sex.)

The argument put forward is that women only perform at a lower level than men in sport because we psychologically cap our performance and don't try as hard as men.

AIBU to think that this is a load of old b and will result in women missing out on the opportunity to play fair, competitive sport? Women in sports, particularly at the top level, work their a off and display incredible determination and skill - but they cannot outpower men.

Men have longer limbs, greater lung capacity, bigger muscles and a different shaped pelvis (shaped for efficient movement rather than childbirth) to name but a few differences. I play sports and, when I've played (socially) against men the sheer power can be overwhelming even when they are technically a less skilled player.

Surely, it is obvious that refusing to acknowledge physical sex differences, far from being open-minded and progressive, is massively detrimental to women?

F1 can be unisex
A surprising amount of strength is required to drive a modern Formula 1 car, I don't think it's likely a woman will be competitive any time soon.

Why aren't men racing against greyhounds then? They limit themselves by only racing humans.

Unless sports science is wrong Ifailed I'm not aware of any aspect of sports science that uses a breeding programme to pass on sporting genes?

I don’t understand what you’re talking about. You’re just saying really bizarre things and it’s pretty clear it’s not something you know much about.

But equestrian events already have women competing against men, so that's an irrelevant example

A poster asked about a sport where strength was not the issue. This is one. The poster's question was answered.

Men have been competing in sport much longer than women and their bodies has evolved to have an edge due to this

Ha, ha, ha - this is a joke, right?

Caprisunorange you claimed that because men had been participating in sports for longer than women, and presumably success in said sports was sufficiently important that their genes were more likely to be passed on, their bodies had evolved for more sporting success, unlike women.
Evolutionary change, sufficient to have an impact on an entire race, take many generations, not a few.

Lowering a trans bloke’s testosterone level doesn’t even begin to level the playing field between men and women.
Any doctor, anatomist or physiologist will tell you that men have a higher cardiac output, higher vital lung capacity, broader shoulders, greater muscle to fat ratio, greater upper body strength, narrower pelvis, different centre of gravity... the list goes on and on.
Measuring testosterone level simply evolved as an easy test to check whether men were cheating by competing in women’s events - it certainly didn’t imply that testosterone was their only advantage. We could test their DNA for XY chromosomes as a giveaway that they’re male cheats too, but it’s not the chromosome per se that is the advantage, just all the physical expressions of it in bodily organs.
Transgender men competing against women is still cheating, and will lead to the obliteration of all women’s sport if we don’t stamp it out firmly now.
Let them have a separate “trans Olympics”, rather like the Paralympics, where they can compete against each other instead of invading our female sports.

There is also a very legitimate theory that Caribbean athletes evolved to be powerful due to the natural selection that came with slavery.

I think "natural" could do be with being re-worded there. There is some evidence that slaves were bred by owners, and that slaves which were not deemed got workers were simply killed. That isn't "natural selection", that eugenics, and a particularly brutal and immoral version of it.

Remember Lauren Jeska? Fell-runner who wiped the floor with the natal women they competed against. Then they drove from Wales to Birmingham to attack British Athletics official Ralph Knibbs with two knives (and lashed out at two others who tried to stop the attack, injuring those people too) because they thought the discovery of their trans status - giving them an unfair advantage - might mean they were stripped of their titles. Jeska is now serving a sentence for attempted murder and Knibbs has life-changing injuries.

Jeska is tall and wiry but it's not height and weight that gave them a massive inbuilt advantage over the women they competed against. And won against. Is it now?

Why aren't men racing against greyhounds then? They limit themselves by only racing humans.

In the next Grand National, the jockeys should get off and race the horses. It might take a while but I'm sure with perseverance they'd soon catch up.

Men have been competing in sport much longer than women and their bodies has evolved to have an edge due to this*

So evolution is a response to sport? Have you read anything about evolution?

So evolution is a response to sport? Have you read anything about evolution?

😂😂 made me laugh too

Yes sorry, that’s true it was eugenics.

Ifailed you’re looking at this as though everyone is an athlete- they’re obviously not. Your body isn’t as capable as an athletes, male or female. But competition has allowed focus on training the body to perform at the highest level, and this attention was, for a long time, in many sports, focused only on men. In recent years women have been able to complete but are still 50,100 years behind men. The gap is closing. It’s been predicted for 40 years that the gap will close in long distance running.

Do you really think that evolutionary change in women's bodies can be achieved in 100 years? we aren't fruit flies!

Caprisunorange with respect, training may help women athletes to improve their performance, but it can't maker them produce far greater amounts of testosterone, grow to be an average of five inches taller, have denser bones, broader shoulders, greater lung capacity or build considerably more muscle. If the sports science you have studied is telling you all that is possible, it isn't science, it's bunkum.

Any evolutionary effect would need to rely on athletes having a significantly more children than non-athletes, which, considering the numbers of athletes v non-athletes, is unlikely.

Changes are due to improved training and general health. The overall population is usually healthier and stronger (and often taller) than previous generations due to hygiene and food.

There is no evolutionary effect at play here

A memetic and societal difference, certainly, but not evolutionary

In recent years women have been able to complete but are still 50,100 years behind men.

That's unlikely. Even if you claim there is an epigenetic effect in breeding athletes from athletes (ie, that Ailish McColgan has a biological benefit from the training her mother did) there aren't enough athletes whose parents are also elite athletes to make that effect significant. And even then, it's extremely rare for an athlete's child to outperform their parent: the parsimonious explanation would be that athletes' children have opportunity and motivation from their parents, but lacking the lucky genetic accident that gave rise to their parents they are at best good amateurs.

So then you can try the claim that women's training methods are fifty to a hundred years behind men's. They aren't.

One factor is that the active talent pool for men is larger. More men try sport at an early age, fewer give up at 12, and there are more routes through amateur clubs. There are a lot of fourteen year boys kicking balls around, from which not only football but also athletics more generally can draw. There just aren't as many active female athletes. So elite men's sport is selecting from a larger pool than elite women's sport, therefore the top 1% (or whatever) are a narrower, better, band of performers. There is more likely to be a woman who never kicked a ball but would have been better than Hope Powell than there is a man who never kicked a ball but would have been better than Zidane.

But all of that said, the world record for the 1500m for women is 3:50, set in 2015. Dibabe is probably clean, although there is some suspicion; unfortunately most of the world record runs prior to then back to about 1970 stink, so breaking them is inevitably going to attract scepticism. Jules Ladoumègue ran 3:49.2 in 1930. Dibabe is training with the same support and techniques as men; she is certainly being trained better, more scientifically and with more sophisticated equipment than 1920s France. You can make the same comparison for most sports: once you discount the obvious joke records set in Eastern Europe in the 1980s (400m, 800m) women's records are roughly at the level of inter-war performances by men. That's not about training techniques.

Men have been competing in sport much longer than women and their bodies has evolved to have an edge due to this
I'd say that the fact that men have been the hunters (running, chasing down prey) and women the gatherers (and the one's to rear the children) since humans started walking on 2 legs has played a more significant role in the evolution of the sexes bodies than how long competitive sports has been around.
Physiologically the male body is far different to women's and no amount of hormone replacement or therapy is going to change that. You can't change orthopaedics, lung capacity, muscle development because of a feeling your body isn't right. Biology is fact, it is science, and if trans-women are allowed to participate in women's only sports there will soon be no women in those sports.

Sleet shooting used to be mixed sex. However, after a woman won it in the Olympics for the first time in 1992 women were banned from competing and it became men only with no women's event: the victor didn't have the chance to defend her title.

m.womenofchina.cn/womenofchina/xhtml1/people/sportswomen/7/7613-1.htm

So to summarise, women are supposed to just accept that men will beat us and we should try harder: why doesn't it work the other way round?

Men have been competing in sport much longer than women and their bodies has evolved to have an edge due to this. As a PP mentioned, the gap is now closing in events where women have historically been allowed to compete earlier ie long distance running.

Surely this is down to improved understanding on how to train women’s different bodies to get better results – technical and research based improvements.

Evolution is process by which most successful individuals pass on their genes to next generation. For there to be an evolutionary process people good at sport would have to be having larger number of children than general population – is there any evidence of that?

I’m aware of one of the population pressure we have in the west currently is sexual selection and some research in US seem to be showing that shorter curvier women are more likely to have children than other women and have more of them. It was surprising as it’s not the media stereotype of attractive womanhood but means shorter curvier genes are being passed down in greater numbers to next generation. I’m unaware of any research showing preference being given to particularly sporty people.

ReflectentMonatomism point aboout wider pool to draw from for men make a lot of sense as well.

Serena Williams says Andy Murray would beat her in straight sets every time. Maybe she should just try harder.....l

For there to be an evolutionary process people good at sport would have to be having larger number of children than general population

Or there would have to be assortive mating amongst sporty types, which does anecdotally seem at least possible. That makes disentangling nature and nurture rather difficult. Genetic drift over a few generations is implausible, although epigenetic research is changing some of that certainty. But children raised within sporty families are more likely to have the opportunity and incentive to be sporty, so will make the best of their genetic heritage (which might already be somewhat advantageous if both of their parents are sporty).

There is a PhD, if someone wishes to both do the work and become a figure of hate from both left and right, on the way in which assortive mating amongst graduates is affecting society. Whether nature or nurture, in a few generation or two's time we could easily be in a position where the two most likely parentages are (a) both parents graduates and (b) neither parent a graduate, and we will start to see the rise of children all of whose grandparents are graduates (which is today extremely unusual). The same possibly applies to some sport: it's pretty routine for athletes to marry athletes, for example. Disentangling nature and nurture is likely to offend everyone.