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Fair point, that was a straw-man. My uncharitable interpretation was perhaps motivated by my own personal experience of being in the >95th percentile of teenage boys and not being able to match my overweight, untrained male classmates despite going to the gym 3x a week and trying to average around 3k calories a day. I didn't feel like my male puberty had given me much competitive advantage when I would get beaten in arm wrestling by random female classmates or the teacher assigned me to play football with the girls in PE, so while I agree that the male/female athleticism distribution is bimodal, overlaps do exist.
You were an exceptionally small/weak male that drew the short straw in the genetic lottery.
I wonder what would happen if you got a freaking animal of a woman in here…6’2”, 200 pounds, national champion swimmer who could bench 225. I’m guessing this animal would be more likely to shrug and say that she wasn’t that much weaker than the guys…
She would compare herself against freaking animals of a man that she saw at the national swimming championship. Yes, Katie Ledecky is a swimming monster, but she know that past 400m the differences between her and equally qualified male swimmers start to look insurmountable even to untrained eyes.
Yeah. I don’t know if she’d compare herself to Joe Average, though…our puny hero from before compared himself to both Joe and Jane Average. The fact that most men are far stronger than most women didn’t sink in quite as much for this guy, due to his not personally experiencing that. The puny guy didn’t compare himself to exceptionally small/weak/scrawny women…
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Are we using the same sign for the quantile direction? There's virtually no overlap of the top 5% of male athletes and female athletes.
Seems like you were also adversely selected for arm wrestling. Like weight makes a huge difference when comparing with male classmates, not just because being bigger makes it easier to carry more fat free mass. Fat leverages make a big difference in strength sports. I would also assume female classmates willing to arm wrestle are not random? Like they were probably in the top quartile of self assessed strength and that's why they would participate in such a challenge. I can't think of any instance where I've seen a petite woman seriously challenge a man to arm wrestling in person.
I sort always had the implicit assumption that much of the culture war aspect of the issue comes down to the elite levels. It's not clear to me that the local D level rec-league shouldn't just be an open league. For individual sports no one cares if you win the novice, 35-40 yr old, 65-70 kg, nearsighted division of your local park run. Like if it matters to someone, anyone can find a "competition" where they hand our participation trophies.
I didn't mean overlap in the athletes (unless you're comparing modern-day female athletes to early 20th century male ones) but the general athletic level of the population. As for the arm wrestling, I was beaten by a highly athletic female classmate, and then it was a challenge against one that wasn't particularly athletic as far as I know, not petite but fairly average build, perhaps top third to top 50%. There's a possibility I have mild endocrine issues, I have signs of low prenatal androgen exposure (and paradoxically high T levels despite low masculinisation, suggesting some compensation for lowered androgen sensitivity).
Which is another reason that I'm favouring the hypothesis that endocrine disruption is responsible for the surge in transgender identification, and that the focus should be on that rather than nebulous concepts of gender identity, along with waging the culture war over what should be purely a medical issue.
Most of the attention is on elite levels sure, but the laws in Kansas block transgender girls from playing in public school and college sports, which as far as I know aren't elite. The culture war debate extends to the trans girl that wants to play on her high school soccer team as well as the top echelons of women's sports, although in both cases the number of trans athletes is still extremely low.
I was thinking of slide 33 of the presentation of the USAPL report I had referenced down thread. That sample is best raw total for elite powerlifters 2011-2018. People often cite the grip strength study in untrained people, but I would have thought it was less applicable to trained individuals participating in sport. I think the quantile cuts are similar though. For virtually any otherwise equal selection, the strongest woman is about as strong as the average man.
Your situation makes a lot more sense now that you've explained a bit more. I do think that prenatal androgen exposure is a more important factor in athletic performance than most people realize. At least on par with puberty effects and free testosterone. It seems to dominate neuromuscular efficiency effects in animal models. That neuromuscular efficiency is what really separates elite athletes from mere mortals. It also effects androgen sensitivity which in turn effects how well people respond to training.
I do consider college sports to be elite. Even a D III player is on a totally different level than an average person.
I was imprecise by the implication that highschool level didn't matter. It sort of depends on what the purpose of scholastic sports is, but doesn't fit into the same bucket as elite levels to me. In the US most highschoolers that are eilite enough to get to the colleget level play club as their most competitive team. I guess that belongs to the same category as college? For the sports sponsored by the school, I'm sympathetic to the notion that trans girl want to play. On the other hand there are plenty of regular cis-boys that aren't good enough to even play on the JV team. Are school sports supposed to be accessible to literally everyone? I don't think they are at most high schools. I say this as someone who's best chance at a varsity letter would have been convincing my school to add a scholastic bowl team. I also don't think the institutionalization of sports for youth has been a positive development. The neighborhood sand lot games seem better to me at accommodating a variety of skill and strength levels.
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Yeah. I think there’s something to the idea that atrazine is making the frogs gay…and the humans queer. And trans.
Lots of confounders: but are trans people more likely to have grown up near like farms using lots of pesticides or plastic bottle factories or something?
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