Stats on why we have women and men sports?

[InaConfusedState]

I came across the story of Fallon Fox shattering Tamikka Brents eye socket a while ago. It’s so patently obvious that a woman is at serious disadvantage fighting a person with a male skeleton, muscle structure and build, I really couldn’t see why Fox wanted to compete against a woman let alone be allowed to do it. It led me to here and reading fascinating (and diverse) views.

After talking to someone about this case, it got me thinking about why we have women’s sports in the first place. I always thought it was because women are structurally different to men and therefore unable to compete against them on a level playing field. But if men are now able up compete against women, is this not true?

I wondered if anyone has links to evidence and stats that show why women have their own sports.

For example, what does going through puberty as a teenager do for male strength, muscles, etc compared to a female?

What advantage does testosterone confer?

What are the typical levels of testosterone in make and female sportspeople?

If a man competes as a woman, does he have to artificially bring his testosterone levels down (and if so is it to the same level as a woman?). Does the fact he’s been through puberty give him any advantage regardless of whatever testosterone level he now has?

What else - hormones, physical build - do men have as an advantage over woman that makes them faster/stronger?

I’m really interested in these physical aspects as it’s what got me (and several friends) questioning what it means for women if a man can become a woman.

Testosterone (T) makes men tall, broad and strong. It narrows their hips. It confers stamina and endurance. It gives them high muscle-to-weight ratio. It lowers body fat. The advantages for sporting prowess are huge, and the reason why T doping is an issue across the board, from street bodybuilders to 100m superstars.

There is no theoretical T max in male sports categories. Doping is suspected if a male is observed to go through peaks and troughs/unusual spikes.

Males wishing to compete in female categories must have T levels below 10 nm/L, the max for the female category. Average female T levels are about 1.5 nm/L (IIRC). Females with high T (quirk of their biology, undiscovered medical reason, etc) have been stopped from competing in this category, then allowed again, and now are facing a requirement to lower T.

The 10 nm/L level is not considered clinically problematic for your average male, BTW. Within normal range.

Males who have been through puberty before lowering T retain skeletal advantages - height, handspan, narrow pelvis and so on. They likely retain increased lung capacity. They also retain muscular capacity to respond to training - lowering T may ‘soften’ them initially, but their muscles have a biological signature of having been exposed to male levels of T, and this allows them to build strength far more quickly than a female can.

There was a thread recently where someone posted stats about male versus female hand grip strength. You can find them here;

www.google.co.uk/search?ei=TFBsWu_hJKmOgAaPsYC4Bw&q=male+hand+grip+stronger+than+women&oq=male+hand+grip+stronger+than+women&gs_l=psy-ab.3...8321.10333.0.10860.16.16.0.0.0.0.136.1419.12j4.16.0....0...1c.1.64.psy-ab..0.13.1147...33i22i29i30k1j33i160k1.0.8PU3GFOnx-8

Regardless of height or weight, almost all men are stronger than almost all women.
www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/4vcxd0/almost_all_men_are_stronger_than_almost_all_women/

Compare the statistics for men and women in any segregated sport. Women compete separately because if we dont, we dont ever win.
Men who ignore that and compete with women will kill women's sports.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_winners_of_the_London_Marathon

I think most people radically underestimate the gap between sexes in most sports.

Serena Williams, one of the greatest female tennis players to live, could not beat a male ranked #203 in the world, in an exhibition match. She has joked with Andy Murray about playing exhibition with him but admits she would be unlikely to take a single point from him.

The greatest female tennis player wouldn’t take a single point from a similarly-ranked male

I once mapped female track/field world records onto the male cohorts at the 2016. In 100m and high jump (both female world records are long-standing for many years i.e. considered to be utterly exceptional performances), every single male from heats upwards, including the awkward/embarassing/‘aw bless, at least he tried’ efforts would have beaten the female word records.

For mosr sports, the gap is utterly mindblowing.

And Serena Williams has revised her prediction to thinking she might beat a male ranked outside the top 350.

Thanks Maid.

How many women do actually have the max of 10nm/l - is it likely that they do?

If, say, levels in competing women were: 50% 5 nm/l
40% 7 nm/l
10% 10 mm/l

Would we expect the 10% of women to be winning the top spots because testosterone confers a competitive advantage?

If a man joins in and has to artificially lower his testosterone to 10 nm/l, doesn’t he automatically become one of the top 10% since he is always at the top of the testosterone range? He is then more likely than the average female in that sports category to win (since the competing women have a spread of testosterone levels whilst the men do not)?

The links are interesting. If we know that the best women wouldn't be able to beat her equivalent, why are men allowed to compete in women’s sport?

This thread has some good info:

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/2913821-Trans-and-sport-so-what-would-be-fair?pg=2&order=

Thanks Amber - that thread has the questions I’m asking myself. Off to read.

“Compared with women with the lowest levels of free testosterone in their blood, those in the top third performed significantly better in certain events: the 400 m sprint (2.73% better); the 400 m hurdles (2.78% better); the 800 m hurdles (1.78% better); the hammer throw (4.53% better); and the pole vault (2.94% better)”
BMJ

What I can’t see is what the spread of T levels are. They divide women into groups of high/medium/low but I can’t access the original article just yet, so not sure if the groups are referenced to each other, or to a T category.

Anyway, a male coming into a female category at the top level of T will have a signficant advantage over majority females, even if everything else were equal. But of course, these males are not equal when they enter the female category. They already have the advantages of a lifetime of T, not just what’s currently ciruclating in them.

That’s what I don’t understand - if a male is not equal and has an advantage even before you consider current T levels, why are they allowed to compete against women? Surely this will render women’s sport meaningless over time as more men enter and win, meaning it’ll be pointless for girls to train for top flight competitive sports?

I thought I’d missed something but appears not!

Am rapidly coming to the conclusion that society (as an entity, not individuals) just does not care about women. Even areas we have sound biological reasons for being treated differently don’t belong to women.

IIRC the limit of 10nmol/litre is 5 standard deviations above the mean for the female distribution. That's the level of "so blindingly unlikely to have occurred by a chance fluke of statistics" that CERN use 5 sigma as their cut-off for establishing the existence of a new subatomic particle.

And it's not just testosterone. The thread linked to a few posts above has an intereseting discussion of maximum oxygen levels in the blood. Men can oxygenate their blood much more effectively than women.

Then there's height/length of levers. In some sports - rowing, basketball - being tall is a massive advantage. (Thinking of the Gabriel Ludwig case in Basketball for example, I think I read somewhere that if you're a man who is over 7 foot tall in the US, the odds that you are a professional basketball player are greater than 50%. No where are all those men natural athletes - but height alone confers such a massive advantage it's worth a pro team taking on someone that tall regardless of their athletic ability.)

DS has a programme for a recent game from our local premiership rugby team kicking around - out of a squad of 40 odd players, only 2 are less than 6 feet.

Imagine an amateur football team (I used to play women's Sunday league). It's next to impossible for a female keeper, even one who is quite tall by female standards - 5'8" or 5'9" - to "cover" the goal. (It's 8 yards wide, the cross bar is 8"). That's one reason why women's football often throws up huge scorelines at the 8-0 sort of level. Now imagine your team finds yourself facing a women's team with a 6' trans goal keeper. The keeper isn't even that good by male standards, just benefitted from the typical male socialisation of playing football for thousands of hours as a kid. Suddenly your team is at a massive disadvantage.

And that's before we even get onto the question of a women's amateur rugby team so far down the leagues that no-one's going to do blood tests on players. You have a transwoman in the front row of the opposing team's scrum. Do you feel physically safe? Are you really going to put your spine on the line?

I think the 10nmol level was put in place because CAIS athletes (like Duttee Chand) can have high levels of testosterone in their blood but not be able to gain advantage because their testosterone receptors don't work. So it was bought in to benefit intersex athletes. That gave trans athletes an opportunity to piggyback on the ruling.

Sports that really showcase women’s superior strengths (stamina, mental toughness), like ultra long distance running and swimming need development, investment and publicity. We are not weaker, we just haven’t had a chance to play to our strengths.

Testosterone is only one measure. Yes it's important - you only have to look at the many athletic records set in by the old Soviet Union and East Germany to recognise the importance of testosterone. The Eastern European women who took testosterone for years, mostly starting at about school leaving age, set records that have taken decades to beat.

So women given testosterone at intervals from, say 16 to enhance performance hugely outerformed women with female hormone levels. It's obvious that men, with lifetime raised testosterone levels will have an even greater advantage.

But the real issue at the moment is that men who can declare they are women, and reduce their testosterone levels slightly and qualify as "women". The testosterone level is the only thing taken into consideration - male muscles, heart, lungs, skeleton, size, weight, all are complete ignored if an individual can manage to have a (relatively) low testosterone level.

Wow this is a fascinating thread. Thank you to all who have contributed stats. I've long been concerned about the effects of transwomen coming into womens sports and i suppose a bit of me thought perhaps I was being a bit bigoted.

Please forgive this slightly rambling post as I tell you how I came to realise I am not a bigot!

Im 50, tall, heavy but only a size 14/16 (BMI 31). Not menopausal yet, very healthy and very active - gym/classes/swim at least 10hrs a week - so I should be in a pretty good place, fitness wise. I do several weight type activities as well, not for muscle but for strength.

My DS is 14, short, skinny but with a 6-pack, healthy and just beginning to go through puberty (no hair or voice change yet). Plays sport 3 times a week.
His strength/stamina is AMAZING. He can hold me for ten minutes in an arm wrestle using his non-dominant arm. He can do 50 pull-ups on overhead bars and squat-run over 20m. Which makes me wonder what his body will be capable of by 25, even with no specific training.
How on earth could anyone think it would be fair for him to compete against women??!

Male and female sports have always existed for fair competition. In saying that, there have been controversial cases like Caster Semenya, thought to have excessively high testosterone for a woman, and some other competitors in her races (mostly black Africans strangely enough). We could then look at cases like the Williams sisters in tennis, much stronger and more muscular than the average athletic woman on the tennis court. Then compare your average men to your 7ft truck lifter that puts it in further perspective. Male and female is just the simplest way to split categories of natural strenght/testosterone and there will never be a happy solution for the discrepencies within.

If you feel strongly about this issue, please consider filling in the Scottish gender self-ID consultation (see link below) - you don’t need to be Scottish. Quote some of the stats in this thread to give your pov more weight.

consult.gov.scot/family-law/review-of-the-gender-recognition-act-2004/

WhyDidIEatThat - the type of sports you are talking about, long distance running/cycling, triathlons, ironman (yes the irony of it being IronMAN hasn't escaped me) are the very sports where the women's races are becoming dominated by men, which is very sad.

It's hard to find statistics though, as the wins are recorded as being by "female" names, so it's only when you see photographs that you realise the winners are male.

No I’m talking about ultra running and swimming, events where the longer the distance the more likely men are to give up before the end and which women are not only better able to complete but to win overall.

RoseSonata I don't think this is about self id or trans issues in general, which explicitly exempts sports anyway. It was a question about why we have male and female sports in the first place and the role of testosterone levels. It came to particular prominence at the 2016 olympics.

EG www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4495100/#!po=6.70732

Why - interesting, any info on that?
I did a quick google on ultra running and all the men's records were better than the women's.

Unfortunately the ultra long distance sports where (natal) women are more likely to win are incredibly hard to translate for an audience. I love various sports, but I don't want to watch someone slogging across the desert for 18 hours (or whatever)

OK, cross post. Thanks.

This article might have some stats

www.outsideonline.com/1919331/beating-boys

We are still so new to sport, and our ideas about what strength and power mean are so rooted in maleness I think we really have no idea of what women are capable of