At 11 years old, Fatima Whitbread picked up a javelin. 14 years on, at the 1986 European Championship, she broke the female world record (77.44m) and won gold. A year later, she was the World Champion. 1/
During her javelin career, Whitbread accrued 2 World Championship medals, 2 Olympic medals, 2 Commonwealth Games medals and a European Championship, one of the greatest female javelin throwers of her time and an iconic figure in female athletics. 2/
Throughout her life, both on and off the field, Whitbread has been the personification of triumph over adversity, a female of quite extraordinary character. 3/
As a competitor, Whitbread was no stranger to the abuse many powerful female athletes are subjected to, where misogyny, racism, and doping accusations are aimed at women who defy “white western ideals”. 4/
“Ideal” can be, of course, somewhat subjective. As Whitbread has rather sharply and rather wonderfully pointed out: “I’m not Bo Derek and if I were, I wouldn’t have been able to throw a javelin”. 5/
But it is her courage during her youth that is most remarkable. Her horrific early years included abandonment as a baby, a succession of children’s homes, and an abusive and violent mother who facilitated rape against her. 6/
Bereft of love, trouble at school, child psychiatry. She is candid about her childhood and her story is not mine to tell on the limited medium of Twitter. It is, however, a childhood, nobody should ever experience. 7/
However, during her early teenage years, she was trained (later adopted) by Mary Whitbread, and a promise to her new mother “to behave” shifted Whitbread’s path in life from lost girl to world beater. 8/
Whitbread is not the only athlete to credit sporting ambition and success as a life-changer. Sport can save young people from child abuse, from drugs, from gangs, from eating disorders, from bullying. 9/
Sport is a step towards the social mobility denied to so many, offering a route out of poverty and acquired societal status. For females, sport boosts self-esteem, builds confidence, hones ambition, creates leaders. In a white man’s world, sport is a pathway to equality. 10/
Imagine if Whitbread, or any of our young girls, missed her chance because a teenage male took her coaching slot, her equipment bursary, her track time, her scholarship, her qualifying spot, her podium place. 11/
Imagine being high schooler Chelsea Mitchell, and seeing two unadulterated males beat you easily to the finish line, the leader setting a new female state record in the process. Imagine being relegated to third place and race reports neglecting to use your name. 12/
High school junior Selina Soule complained in the media: “We all know the outcome of the race before it even starts; it’s demoralizing.” How many girls will give up when they know they can never win? 13/
Mitchell represents many young girls who are going to lose races, games and accolades to male athletes. I cannot consider what else may be lost for these girls. 14/
At 11 years old, Fatima Whitbread picked up a javelin, and it changed her life immeasurably. It was, in her own words, her “saviour”. Let’s not deny other young girls that same chance. End/
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This is your regular reminder that I am not an entomologist and I do not study beetles.
My handle is derived from a quote about creationism and I research human genetics and genetic disorders, including one that kills males.
Here is a motor neuron I grew in a dish.
I do not study cool things like…
Jewel beetles. Studies of their iridescence (like liquid crystals) has helped paint chemists. It’s also surprisingly good camo (expt: attach bright or dull wings to mealworms and see which get eaten by birds…).
Dung beetles. They roll crap around all day. Their immune systems are a source of some interest.
Sex is *observed* at birth by “reading” external genitalia, which is a remarkably sensitive marker of sex. Sex is also now routinely observed in utero, again by “reading” external genitalia and, increasingly, by DNA analysis.
@RealTayChaTLC The definition of female is: of or denoting the sex that can produce large gametes.
This not a matter of *observation*, this is a matter of *definition*.
@RealTayChaTLC Very few animals and no plants menstruate, yet females exist across almost all complex life.
We do not become men at menopause. We certainly don’t “revert” to men, which implies we were men at some point before menopause. Maybe you think we are men before menstruation?
Across the natural world, male and female are defined by reproductive function, describing the contribution of small gametes (like sperm) or large gametes (like ova), respectively, to the next generation.
In healthy humans, there are two anatomical body types, each corresponding to one of the two reproductive functions. That is, in humans, there are two sexes.
In utero, males and females develop sex-specific primary characteristics pertinent to function during reproduction.
Healthy male anatomy comprises testicles, internal genital structures like the vas deferens and an external penis and scrotum.
Here is a graphic of changes in muscle and strength in transwomen pre- and post- testosterone suppression (12+ months), compared with baseline metrics from demographically matched females.
The original data is presented in Hilton and Lundberg, 2021 (Table 4).
The graphic was created by me for a policy paper I coauthored with Professor Jon Pike @runthinkwrite and Professor Leslie Howe @usask for the Canadian think tank The MacDonald Laurier Institute.
I recently tweeted about people who think I believe humans are asparagus.
This bad faith take stems (ha ha) from an analogy I’ve used to illustrate that the phenomenon of male/female is not limited to the constructions of the human brain.
Like many plants, and like humans, (some) asparagus strains are dioecious - they exist as individuals male and individual female plants. In animals, we call this set up ‘gonochorism’.
Asparagus can reproduce via the fusion of one small and one large gamete (sometimes, they reproduce asexually).
Biological convention denotes the plant morph producing the large gamete, found in the ovules, as ‘female’.
Systematic differences between the two sexes of a gonochoristic species of a physical characteristic (or set thereof), not including reproductive anatomy.
Some sexually dimorphic characteristics are non-overlapping (e.g. deer antlers) while some are very overlapping (e.g. human height).
The extent of overlapping observation/measurement is irrelevant. The only requirement is a robustly-detectable difference between sexes.
Many female humans are taller than many male humans, yet the population descriptions of height in humans consistently reveal that males as a sex class are taller than their demographically-matched female peers.
Height in humans is a sexually dimorphic characteristic.