ive always been willing to die on the hill of cis women being able to beat cis men in sports so nobody will ever ever make me concerned about trans women in womens sports even if i was delusional enough to believe that was a comparable situation. do i think a cis woman could beat a trans woman in fucking pickleball or whatever? Buddy I think a cis woman could beat a cis male bodybuilder in sports. You will not get me
many people in these notes are revealing how they truly don't believe afab people are capable of beating amab people at Any sports due to their fragile bird bones delicate skin and and trying to make it seem like i'm feeding afab people to lions in the coliseum. you people are not only wrong but more importantly you are Stupidt
whenever female athletes in a sport start getting similar resources to the men (funding and training comparable to the men's ever since childhood) the difference in performance between the men and the women starts decreasing.
if female athletes are not paid enough to make a living of their sport/require to have a side job for healthcare or retirement funds, they won't be able to reach the same level of athleticism as the men, as they will spend less time and energy training.
if female athletes start getting high pay/professional levels of training later in life compared to the boys', they won't reach the same level of athleticism as male athletes who have been training at high levels from a younger age.
if the best facilities and best coaches go to the men, the women won't reach the same level as the men.
if girls who do sports are not taken as seriously as boys are (do not receive special permits to leave school earlier to go training, etc), the women won't reach the same level as the men.
as long as female athletes and male athletes have different levels of opportunities, we won't actually know if there is a substantial "natural" difference in average across men's and women's performances.
i mean, look at professional ballet dancers. those girls undergo hellish training since a very young age and ballet obviously does not consider female dancers a lesser category of dancers. look at what female ballet dancers do with their bodies while pretty much starving themselves. what do you think a woman can do if she receives rigorous high-quality training since childhood and also eats?
As per prev tags - Throwing Like a Brazilian: On Ineptness and a Skill-shaped Body, by Greg Downey
Is the most thoughtful and coherent interrogation I've read of how physical skills are developed, and how the development of skills is located in cultural expectation, teaching, support, and self-concept, as well as physically shaping the body through practice.
It spins off from a response to a feminist touchpoint essay of the 1980s, "Throwing Like a Girl" by Iris Marion Young, which examines the stiffness and lack of whole-body engagement in girls asked to throw a projectile, and relates this to the pressures of self constraint and self-conscious over-awareness of the body forced on girls.
Downey approaches the topic from noticing that the Brazilian capoeiristas he's training with - who are extraordinarily physically skilled across a range of specific skillsets - are not very good at throwing or catching projectiles. And, more specifically, that the way in which they throw when asked to - stiff, without whole body engagement - exactly matches what Young (and others) have characterized as "throwing like a girl".
Which means that it's not (or not only) a function of self-consciousness, or of an undeveloped sense of body integration - rather, it's the way people throw at the very early stages of learning to throw a projectile.
Which makes the question, then, what is it about the author's own (North American) society, that produces such a disparity in learning experiences between boys and girls - such that even girls who have nominally been taught to throw a ball, have broadly not actually been taught past the very first steps, by ages where their male peers have?
And how is it that this difference in experiences is so obscured, that people fail to recognize the points at which it occurs?
The essay delves into the specifics of these questions with a lot more depth and nuance than I can summarize here. Overhand throwing is a complex skill which is developed in many stages, using this process as a case study, Downey looks at factors ranging from access to coaching through difficult parts of the process, to gendered differences in the opportunity for rowdy, whole-body play.
I really reccomend reading the whole essay. I can't find a fully online version of the whole text, but the website "academia.edu" will let you download it with a free account (use a junk email, they send spam.)
