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> probably more down to food access and/or training disparities than actual “significant” biological factors.

I'm not really going to defend the other side here because sports are (by definition) fundamentally arbitrary, but is this really borne out by reality? To use an easy comparison, elite adult womens' track and field athletes might be competitive against high school boys, but not at any higher level. Compare, for example, the international womens' records [0] to the records from this random high school nationals track meet [1]. What food access and/or training advantage are high school kids going to have over the most capable athletes in their sport?

[0] https://trackandfieldnews.com/records/womens-world-records/

[1] https://nbnationalsout.com/results-and-records



You’re asking the wrong question… what we’d need to do is take a girl with the same height and muscle mass as a boy and give them both the diet and training (and societal and economic incentives and rewards) of a Usain Bolt from birth, then look for sexual dimorphism’s effect on their sports performance. Looking for support for your confirmation bias in stats that already are influenced by thousands of years of your confirmation bias doesn’t exactly make decent scientific inquiry. Again, when compared with the other great apes (never mind less closely related primates) we humans have relatively minimal sexual dimorphism, and no obvious biological reason to simply assume that two adult peers that had the same dietary and exercise and skills training regimes would have vastly different athletic performance characteristics, especially across a wide range of sports.


> You’re asking the wrong question… what we’d need to do is take a girl with the same height and muscle mass as a boy and give them both the diet and training (and societal and economic incentives and rewards) of a Usain Bolt from birth, then look for sexual dimorphism’s effect on their sports performance.

The unequal distribution of height and muscle mass is part of sexual dimorphism.

> no obvious biological reason to simply assume that two adult peers that had the same dietary and exercise and skills training regimes would have vastly different athletic performance characteristics

Imagine you convinced someone this was true. They could say trans women should be banned from women's sports because boys receive superior training.

The effects of hormones are not assumptions.

What is your explanation for trans men gaining athletic advantages and trans women losing athletic advantages during transition?


> The unequal distribution of height and muscle mass is part of sexual dimorphism.

No, it’s potential evidence for sexual dimorphism. It’s also potential evidence for systemic dietary sexism. You’d need to establish that the latter doesn’t exist to establish that the former does.

> Imagine you convinced someone this was true. They could say trans women should be banned from women's sports because boys receive superior training.

At that point we’d have shown that sexual dimorphism was not at play and that gendered sports were inherently discriminatory, so that hypothetical person would now be an idiot arguing against reality. The obvious solution would be to redirect better training at the now know equally capable athletes.

> The effects of hormones are not assumptions.

Actually they largely are… we really don’t have more than minimal and crude knowledge of precisely how hormones work or what their actual effects are.




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