Thread by @Scienceofsport

@DesiFootyStats It’s different by scale (a lot) and concept. First, scale. Phelps was about 0.2-0.4% better than his rivals. Indeed, he even lost races. His “advantage” was worth about half an arm length. Compared to the male vs female advantage, that’s tiny. M vs F is about 10-12%, so Phelps

@DesiFootyStats …would be about FIVE body lengths ahead of Ledecky or McKeown. The M vs F difference is enormous, way way bigger than anything that exists within males because of long arms or whatever other simplified theory one has for why an athlete wins.

Next, let’s talk concept.

@DesiFootyStats Let’s begin by asking “why do categories exist in sport?” What’s the reason we have a women’s event, or a lightweight boxing title, or age categories etc?

The answer is that we create categories because we want the outcome of a sports event to have meaning and be a way to

@DesiFootyStats …celebrate the athletic traits that matter. For instance, in boxing we want to reward speed, balance, skill, endurance, power, strength. But if we did not have categories for smaller boxers, these attributes would be “drowned out” or overwhelmed by size. The best boxer would

@DesiFootyStats …always be the biggest one, because that one thing distorts the outcome so much that we can no longer reward the others. Same thing is true for sex. Without a category for women, male advantages due to T are so large that they overwhelm all the other athletic traits that we

@DesiFootyStats …actually want to identify and reward. So, what categories do is “exclude” or filter out the distorting property so that it no longer overhead the properties we actually wish to celebrate through sport. Hence, long arms is nothing at all like being male. Also, just think about

@DesiFootyStats …it for a second. Do we really believe that there are no women with long arms? Or for 100m, do we really think that no women have fast twitch fibers and biochemistry like Usain bolt? Of course they do! Elaine Thompson does. So she should be celebrated for it. But, she is still

@DesiFootyStats …12% behind Bolt, even though she has “all the right stuff” to be a champion athlete. For that reason, we need to have a category that “filters out” the thing that makes Bolt 10-12% faster, and thus reward Thompson for being his equal in terms of having what actually matters.

@DesiFootyStats So, in short, the sex categories are nothing like the natural advantages that occur to create champions. And finally, this argument about “all natural advantages should be allowed, they’re the same” is actually an argument FOR the abolition of all categories in sport. After all,

@DesiFootyStats …if we are gonna use this “logic” that athletes have natural advantages and we allow them so should just accept it, then why draw a line anywhere? Just let humans compete in one race, crown one champion, and see what happens to women in sport. Play it out and see how it ends

@DesiFootyStats Oh and a small but important final point, when you say “female with high T”, you actually mean biological male with high T. They only have the high T by virtue of being male. It’s a category crossing origin of a difference that creates all manner of biological & performance diffs