293
Women Are Strong
(lemmy.nz)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2026
293 points (99.0% liked)
Memes of Production
1710 readers
696 users here now
Seize the Memes of Production
An international (English speaking) socialist Lemmy community free of the โMLโ influence of instances like lemmy.ml and lemmygrad. This is a place for undogmatic shitposting and memes from a progressive, anti-capitalist and truly anti-imperialist perspective, regardless of specific ideology.
Rules:
Be a decent person.
No racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, zionism/nazism, and so on.
Other Great Communities:
founded 8 months ago
MODERATORS
At the 2024 Paris Olympics, in the 800m track event, the woman who won gold, fastest in the world that year, ran the race in 1 minute and 56 seconds. I chose those games because it was the most recent Olympics, and I chose the 800m race because it was something I knew I could find corresponding data for.
At the 2026 OFSAA senior finals, the fastest runner in the 800m race finished in 1 minute 53 seconds. OFSSA is Ontario highschool boys, so in this case he was a highschool senior (grade 12 likely). That's not the Olympics, it's not nationals, it's the fastest highschool boy in the province of Ontario Canada in 2026, and he would have gotten gold in the Olympics by 3 full seconds. The Olympic gold medalist would have come in 8th place in Ontario assuming the same performance. I picked Ontario because I live here, I picked 2026 because it's the current year, and I didn't go hunting for a result like this, the 800m run is literally the first thing I looked up.
The Olympic record for the fastest any woman has ever run 800m is in 1980 when a woman ran it in 1 minute 53.43 seconds which is 0.17 seconds faster than this year's fastest Ontario boy. Had he run in that race, again assuming same performance, he would have come in a very close second. Silver from the 1980 race would have gotten bronze in Ontario this year, and bronze from that race would have come 5th. And remember that's the fastest race ever, from 1980, not this most recent Olympics where gold would have come 8th in Ontario.
To cherry-pick a little, last year that same Ontario boy ran the 800m in 1 min 52.36 seconds, so that year he was faster than any woman on earth has run it. The all-time world record for women's would have come 4th in Ontario that year, so not on the podium. None of that is even close to the the all time Ontario record, by the way, which is 1 minute 48 seconds set in 2007.
Okay, so what. I'm not saying women are inferior because they run slower. Maybe we decide sport in general is a dumb way to rank people. I'm not saying I'm faster than the Olympic women's athletes. There's a spectrum and there's overlap. I'm not saying trans women have the performance characteristics of men. Data seem to show those advantages may decrease over time. I'm not fighting to keep trans women out of sports.
The trans in sport thing is absolutely a distraction, because the people taking the hardest stances didn't give a shit about women's sport before this.
But there's a reason we keep records and events separate, and it's because a random highschool boy from Ontario Canada is not the fastest boy alive, but every year some highschool boy in Ontario runs fast enough to win Olympic Gold against the women, and often, or at least occasionally, faster than any woman ever. Let alone nationals, international, and Olympic men.
What an infuriating read, dancing around saying "I'm not saying trans women should be kept out of sports" while simultaneously hammering home just how inferior women seem to be to men when we look at the highest levels of sport.
Are men inherently smarter (chess), more coordinated (darts), more elegant (ice skating), and more agile (gymnastics)? Is it the penis, the testosterone, or some amount of time that makes these things inherent? Do women with PCOS have to start competing with men? Is it how estrogenized someone is, and if so how much is enough and for how long?
Is all of that worth telling trans girls they can't play with their friends? Is all of that worth telling women that men really are the superior gender?
Protection is one thing but comparing what men can do with incredible investment and support structures compared to what most women's sports get is disingenuous at best. This argument is never in good faith. We tried this segregation shit with race before I was born and it's as shit of an argument now as it was then.
EDIT: Their entire post is side-eyeing speed records and going "I'm not saying anything buuuut". If you can't understand why I'm frustrated reading it as a trans woman then just block me and move the fuck on. It's bait made to get people to think it's reasonable to assume that women are not as athletic as men in a post about trans women being excluded from sports with their peers. And all of that side-eyeing implies there's a "man advantage" that women need to be protected from. In context, you can understand what the commenter's heavily implied suggestion is.
If that didn't clarify where I stand: If we're going to have gendered sports, trans people belong with their gender. Full stop. Casually gesturing at gendered professional records as a gotcha or moderate position still implies that you see trans women like me as men.
Let's just admit that men and women are different. It doesn't mean that one is better or worse than the other. If we can't start from a place of acknowledging the simple facts of reality, then we aren't living in reality.
Many people believe that different means better or worse, it never occurs to them different can just mean not the same. Its like comparison never ends for those people, everything is a measuring stick to compete or argue over.
Many people believe that the moon landing was a hoax. Many people believe that vaccines cause autism. Many people believe stupid shit all over the world a thousand times over.
And some just shout at the sky.
I'm... I'm actually not sure which side you're arguing for. Are you arguing for one integrated league... or are you arguing against that? ๐
What I was going for, and may not have achieved, is that men really are excellent at sports. Not all men, certainly not me, but the ones that are freakish are really really freakishly good. But also not the same men, like, the ones that are the best swimmers are not the best runners, who are not the best basketball players. When a sport requires muscle, some dude will have the most muscle, and when it requires height, some dude will be the tallest.
When people cheat at sports, sometimes it's through injecting extra testosterone, so it's definitely a factor.
But the main point I was trying to make is that excellence at sports is not, and should not, be considered "superiority". Women can be non-competitive with men at sports, and still be superior or equal on an average day-by-day basis. When going to a bank, being 7ft tall with an ungodly armspan doesn't help.
We split the sports so that women could still play with their friends and have fun winning and facing surmountable challenges. In sports. If people want to not play sports, that's great! But if you do, there's a league for that that's meant to be fun.
I think the premise is somewhat flawed. If we're going to decide superiority based on direct head-to-head conflict, a thing men are advantaged at, then it's going to seem like men always come out ahead. But that's because we've stacked the deck and decided to judge based on what we're already good at! So it's not a fair comparison, it's not an even playing field to determine "bestness", if that's even a thing we should be trying to decide.
Here's another observations I have, this time with no data to back it up, just shooting straight from the gut. When talking about chess or chef-ing or Jeopardy or StarCraft or guitar or painting or whatever non-physical thing, there's a ton of privilege and support for men over women. Definitely. But also, whether through hormones or brain chemistry or upbringing or culture or comorbidities, some men seem more... obsessive about stuff? Like, some men spend 18 hours a day every day doing their thing, and everything else gets no attention at all. Like, no partner, just eating cereal, no laundry, no decoration, haven't showered, there is nothing but this thing in their life. Every day. And that's probably not good or healthy, but it can make one very very good at whatever it is they're spending all their time on.
And maybe it's just me, but I've never seen any woman that put that much single-minded time into anything as these men have. The women seem much more balanced, which is actually better as a lifestyle, but again if you're measuring superiority based on success in direct competition, it's going to look like the unhealthy lifestyle is the superior one. But it's probably not.
And I don't know why they are that way, it's not the way I am, I'm just on their team because of how we drew the lines ๐
And I mean, if you're going to mention race. Have you noticed the racial breakdown of sports teams? The ratios are not representative of their local demographics ๐. There is definitely advantage there, and it's not that it was a bad idea to split leagues because it turned out there was "fairness" after all... it just looked bad enough that it was embarrassing to split that way and they gave up and redrew the lines. But again, most importantly, sport performance is a bad measure of superiority.
Yes, very good analysis. The thing is, this all assumes that all girls sports are about to be pitted against boys in all categories. When the reality is the phenomena of a trans girl wanting to play in sports is extremely rare. Trans athletes make up just .002% of college athleteshttps://www.sf.gov/trans-women-in-sports-facts-over-fear . Given all the factors that are involved with transition and the rarity of someone wanting to compete it seems to me to be more of a case by case basis rather than legislating hard rules that as the OP points out do more harm to women in general.
I agree with you! The trans-athlete debate is mostly just anti-trans opinions wrapped in a palettable shell. And checking for transness, even if you don't care about trans people and only care about cis-women, is still super fucked because even in a field of only cis-women it's going to be embarassing and invasive.
But I don't think any of that is what OP was about. I think that's just your own opinions reflected back at you on the general topic that OPs comments were on.
OP was saying that that anti-trans concerns have tricked us into believing that women suck and are bad at stuff, and that this inherent badness is why we need DEI and other things like it. And that's not true, I mean by and large the reason for a lot of equality issues is that the dudes in positions of power are willfully being shitty to women, not because women can't do male jobs. And those same dudes also, wouldn't you know it, happen to be the ones against this stuff. So that's all great...
But sports is a bad example. Sports is kinda the one place there is actually a measurable advantage that seems unlikely to be just bias or gatekeeping, which is what I tried to highlight with my stats.
But even this isn't fully against what OP was saying. I think they were saying the bad people are using this one case where there's an unbiased difference, and implying that this is also the case in other areas where it doesn't apply. In this I also agree with OP, that maybe sports are a bad place to focus.
(I'm not saying men have never tried to gatekeep women from sports. I've seen the picture of people trying to pull a woman off the course of the Boston Marathon. I'm just saying that in 2024 the 90th percentile finishing time for young men was 2 hours and 40 minutes and for young women was 3 hours and 8 minutes)