Woke DD and women in sports

[ElfrideSwancourt]

My eldest DD has recently finished at a woker than woke uni and is terribly woke now. She would consider herself a feminist but just doesn't get the issues with self ID and sport.

I usually avoid the subject because her attitude is one of the few things that we disagree on, but I did bring up women's sports today.

She tried all the usual 'but aren't they entitled to do sport' arguments but I just kept centering the women and how massively unfair it is and she just had no answers .

I'm really hoping that I have sowed some seeds, and now she is not at uni she will start to see the light.

Channeling the libfem I used to be in my 20s (way before trans issues took off - and I hasten to add as a sporty woman, I was never so daft as to think there was no physiological difference...) I think the reluctance to "see" physical differences comes from three main factors.

1. An over-emphasis on the importance of socialisation relative to physiology.

2. Cognitive dissonance -"if I admit to myself how much stronger men are, and that some of them are bad guys, I'll never leave the house again... so I'll pretend that Black Widow, Wonder Woman, etc. etc. are realistic, and that with the right jujitsu moves I too could fight off a rapist."

3. A worry that if we admit to the existence of physical differences in sport, that will function as the thin end of the wedge, and we'll end up having to admit to cognitive differences as well. (I don't think this fear is well-founded - insofar as any studies do show cognitive differences, the d-values are tiny, way, way smaller than d-values for physical differences; and the studies are rarely robust across different methodologies; and you can't even in principle filter out the effect of nurture and brain plasticity).

Re. 1, the importance of socialisation (and apologies - this really is a TL:DR): I can see how this happens because in some sports women are still playing catch up. Take football AS AN EXAMPLE - a sport I used to play. I started aged 30-something (friend talked me into giving it a go, I fell in love with it). By about age 7 or 8 DS was more skilled than me, because he had played for hours and hours, obsessively, from about the age of 2. (Although it's been debunked as being the whole story, Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hours to excel at something rule has some merit).

Now look at your average upper primary school. You have 4 classes of 30 - so 60 boys, 60 girls. At least half of those boys will be obsessive about football. Maybe 1 girl out of 60 will be. Simply because of social pressures. There will be sporty girls - doing gymnastics, or swimming, or... But not football. So you immediately have a massively larger pool of talent. This is still the case today.

So a libfem can point to this socialisation and say "that explains the difference..." (In fact there used to be a poster on here who used to try to push this position).

My view is that if women's football was taken as seriously as, say, women's tennis (if we'd never had the FA ban on women playing on FA pitches, which ran from the 1920s to the 1970s!) we'd see a lot higher standard of women's football. It's really turned round out of all recognition in the 20 years I've been following the game - standards have rocketed. But just as Serena Williams couldn't take on a man in the top 100, women's teams will never be able to compete with the sheer speed, strength and physicality of men's teams.

Socialisation is part of the story, but it's never the whole story.

I'm dreading my daughter being brought up in this world

@OkayGo me too. I am terrified at the prospect of her being swept along into this madness and all my attempts to arm her with facts and compassion actually alienating her from me. One of the very worst things about all of this is the way that women are being silenced and wrongly painted as hateful bigots (ironically, by some of the most hateful misogynists) all because we dare to defend our hard won sex-based rights and even the right to be called women and speak about our bodies. How many of us are scared to write what we think online? Scared to speak about this to our friends and family for fear that they will cut us off? Scared to speak up at work for fear that we will lose our jobs? Scared to speak up to our sports team for fear of being kicked out? There are lots of brave women doing great things, but we shouldn't have to be brave in order to be granted our existing sex based rights.

Brothers

Brothers are the key

OP does your dd have a brother?

@WhatsInAName19 it's so frightening. She's only small but I worry about what she will come across in her years. What the state of things will be by the time she is old enough to experience it. Or if she will push me away if I try to explain it to her.

I feel like the best question is,

“Why do we separate sports by gender identity rather than sex? Is there evidence that females with a masculine gender Identity (trans men) are as a group stronger/faster than males with a feminine gender identity (trans women)?

If not, shouldn’t we separate by sex, since there’s strong evidence that males are as a group stronger and faster than females?

Yes I have told her about Fallon Fox etc, and just kept asking her why it was fair to women.

She doesn't have any brothers or male cousins.

She does do sport, but not competitively, and it is one where skill is as important as strength.

She was away at uni over the last few years while I have been radicalised on mumsnet. Her younger sister gets it far more.

I hate feeling like an old reactionary (I'm in my mid-40s)and have always been on the centre left of politics. I also hate arguing with her but I intend to keep pushing her on this.

I'm really hoping she will get it as she gets older - sooner rather than later.

It would be so much easier if sports (and changing rooms and prisons etc) were all just recategorised as
*Penis
*Vagina

Done.
Humanity saved.

She's not 'woke', she's 'sleep'!

Of course everyone is entitled to do sport - competing with those of the same sex!

Give her a decade in the real world - that'll soon wake her up.

OP: was she able to work out the biological male in that photo I posted yet? Or is she still trying to work it out?

I think I was pretty convinced that I could be as strong and as fast as the boys as a late teen/early twenties. Mainly because I was fitter and faster and sportier than the more interested in computer games boys I was friends with and dated at university! I didn't quite get that there is actually a real gulf until I started doing mass start running races where I found myself jostling in the middle of the pack with fat middle aged men even after training my socks off for months and having pretty good times for my sex and age category! As I've got older and lost fitness it's become even more apparent. And when I go to the gym with my 15 years older then me, does an office job husband and he can lift way more than me despite the fact I'm in a physically active, manual job every day it hits me even harder. Sometimes personal experience is the only way to displace a misconception. I also horse ride where you do compete on equal footing with men... which I think makes it more difficult to see. If her sport is skills based it'll cloud her understanding.

Unfortunately another thing that brought it home to me in a different way, although I
didn't join the dots at the time, was being sexually assaulted and not being able to do a damn thing about it because the man I had observed to be a bit weedy and unthreatening was actually able to completely over power me. I'm not a small woman, I'm broad shouldered and muscular... But nope.

I guess just keep talking to her, OP. And hope she doesn't have to have a bad experience to see what you mean.

Yes a lot of that rings bells. When I trained really hard for rowing (morning and evening sessions on the water, six days a week, weights three or four times a week - I put on three inches on my busy measurement, all of it muscle) I got so I could do... Ta dah... Five pull ups. Your average bloke who was a complete couch potato could probably do that with no training at all, most men I've known who are in any way athletic can do between 30 and 50.

Goose's comment about muscular strength dropping off faster in women also rings bells - I've found post menopause my muscular strength has dropped off a cliff. It's actually pretty distressing - my body which used to do all sorts of great things has just completely crapped out on me.

so I'll pretend that Black Widow, Wonder Woman, etc. etc. are realistic,

I wonder about the influence of popular culture on the perceptions of younger people.

I'm not a fan of fantasy or sci-fi or super hero genres, I prefer my books, films, TV shows to be rooted in the real world but even there of recent times there is an awful lot of portraying women as the physical equals of men. Women cops who can beat up male suspects. Women soldiers who are equal in every physical way to their male counterparts. Women spies who 'kick ass'.

What is rarely depicted is the reality that women will almost always lose a straight physical contest with most men. That the male suspect will be able to knock the woman cop out and get away. That the woman soldier will be carrying a lighter pack. That the woman spy will be using methods other than 'kicking ass'.

For young people who aren't using their bodies and comparing directly in the real world it is perhaps not surprising that they have unrealistic views when that is what much of popular culture portrays.

I am wondering in the same vein if it hasn't become a little impolite to talk about women vs men in terms of physicality. I hadn't thought of it before, but a few nights ago my husband was saying to my 15 year old daughter that as a child and teen, he had been taught that it was wrong to hit girls. She's realistic about men's strength, but even so she found it hard to relate to that idea. My husband pointed out that this was because men are stronger generally and it's not really on to fight with people weaker than oneself, but she still found it an alien and even offensive way of thinking.
It struck me that you don't really hear people talking that way anymore, even if men know which I think many do, it's almost impolite to mention it.

I dripfeed reality into discussions regularly.

Stuff like, when checking peak flow for asthma, just going 'Jesus, I hadn't realised the women's chart doesn't even touch the men's chart! Look, DD, if Dad had your peak flow he'd be nearly dead.'

Or talking about hip angle when she's doing physio.

Or watching horseracing, or dinghy sailing, and commenting on how there's no need to split by sex if it's skill rather than muscle needed.

Or celebrating the truly remarkable women doing ultra-marathons.

Yes I have been surprised by this in real life too. Seems like its fairly common for a fit and/or skilled woman to be able to out perform an unfit/unskilled man at cycling, tennis or even climbing a steep hill.

But then they start to do a bit of training and suddenly you watch them whizz past you in terms of achievement which is kind of depressing.

I suppose there has been so much crap in history about women not being capable of doing maths or most of the professions etc etc that young women sometimes think the sports stuff fits into the same category rather than being a reality based difference.

If your dd thinks it's fair for people to identify into a sex class of their choice, including one where the other people are typically physically smaller, lighter weight, with less muscle etc, then presumably she thinks that weight and age classes are also irrelevant.

Presumably she would have no issues with a heavyweight boxer identifying as welterweight and beating all the other boxers to a pulp.

Presumably she would have no issues with adults identifying as children to win children's races, competitions etc.

Either you think physical reality matters in sport or you think that identity ie what someone thinks (or claims to think) they are is more important.

You can't have it both ways.

When I was young I hought it was just sexism when everyone said that men were stronger. But there weren't any female football teams and anyway I preferred to be with the boys.

And no, OP, we are very far from reactionary

‘Entitled’ yup, that’s about the long and short of it.

Are they also entitled to use woman changing rooms, win women’s awards (when using as a woman part time - see P Bunce), have access to woman’s refuges...?

Does she believe that a transsexual is the same as transgender (and has she seen who falls under this - just about everyone these days).

What does sex mean - what does gender mean? Can a male person who says they are female still get prostate cancer? Can trans men still have periods? Can a woman have a penis? Can a trans woman still rape?

Can she not see there is a obsession with transing why are most likely to be gay kids? And what this means for the child - medicalisation, sterilisation, drop in iq achievement levels, life of medical procedures... why is big business killing themselves to adopt the rainbow - when it was back in the LGB days they wouldn’t touch it with a barge pole!

Encourage her to start park run, and see where the fastest female finisher ranks overall each week.

When I was a teenager I believed that women could be as physically strong as men, and as capable at all sports were it not for socialisation and practice. I thought this was a "feminist" position to take. Deep down, I knew it wasn't true but admitting women were "weaker" would be like admitting women were lesser, and I couldn't face up to the cognitive dissonance.
I grew out of it though - the evidence was too overwhelming!

I did couch to 5k recently. When I was near the end, dh (tall, long legs) started it. We realised that he was covering the same distance on his week 1 runs as I was on my week 9 runs. (So annoying!) His fast walking speed is the same as my jogging speed!
I do park run now, run at least 3 times a week and have really seen improvement. However dh's occasional park runs are still much quicker than mine and he runs a lot less regularly. I do overtake some men while running, but when you look at the park run results it really hammers home the difference... The fastest runners every week are men.

I suppose there has been so much crap in history about women not being capable of doing maths or most of the professions etc etc that young women sometimes think the sports stuff fits into the same category rather than being a reality based difference.

Yes. My DD has, I think, a clearer view on the matter. She's studying engineering. Lots of hard maths equally for all, but when in one practical she encountered a bolt beyond her strength, the demonstrator handed her the 'girls spanner' ... not pink, just longer than the standard one to apply more leverage.

Women will, both on average and at at the extreme top of the range, always be physically disadvantaged compared to men in many respects. This is the trade-off for having bodies evolved to do the awesome physical tasks of growing, birthing and feeding a baby. Our bodies aren't 'lesser' - they're great for an incredibly physically demanding challenge which men can't do at all.

Does she realise that no matter how many hormones are taken and how much surgery has been had it is basically a cosmetic procedure?

I say this because I had a rather heated twitter interaction where someone claimed trans women and cis women have equal rates of breast cancer.

in one practical she encountered a bolt beyond her strength, the demonstrator handed her the 'girls spanner' ... not pink, just longer than the standard one to apply more leverage.

I love that 'girls spanners' exist (though I'd probably call them womens spanners myself). I did not know this. Real, practical solutions to real, physiological differences is what should be aimed at more widely.

but when you look at the park run results it really hammers home the difference

We do the kids park run, and the fastest every week are boys - although there's generally a girl in the top 5. From looking on from the sidelines, it seems to me that the differences start at about 9 or 10 - below that, the boys and girls come in in general fitness order, but once they get that touch older, the boys start pulling away with their times.

I hope I can support my daughter should she decide not to agree with me on things.