1/n 🧵

I want to address a narrative that we see around women’s sport and inclusion (particularly from those who seek to exclude trans women & women with sex variations from women’s sport), and how this narrative is part of a bigger pattern that functions to keep women small pic.twitter.com/m5WBYnqzhx

— RealScientists | Meltem (@realscientists) May 24, 2022

This is physiologically absolute horseshit. It’s absurdly wrong. It’s comically wrong. Yes, women were excluded sometimes because the top 0.000001% of women could compete against the top 0.00001% of men in rare situations.

But the reality is that the average woman’s upper body strength is only 30-35% of the average man’s, and that advantage persists (to a somewhat lesser degree) no matter how much a woman works out. Lower body strength is a little closer — somewhere in the neighborhood of 60% as much. This is supported by an absolutely overwhelming amount of evidence, by the way. (And realize that at the elite level of sports, 0.5% differences matter a great deal.)

In short, for the most part, women can be competitive in sports where strength isn’t as big an issue or ultra-endurance is required: shooting, curling, ultra-marathons, etc. Otherwise even elite-level women will just get easily beaten by merely average male competitors.

This is part of the “biology doesn’t exist” narrative. These people are fucking insane. As someone who really enjoys watching women’s sports, it’s going to be sad to see them destroyed.