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Reality check: athletics edition

(Chris Pietsch/The Register-Guard via AP)

Yesterday in my piece “She’s a Liar” I took apart the Human Rights Campaign’s Kelley Robinson who flat-out lied to Congress about there being no physical differences in athletic performance between men and women.

She made the ridiculous assertion that no man could beat Serena or Venus Williams in tennis, expecting everybody to nod sagely that indeed those tennis players are just far too strong to be beaten by a man.

Except both of them were, by a man who was ranked lower than 200th in the world. Neither Venus nor Serena was dispirited by this–they are exceptional female tennis athletes–pure phenoms–and being disappointed by losing to a very good male tennis player is like a sprinter feeling awful that a cheetah could outrun them. These are just separate categories and shouldn’t be compared.

Gender ideologists have committed themselves to a fundamental falsehood, and keep trying to rearrange reality to make it fit their fundamental assertion. We have seen this before in science. In the Ptolemaic model of planetary movement, scientists kept on trying to develop explanations for why the planets didn’t appear to move in their orbits as predicted. Orbits were supposed to be circular, but the planets didn’t appear to move in the sky as predicted.

So they came up with the idea of epicycles, where planetary movements were circular around the Earth, but within many different circles. It looked like this:

Now you can’t make heads or tails of that unless you have spent about 10 minutes with a basic background on the idea, but with enough tweaking astronomers could invent a system that predicted the motion of the planets nearly perfectly–but it was so byzantine and so implausible that it was clearly also wrong.

What led them astray was not accepting that the evidence before them contradicted their basic assumptions and that they needed new ones that better explained the phenomenon in front of them.

We see the same problem, multiplied a million times, with alphabet ideology. At least the epicycle theory could predict outcomes, even if the assumptions were wrong. Alphabet ideology is like climate change on steroids: hold fast to your beliefs despite all the evidence contradicting you. Just invent your own evidence.

So let’s take a short look at the evidence that relates to women and men in sports.

A helpful website called “Boys vs. Women” provides very useful data that can illustrate how absurd Robinson’s claims about there being no physical differences between men and women.

Boys vs. Women compares 2016 Olympic female athletes to the 2016 High School Boys’ championships and compares the results. In almost every case the High School boys do better than the very best female athletes in the world.

Whoops. It turns out that High School boys actually do seem to have a significant advantage over the top women in the world.

This pattern shows up again and again in both swimming and track and field. And those are not unique because men are simply different when it comes to muscle mass and variables that go beyond my understanding of biology.

In the old days, a lot of feminists tried to downplay this because they feared that the physical differences would be used as evidence that women are somehow inferior to men–and indeed people have made arguments like that, just as the different distribution of intellectual abilities such as math and spacial reasoning that seem to exist between men and women has been used as an excuse to declare on sex better than the other.

But the solution to this problem is not to deny that there are differences because there are but to recognize that our differences are actually complementary. It is also important to understand that general tendencies don’t translate into specific cases. Every individual is a unique case, not a representation of an average.

On average, men are better at some things than women. And on average, women are better at some things than men. Welcome to the real world. And none of us is average in everything, meaning that each person has unique abilities, skills, temperaments, and value as a human being. This is why God invented the division of labor, and allowing people to gravitate to what they do best makes everybody better off overall. In economics, we call this comparative advantage.

If everybody does what they do best, everybody is better off. Trying to fit square pegs into round holes is idiotic.

Still, alphabet ideology simply has to insist that men and women are physically and metaphysically indistinguishable because that assumption undergirds everything else they want us to believe.

 

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Ed Morrissey 8:20 PM | November 08, 2024
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