You might enjoy the replies to what I am sure Sport England thought was an innocuous tweet

[wiltonian]

To save you time, they are pretty unanimous, no dissenters at all

https://x.com/Sport_England/status/1772973661311369496?s=20

If you want a geeky take on it, Sport England, as a public body, has a duty under the Equality Act 2010 not just not to discriminate against protected characteristics but to advance equality...

In the case of girls participation in sports tbh it's both sex and gender stereotypes.

@ErrolTheDragon ok and how do you explain the differences in prepubescent girls? How is their sex preventing them or making them decide not to do sports? Why are our daughters less physically active than our sons?

I'll accept this. But in my mind there's a difference between sex and gender, they're not interchangeable and to suggest in this instance they should be changed is doing a disservice to girls.

Do you think fewer girls are physically active because of debilitating periods?

I remember vividly sitting out PE and cross country at school, not because of stigma - I was genuinely afraid of flooding when on my period, because it had happened once before. Also swimming was completely off limits because I had once sneezed while in the ocean and had flooded a bit too. Back then there were only pads and tampons - had I had a mooncup maybe it would have been different, I don't know. But it certainly wasn't just socialisation that stopped me from doing more physical activity than I could have.

I also had 34E breasts from the age of 13, and sports bras were hard to get on and off - which didn't help much either.

I think transgender boys are more likely to be sporty- because they're boys aren't they.

I wonder if there are any stats... and no, they're not boys.

@Manxexile I'm saying that this survey talks about lower physical activity in girls than boys. I believe girls are less likely to be physically active because of the gender roles foisted on them. I'm talking about the girls who don't participate. And I don't think it's their biological sex that's stopping them. I think it's their gender.

Some of that is doubtless gender stereotypes. 'Girls can't play football' rot.

Which isn't the same thing as 'gender identity'.

This! Although really it would be better worded as "sexism", "racism", and "ageism" all....

The idea that girls are biologically less sporty, active due to their sex is sexist nonsense. Gender, as in stereotypes based on sex, is what means girls and women less likely to be active/involved in sports.

Beyond puberty, it's sex and gender. Apart from periods,some girls stop being active because of their breasts - they don't all have good sports bras. Running becomes bloody uncomfortable!

What you’re describing in the way boys exclude girls from football in the playground is the mechanism of gender as a form of oppression of women and girls. This is what gender used to be understood as in second wave feminism. Gender is the socially constructed set of expectations and values applied to someone because of their sex. Boy’s don’t exclude girls because the girls think of themselves as girls, the exclude girls because the girls are female.

This is sex discrimination at work, gender is the mechanism.

This is sex discrimination at work, gender is the mechanism.
Yes, that's it.

@NumberTheory thank you. What about the girls excluding themselves based on gender roles they're conforming to.

What about them? Girls who conform to female gender roles don’t do so out of the blue because they happen to innately identify with those roles. They will have had those roles pushed on them, because of their sex, since they were babies

You are only focusing on the "choices" women and girls make with regards or physical activity and sport, not the structural conditions that exclude them.

In the case of sport, gendered expectations are so intrinsically linked to sex that it's sex that matters.

The financial and other resources deployed to support female sport has historically been low/lower; women have been excluded from sports and activities.

I worked for Sport England and in sports development for decades and can testify that the quality of leadership and thinking in this area is deeply lacking.

Isn't this where it's confusing. Consider the frequent use of transgender women to mean transwomen.

And GP Christine Mimnagh who describes self as a transman and transgender woman, iirc previous discussions.

We've no idea how Sport England define boys or girls thanks to the capture of some posts by people guided by ideology in any data collection and a strong drive to update The Crucible.

Eh? I don’t have a ‘gender’ because it’s a made up load of nonsense. I am also a teacher. I know for a fact that one’s sex affects one’s involvement in sport. Trying to get 11 year old girls to play a team sport with boys is nigh on impossible!

Many girls are expected to do more chores and caregiving (e.g., look after younger siblings, help with a disabled family member) than boys. They have less free time for sports. Here's one study I found with a quick Google search:
https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/arid-40322318.html

Many parents keep girls on a shorter leash, too. They aren't able to join in informal games on the next block.

Plus, even as young kids, boys tend to be better at sports than girls. E.g., When my kids swam on teams, they separated the boys from the girls even when they were 3 years old. Boys were faster. Young boys run faster, etc. Most ppl spend more time at things they're good at bc it's more fun.

It is a proven fact that a large proportion of girls stop playing sports when they hit puberty (that's why successive governments have tried to encourage girls into sport so much). One of the reasons is that they become very conscious of their changing bodies, and of the reaction of boys towards them - mocking their jiggling breasts, if they are well-endowed; mocking their flat chests if they aren't; shouting personal comments about them etc.

But obviously, having the opportunity to change in the same room as male-bodied "girls", and share shower facilitates and toilets with them, they will become much more confident that they aren't being pruriently observed and secretly perved on. They'll be flocking to the sports field in droves.

I'm fairly certain the reasons for lower physical activity in girls is nothing to do with their sex.

Well, you're wrong.

Agree with @Changeandagoodrest

The fact is that both boys and girls drop out of sport at a high rate between 14-16.

Girls drop out at a higher (roughly double) rate than boys.

There are many, complex and interacting factors but key ones are that at that age, children have more choice as to how they spend their time and parents don't have to use sports clubs as pseudo childcare.

To suggest that sex is not a factor in sports participation is utterly ludicrous. It's not just about socialisation (although by the age of 8 girls are more likely to think that sport isn't for them) it's about the whole system of sport, and factors outside of sports such as male violence and personal safety.

Now is not the time to focus less on sex as a factor in sports participation. We should be focusing on it more.

Yes actually.

Think periods when doing competitive swimming or running or jumping
Think missing training or important matches because of heavy, painful periods
Think trainingsschedules that don't take the hormonal changes into account that impact the stamina of the female body that fluctuates with those changes
Think of the risk of muscle injury increases significantly before a period.

So yes, sex influences the enjoyment and result of sports as much as gender expectations do

I think others have already answered this, but my view is that it's the gender role that society etc imposes or prints on girls that is the issue, not their gender or gender identity (whatever those two terms mean) per se.

FWIW apart from some vague and woolly concept like "man and boys are meant to behave and feel like YYYY" and "women and girls are meant to feel like XXXX" I have no idea what gender means.

I happen to be a man but if somebody asked me what it felt like to be a man I'd have to say "No idea really. I just know what it feels like to be me".

In fact, while some of this is to do with the roles imposed on girls, a huge part of it is actually to do with boys and men. The ones who sexually harass them so that they don't want to do sport outdoors, the ones who take their ball so that they don't even bother trying to play football in school or in the park even when they are on a team.

And I would say that this is to do with sex, not gender. A girl can identify as non-binary or be trans, but that's not going to disqualify her from any of this.

But what I actually came back here to say was that it turns out that Sport England are Stonewall Champions. What a surprise, you could knock me down with a girder.