As a TS woman do I stand a chance against men?

So hear me out. This is going to be a long post (like most my posts) but you've released the anarchist in me.

My first lecture at university was from a lecuterer telling us that he loves golfs but he doesn't ever think that he'll see the human peak of the sport.
Not just that training methods are getting ever better but also that the person with the perfect genetics for it may have been born a 1000 years ago or he may even be a Bedouin and never see grass let alone play golf.

So we aren't rewarding peak human ability in that rule set because there is a lack of access or opportunity (I believe this was also the theme of the famous documentary Cool Runnings)

So are we just rewarding opportunity?
If so then are we not just upholding a society that is fundamentally unfair in terms of lack of opportunity?

This would indeed go against the spirit of Olympism which looks to build a better world through sport.

So what are we rewarding with medals? and should we reward it?

Maybe we should seek to provide opportunity first and reward achievement second.

 

You need to look no further than the current leadership of more than a few countries around the world to see that we clearly award opportunity rather than achievement.

 

Isn't being British wonderful?
You know those old Russian communists had a decent idea, although terrible execution (pardon the pun).

 

Ooooh you guys are going to love the big argument thread I'm going to start tonight.

 

Oh absolutely...success in sport is a tangled web of cause, causation, correlation, genetics, nature, nurture, culture, opportunity, funding, access and who knows what else.
I'm not pretending it's a simple topic at all and think the main people that get it wrong are the people who think they have all the right answers.

My hunch...and it is a hunch..is that even with totally equal access, encouragement, funding, yadda, yadda (not that we'll ever get that of course) some (most?) sports would still see a gap between top male performance and top female performance. With a fair but of overlap and us average Joes and Joannes not getting close to either.

 

It's wierd how we are all so caught up on who is the best athelete individualy,

I'd wager there's more female atheletes recreationally, (running clubs etc) then you would think, and therefore more active females atheletes hitting better then average times etc then men, if you include the population as a whole.

Men do die earlier on average too, that will have a statistical effect.

 

I think that MMA has as wide an open format that allows a full range of skills and abilities at different ranges of combat the preclude the development of a single body type, but you're in a better place to make that judgement. That being said with the different weight ranges will we see different combat methodology tendencies develop according to weight ranges?? (and with that body types?) I mean featherweight boxers use the same range punches of punches as a heavyweight but I think we can agree that there is a tendency for footwork and combat rhythm to be different at different weights. ( I always preferred watching bantamweight fights. Heavyweight sometimes is a bit meh)

 

Its older than Dirt. We are social species that is inherently hierarchical conferring status to the top monkey that is able to do/have 'x' (whatever the other monkeys decide 'x' is)

Our fascination with sport is stone age programming with a 19th century euro-centric fixation over Victorian muscular Christianity and ancient Greek physical culture tied to a murky classical virtue (Arete - Wikipedia) . Though I think with the rise of e-sports and ever more sophisticated doping, this cultural package is going to take a beating.

Its not.....bad or inherently unjust. Its just that in the greater scheme of things adulation over athletes importance is all out of proportion. I think Covid has pretty much much exposed this.

 

I think you're on dodgy ground with the appeals to nature. The evidence, such as it is, is a lot more complicated than that, and there is a severe lack of it to make any definitive statements.

The scant data on true hunter-gatherer tribes would indicate that we did not have had a social structure similar to other primates, and that competition is something that comes along with agrarian and urban society.

I just don't buy the evopsych dominance hierarchy stuff. If I murder a woman's children and rape her, my neighbours don't respect me more for it. I just don't know if you can make the leap between human behaviour and primate behaviour with any reliability.

I think your Victorian classical revival argument has more legs, although I think football comes via a separate tradition.

 

I'm definitely not defending it, but plenty of rapes and murders happen during war and social breakdown, we are not seperate from animals, we are animals.

Theirs a reason a small percentage of the population have evolved to have no conciously about breaking group norms and killing people.

The higher IQ ones nowadays are rewarded by being the heads of businesses and governments.

Man is not that different from other primates, (definitely not the same as lobsters though!)
our environment is different of course, but not our base drives and emotions, we can only move beyond our natural self by understanding it.

Didn't Desmond Morris write a book and several papers about this in the 90's, that could be a good avenue to look at, (although I imagine some of what was said looks terribley dated now).

Edit it was 1967, and a lot of it was bunk, but not all of it! (It's headline is a tad misleading)

The Naked Ape at 50: ‘Its central claim has surely stood the test of time ‘ | Evolution | The Guardian

 

I'm not saying that we don't share any behaviours with other primates, obviously we do. What I'm arguing against is the evopsych tendency to confidently ascribe modern phenomena to observed behaviours in other species, and also to presume that present behaviour must be "natural" and common to humans in all other times and places.

Some more on my point about assumptions on sport and competition:

Play and Contest: Their Distinction and Merging in Sports

 

(Mod note: Joke about murder and rape deleted) j/k

 

Actual LOL

 

Slightly tangential, but still relevant to the idea that competition stems from evolutionary selection in a straight line from today, through our primate ancestors and beyond:

Inequality: Why egalitarian societies died out

 

Some Lessons Taught by Informal Sports, Not by Formal Sports

I'm just reading it now, his previous post is tremendous, I think we need to be carefull assuming all primitive society's are the same, and that just because we have changed from one approach, to another, it makes it less real. We are a competitive society with large amounts of non competitiveness (the Nordic model if you wish), society's which are more based on only competition (see the USA) do very well on some measures, but seem more exposed to the downsides too (poor mental health and issues with resilience to market fluctuations) but society's that have no competivness also don't seem to be progressing that much.

I know it's anecdotal, but the kids I regularly play with, love games, they love trying to win, they don't love others losing, and they don't make a big deal out of it when they do win or loose.

Living is competitive, but not to the extent of hurting your close family/social group.

 

Absolutely. As I said; the data is very thin on the ground, and most research of present-day hunter-gatherers aren't 100% hunter-gatherer bands anyway.

Oh, but "primitive" is hate speech

 

"
So what can we learn from all this? Although dominance hierarchies may have had their origins in ancient primate social behaviour, we human primates are not stuck with an evolutionarily determined, survival-of-the-fittest social structure. We cannot assume that because inequality exists, it is somehow beneficial. Equality – or inequality – is a cultural choice."

Fully agree, but how to get there, that's the rub, the main attempts so far have been via authoritarianism, and that's not gone too well.
Caus you can't trust people, people vote for Boris Johnson and like Coldplay....

 

Primitive beats, advanced diabetes and obesity!

 

What is interesting is that from these articles it would seem as if humans developed rather unique social systems, but once agriculture came along we went back to older dominance hierarchies that bear more resemblance to other primate species.