Study shows sex could be a better predictor of sports performance than gender identity (University research)

[IwantToRetire]

Sex may be a more useful explanatory variable than gender identity for predicting the performance of athletes in mass-participation races, a new paper has found.
https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/indicators-of-sports-performance

No doubt this stunning research will help academia's reputation as being worthwhile and useful.

Seen lots of comment on this on facebook responding,

is the world round

is the Pope a Catholic

the sun shine during the day

What a shock!

what A revelation, I’d never have guessed!

May be?

I despair. I have published so many pages on physiology, biomechanics of sport, sex based differences, etc and I cannot believe any sport research dept ever had to think about this for more than a billisecond.

Unless they all woke up this morning and found the entire back catalogue of sport science had been erased the ONLY new investigations that need to be done is to measure the health and performance impact of the various drug regimes trans identified men and women embark upon. That is the real impact on all performance and health indices in the short, medium and long terms. Not a cherry picked batch if self serving parameters.

I love how they had to guess the sex of the non binary athletes from their names!
but really what a silly study

I, for one, reject these findings and will always maintain that the greatest predictor of sporting prowess is whether your skirt goes spinny. There's real science behind that - look it up. Educate yourself.

Haters.

No way!

Another thread on this

Sex matters when it comes to Non-Binary races www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/4967698-sex-matters-when-it-comes-to-non-binary-races

I actually think it is a good thing this was published - if it was more overtly critiquing gender identity vs sex it may not have been published at all.

It is stating the obvious - but this is currently needed in academia.

Note this line: “Gender identity is clearly important to many people, but nevertheless sex matters."

And isn't one of the co-authors known for her gender-critical stance? I am assuming that Dr Alice Sullivan from UCL is Professor Alice Sullivan who has been very outspoken on the need to continue to collect data on biological sex, regardless of whatever gender identity someone may claim to have?

Okay the Twitter posts linked to in the thread @Ereshkigalangcleg clearly show this is gender-critical research 😁

Written by a mathematician/statistician.

Ie he has crunched the numbers and reported on what they tell him. And they told him exactly what he/we expected to hear.

The fact he felt it necessary to do this, and that these results get published is a sign of the times.

No shit Sherlock!

Sadly it was needed but won't be accepted as it'll be too terfy

This must have been the easist study ever. Credit where it's due. I look forward to further papers in this series: 'Sex is a better predictor than gender identity of ability to become pregnant', 'Sex is a better predictor than gender identity of propensity to be violent' and other fascinating insights.

'Sex is a better predictor than gender identity of ability to become pregnant'

😂😂😂

Ahhh but they used statistics to generate the conclusions, and as we all know, statistics are transphobic

A spider
Not to disrespect your work, but isn't this absolutely bloody obvious to the most casual observer?

John Armstrong
Not according to Scientific American who believe "The inequity between male and female athletes is a result not of inherent biological differences between the sexes but of biases in how they are treated in sports."

https://twitter.com/johnarmstrong5/status/1737785399009763828

I appreciate that the Pope is a Catholic, but….

The study was only conducted on athletes competing in the non-binary category, though.

I don’t think this provides empirical evidence about all athletes competing in mass-participation races.

Both desperately needed pieces of research, I hope they’re in progress as we speak.

I started off eye rolling when I read the title of the thread, and the OP, thinking: well how’s that for a statement of the bloomin’ obvious.

But having read the KCL press notice and the researcher’s statement at the end (which put me in mind of the sort of “master of understatement” wording you get in Employment Tribunal judgments where the judges convey their utterly scathing assessment of the situation but using the most neutral and polite terms), I think this is completely brilliant.

It’s studiously neutral academic research which makes it ideal for anyone wanting to raise this issue with a sporting body in a low-key non-confrontational way.

Thank you so much for posting. One of the reasons I read the feminist section on MN is because I know I will learn something new everyday!

Exactly.

That is true, it is not an unbiased sample. People self-select into the non-binary competition category.

however, if you include scores from the men’s and women’s races, a reviewer might argue that the women don’t feel the same need to compete and excel when challenged by other women. It is a ridiculous argument, but women are often accused of just not trying hard enough in sport. using only mixed sex races provides quasi-experimental conditions, even while it limits the sample size considerably.

What I found interesting was that participants in the non-binary were slower runners than runners of the same sex who competed in the “binary” races.

The results also indicate that non-binary athletes may have slower race times than other athletes once sex and age are controlled for.

One explanation could be that the mediocre male athletes decide to enter the non-binary mixed sex race in order to compete against females and have a higher ranking than they would competing against males.

Another could be that individuals who spend a lot of time on the internet are: likely to be less fit than those who don’t; and more likely to identify as non binary than those who don’t spend a lot of time on the Internet.

Not according to Scientific American who believe "The inequity between male and female athletes is a result not of inherent biological differences between the sexes but of biases in how they are treated in sports."

There are no references listed in that article, so it looks like readers are expected to take that unlikely claim as fact.

www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-theory-that-men-evolved-to-hunt-and-women-evolved-to-gather-is-wrong1/

Or that entry times are lower to enable transmen to qualify, which de facto makes it easier for transwomen who might not have qualified for a man's race, to enter.

Because, as we know, men tend to be faster than women.