If research finds no significant differences for sport for male & female, where will that lead?

[CrazyToast]

I read today that Loughborough has recruited 5 PhD students to research the gender binary in sport. Could be fine, you may think. But look at the advert.

"One of the most influential, powerful and visible institutions upholding the gender binary is sport – where participation is predominantly segregated by biological sex, rooted in the widely-held beliefs about fairness and the biological advantages associated with being male. Such beliefs are over-simplistic, legitimise discrimination, and hinder the sports participation of transgender (intersex, trans, non-binary) individuals. With the rapidly growing societal visibility of transgender people, there is an unprecedented need to address areas where discrimination may arise."

Combining the above statement with other research which suggests 'most policies unfairly alienate transgender competitors based mainly on an unsubstantiated assumption that transgender females possess an unfair sporting advantage.'

NB this is Bethany Jones who recently said that women could just try harder in sports if they didn't want to be beaten by men

There is now a push against testosterone testing in women's sports for trans women, and also to scrap sex categories in sport altogether.

If this happens, then it is essentially saying there is no relevant physical difference between males and females. What could this mean for wider life outside of sport?

Could sport be paving the way to undermining sex-based differences in the same way as self -ID?

What if the research does find that there are no differences? What are we to make of that?

www.researchgate.net/profile/Bethany_Jones5

I agree, Ifonlyus

All this is about power.

Five good scientists, all working on sea ice, or ocean acidification, and similar stuff, have lost their jobs there this year, but there is money somewhere to fund this sort of bollocks

Impending climate catastrophe can't be allowed to interrupt capitalism. Much better to distract the left with gender wars while flogging as much off-label medication as possible in the time available.

The brief makes it clear what the findings are intended to be and the purpose they are wanted for. Worthless before it even starts.

I agree. It's callous to waste a student's time, effort and hopes on this.

The bias is very clear from the framing on the research. Why bring transgender in to it at all. If the issue is sex segregation in sport, examine the appropriateness of this and do not contaminate it with notions of gender.

Exactly. If there’s no difference between men and women you can demonstrate that simply by comparing the achievements of natal men and women.

You’d have a much larger pool to draw on and you can just google the world records without spending a penny.

They've been trying to eliminate women in sports ever since women began competing, so this shouldn't be a surprise.

I read an article on one researcher in this field, working hard to "make space" for transgender athletes in women's sports who believes that since their own personal race time decreased once they started hormones, it proves something.

That and the "Billy Jean King won" references. No one ever points out that Bobby Riggs was over 50 years old at the time and took the match so unseriously he didn't both to train....

It's not that complicated. Just have a look at all the current world records. The top men at their sport will always beat elite women in a physical sport.
Of course a random woman can beat a random but that proves nothing.

It's as if mountains of data doesn't already exist on the differences between elite male and female results at all ages and events.

I agree. It's callous to waste a student's time, effort and hopes on this.

It will be interesting to see, in three years’ time or so, how many have submitted and who the external examiners are. Even in the intellectual wasteland of post modern basket weaving in third tier institutions it’s going to be a challenge to find an external who their central administrators will sign off as qualified but who will put up with this sort of nonsense. Alternatively they will find an echo chamber, and it will be obvious. Externals are not always a matter of record (there was a scandal at SOAS recently) but the theses themselves are, so the quality of the work will be visible.

I have no sympathy for the students. The6 know what’d they are getting into or, if they do not, don’t deserve a PhD anyway.

Are they basically just hiring people to write enough nonsense to gaslight the entire world? Everyone can look up the differences between male and female sports performances for themselves. The issue's clear as day.

But if TRAs can point at actual published papers (in trans-studies journals but nevermind that) that obfuscate the issue, they can use that to bamboozles people into thinking they've misunderstood something or it's all much more complicated than they thought before they "educated themselves."

If they add in some guilt tripping about trans suicides and how trans people will literally kill themselves if they can't win gold medals against women, (just conduct an online survey, I'm sure that's what it will find!) then people will want to believe that it's complicated because they can't handle the cognitive dissonance of being "mean" to an oppressed group. So most people won't question it too hard.

Basically, the same strategies TRAs always use, but it's a new territory to conquer. Fuck these people.

Though I do suspect the bubble of trans nonsense will have burst before these students finish their PhDs and then their CVs will be worse than useless. Can't say I'd have much sympathy.

(Does anyone else mentally model the trans stuff as being like a stock market bubble? Almost everyone knows it's bullshit and there's nothing real underneath, but as long as some people are true believers, or believe that everyone else believes, the bubble will keep growing. So I'm reasonably optimistic about this. All bubbles pop eventually.)

The antecedents for science being compelled to produce fake results that are compatible with political ideology are bad. I mean really really bad.

The antecedents for science being compelled to produce fake results that are compatible with political ideology are bad. I mean really really bad.

Yep.

Applicants should have (or be near completion of) a Master’s degree and have a First or 2:1 Honours degree (or equivalent) in a relevant subject (Psychology, Social Psychology, Sport and Exercise Science or other related disciplines).

How is psychology a relevant subject?

Is it not a bit Stalinist to start research with the conclusion?

How is psychology a relevant subject?

In that this nonsense isn't dealing with material reality, I suppose it's the most relevant one!

Is it not a bit Stalinist to start research with the conclusion?

Well, yeah, but these are the people who think the gulags were like holiday camps where they taught prisoners music and art, so.

A picture is worth a 1000 words

Those pictures of hulking transwomen wiping the floor with female athletes will surely always drown out the message that comes across from this (disingenuously managed and selected) research?

Is it not a bit Stalinist to start research with the conclusion?

It's not a "bit" Stalinist: this is metaphorically but even to an extent literally Lysenkoism.

Yes it will destroy women's sport. Look at any world record timings to see the difference in male and female top times.
The world record for 100m is 9.58 seconds (Usain Bolt ) and female 10.49 seconds (Florence Griffith-Joyner). It's less than a second so could be classed as 'not a significant difference' but when you're competing at top level every fraction of a second counts.

I haven't looked but I'm willing to bet the differences are across the board in most sports. I think the only olympic sport where sex doesn't matter are certain equestrian events.

You don't need a PHD to realise this.

If you google-scholar sex differences in strength, height, lung capacity, etc.. you will find multiple papers which confirm that men are; taller, bigger, stronger, more muscular than women.

There are some outliers, some very small numbers of women who are physically stronger than men ( mostly cause they are athletes at the top of their game and they are being compared to a little weed of a guy) but when we compare men and women on average the facts are very clear.

The trans movement is like the anti-vac movement, its based on bad science, intentionally twisted for political/economic gain.

I've just searched for sex-related differences in sports performance in an online academic library. There is a lot of research into this, unsurprisingly, with many different focuses re age, discipline, pre-existing illness, injuries, etc.

One of the first articles, about differences in adolescents, has this in its abstract:

"Using a cross-sectional design, adolescents were tested for speed, strength, power, and endurance.
No sex differences were found for most of the physical test results in the =13 years, males scored better than females in all physical tests, without exception (p > 0.05).
Further explorations comparing how many females in the same age grouping shared test results equal to or greater than the top third of males were fewer in the older than younger age group.
Equality of participation in mixed-sex sport becomes more difficult to guarantee for older adolescents when results from generic sport-related physical test performances are considered.

It's not that complicated. Just have a look at all the current world records. The top men at their sport will always beat elite women in a physical sport

Completely agree. But the fact that a woman is simply an adult human female is not that complicated and yet look where we are.

Those pictures of hulking transwomen wiping the floor with female athletes will surely always drown out the message that comes across from this (disingenuously managed and selected) research?

Again, I agree and you'd think so, but we've seen men stealing medals off women all over the place already and nobody has stopped it. They've been successfully silenced by screams about transphobia which have this incredibly powerful effect on people.

Fuck me sideways.

All these years! If only women had realised we just needed to try a bit harder.

Anybody who thinks sex doesn’t make a difference in athletic performance should go take a running jump.

All I can say about TWAW in relation to sport:

I'm sorry about the Australian Women's Handball team making the World Cup.

My emotions are equally split between completely mortified and fury. This is not who we are.
Some woman lost her place in our team. The other women on the team, their success has now been tainted. Maybe they would have won. Maybe? But that counts for nought now.

Don't even get me started on the boasting/trolling on HM twitter. 🤐