It’s all in the eyebrows
“Gender studies” academic Susan M. Shaw muddies the waters:
We don’t really have much research-based evidence to say definitively that trans women have a disproportionate advantage in sports. Right now, we’re mostly working out of our deeply-held and rather largely unexamined assumptions about biology and gender.
We do have much research-based evidence to say definitively that men have a disproportionate advantage in sports, and that’s all that’s required.
We could live in a different world. We could live in a world where male advantages simply evaporated the instant the man says “I’m a woman.” But we don’t live in that world. Multiple male advantages are baked in, and don’t go away even for men who take cross-sex hormones.
As someone who went through male puberty, Thomas has developed height and muscular advantage in her sport. All elite athletes, however, have physical advantages that they develop to their fullest to compete at the highest levels. Try though I might, at 5’ 4” I could never play power forward in the WNBA.
Look at all that mud in the waters. Yes, duh, successful athletes tend to have physical advantages, but it doesn’t follow that male advantages over females don’t matter.
We don’t gender-segregate because women can’t compete with men. Rather, we create sports that play to men’s typical strengths (football, for example) and value them over sports in which women are more likely to excel (balance beam). We then use this as proof that men are better at sports, and so men and women couldn’t possibly compete together.
No we don’t.
In other words, we use sports to maintain the illusion that men and women are more different than they are alike. This reinforces a whole world outside of sport that values men over women and questions women’s abilities to lead and succeed.
We do a lot of things to maintain the illusion of difference. Think about it for a minute. If women cut their hair the same way as men, wore “men’s” clothes, and didn’t shave their legs and underarms, wear makeup, or pluck their eyebrows, they wouldn’t look nearly as different from men as they do.
Please. That’s not even slightly true.
One non sequitur after another until we get to the bottom of the page. Pitiful stuff.
I’ve never plucked my eyebrows, don’t wear make up, and wear slacks instead of skirts. No one mistakes me for a man, even though I am taller than average for a woman and no more graceful than a bison in a tutu.
She’s got half of a point here:
Which is the main (though not only) reason we have women’s sports. Most sports are designed to play into the strengths of men, so if women want to compete in them at a high level, they cannot compete with men. The WNBA has some amazing athletes who would never stand a chance in the NBA. Same for women’s tennis, swimming, etc., ad infinitum, and so forth.
So, the argument boils down to: “One member of Group A was able to outperform one member of Group B at activity X. Therefore, it must not be the case that Group B has an advantage over Group A at X.”
This is the kind of specious reasoning that someone like Shaw would laugh off if “Group A” was “children raised in poverty,” Group B was “children raised in wealthy homes,” and X was “achieving educational and professional success.”
This is a little microcosm of their basic argument, and it’s why so many people are fooled into thinking gender ideology is liberal and progressive. If there are males who are women and females who are men — hell, if there are males who are female and females who are male — then sexism is completely undermined because nobody can point to what the difference between men and women is at all! Sexism will automatically disappear!
From this perspective, erasing any distinction between male and female is the only way to stop valuing men over women because they apparently believe the oppression hierarchy is built into the structure of the sex binary the same way they believe racism is built into the structure of Enlightenment Ideals.
She is pretty blatantly advocating an end to all segregation by sex in sport. That would not go over well with the men who demand specifically to be admitted to the women’s division for the purpose of “validation”.
Funny, I thought women’s ability to have children did a pretty good job of that.
Okay, I’ll see your clothing, hair, and cosmetics, and raise you skeletal structure.
I’m sure it’s a complete coincidence that they’re using football and balance beam as their sports examples, rather than, I dunno, men’s and women’s swimming? When they were literally just talking about a male competing in women’s swimming? Football and balance beam are just the first two examples that popped into their head, and not disingenuous at all.
Thank you for admitting men are typically stronger in various ways.
So men’s power isn’t in their eyebrows, like Samson’s in his hair?
It’s arguments like Shaw’s that make me think a basic understanding of statistics would help people make sense of things. But probably not – this is all what we call motivated reasoning.
Overlapping bell curves. I wonder if Shaw knows what a bell curve is. I expect she does, but doesn’t care. The curves for most sex-linked traits overlap. Men are taller than women on average, but there are women taller than most men, and so on. The strongest women can beat average men in competitions, but that doesn’t mean men and women are equal in strength, just that those women are exceptional.
That said, there’s a distinct misogynist undercurrent to Shaw’s argument.
No, it doesn’t really, unless you believe that the only measures worth considering with regard to leadership and success are those measures at which men’s bell curve is ahead of women’s. Women also have traits for which their average is better than men’s. For example, conscientiousness is higher on average among women, which is a large part of why there are more women than men in college now (and why, in my family, the girls all get better grades than the boys). Does Shaw think conscientiousness is unrelated to success? I doubt it’s unrelated to hers.
Following motivated reasoning to its ends results in remarkable absurdity, to which Shaw is apparently blind.
If it weren’t for the sex segregation of professional basketball, there would be zero women in the top 100 NIL (name, image, and likeness) valuations. There would be no WNBA, and there would be no women playing in the NBA, because that’s a sport that relies heavily on sex-linked traits like height and upper body strength. There would be as many professional female basketball players to be counted under Shaw’s regime as there are female professional American football players today.
Speaking of swimming, there are events where women come out ahead of men: marathon swimming. Men’s advantage in power eventually, as the distance is increased to absurdity, wanes in comparison to women’s superior insulation and fat-burning regulation. So maybe Lia Thomas should compete in the Catalina Channel swim if he is desperate to compete against women. I think the video of him being pulled out of the water halfway across would earn a few likes.
I guess I’ve been pretty naive all my life. I always thought that one of the main purposes of education, especially at the university level, was to develop clear logical thinking. Silly me.
But Bruce, that would get in the way of showing how smart and creative you are.