Women's Soccer And "Equal Pay": Clutching Pearls At Obvious Biological Truths

ESPN has a predictably horrified article about a motion to dismiss the frivolous US Women's National Soccer pay imbalance lawsuit, which raises important (and one would hope, obvious) points about difficulty of skill required to play in those leagues:

The motion filed on behalf of U.S. Soccer on Monday reiterated a number of objections made throughout the lawsuit. But among the most stark were repeated assertions that, regardless of any other consideration, players from the two teams do not perform equal work -- either in terms of revenue potential or the actual physical labor required.

As a result, U.S. Soccer said, women's players do not qualify for relief under the Equal Pay Act or Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

"The overall soccer-playing ability required to compete at the senior men's national team level is materially influenced by the level of certain physical attributes," the defense motion stated at one point, "such as speed and strength, required for the job."

That followed the original motion for summary judgment, in which U.S. Soccer stated that women's players did not perform jobs requiring "equal skill, effort and responsibility under similar working conditions."

That the lawsuit got this far is really astonishing, but that these things need to be pointed out is absurd:

1. We already have pay in athletics distributed by ability, not just in the major leagues (starters generally make more money than relief pitchers) but in the overall professional leagues (MLB players make more than minor leaguers). So the principle is not, on its face, absurd, despite attorney Molly Levison's sneering at it as the product of a "Paleolithic era" mentality.
2. Female soccer players get routinely beaten by high school boys in the rare cases where they scrimmage together. This is of a piece with high school boys in track and field commonly breaking world record times by females.
3. The USWNT exists entirely because of subsidies from MLS, which in turn is driven by the male game:
   

   
   Professional soccer players are also paid by privately owned club teams. Megan Rapinoe, for example, plays for Seattle Reign FC, one of nine teams in the National Women's Soccer League (NWSL). Player's salaries in the NWSL range from about $16,000 to $46,000 annually, according to NPR. That's not a lot, and it's certainly less than even the lowest-paid players in Major League Soccer (MLS; the top North American men's pro soccer league), who earn a mandatory minimum salary of $60,000.
   
   That pay gap isn't the result of sexism. It's what the market allows. Major League Soccer teams drew an average of 21,000 fans last year, while NWSL games drew about 6,000. The TV contract MLS has with ESPN and other broadcasters generates $90 million a year. While neither league discloses revenue figures, it's a safe bet MLS earns considerably more—and, thus, its players do too.

   For women to earn what men do, it's clear they need to get butts in the seats and watching on TV. So far, that hasn't happened. (Given some of the women's teams' fans, maybe there's a reason.)
4.  Those subsidies in fact are a big reason that the US women's team has won four World Cup titles, more than the US men's team ever (zero). Only a handful of countries pay their female soccer players, and this makes a huge difference in the quality and quantity of training the players can undertake. It puts the players in the interesting position of asking for more subsidy because they already get some.

It's hard to look at this situation and wonder what self-serving snake oil the women's team attorney offered her clients. The bottom line is still the bottom line, and at least one member of the women's team understands this:

"Fans can come to games," [Seattle Reign FC player Megan] Rapinoe said. "Obviously, the national team games will be a hot ticket, but we have nine teams in the NWSL. You can go to your league games, you can support that way. You can buy players' jerseys, you can lend support in that way, you can tell your friends about it, you can become season ticket-holders."

And that's it.

The Case of Mary Cain

Who is responsible for what Mary Cain became? I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around that. On the one hand, it's Nike's training program, or at least that of Alberto Salazar, that left her a physical wreck:

“An all-male Nike staff became convinced that in order for me to get better, I had to become thinner, and thinner, and thinner,” she explains in the video. Salazar gave her an “arbitrary number” for her to hit on the scale. She became fixated on her weight instead of her performance. Salazar’s mandates took an extreme toll on her body: She didn’t get her period for three years and, due to a lack of estrogen, broke five bones. “I was emotionally, and physically, abused,” she says in the video of her experience.

The beauty pageant aspects of this story are appalling, as if Nike and Salazar were interested in performance only as a secondary matter. But the fact that this appears to be a frequent occurrence throughout women's track suggests that it's not just Salazar who thinks this way:

Amenorrhea—the term for when your period goes away in the absence of pregnancy—is part of what led elite runner Tina Muir to quit the sport altogether in 2017. “There are SO MANY people out there who lose their cycles, yet no one talks about it,” she wrote in post on her website. She’d seen a slew of specialists, was healthy, and ate plenty. Failed by medical science and wanting to get pregnant, the only option she felt was left was to stop logging miles and allow her “body to come out of panic mode.” One estimate suggests that the majority of female runners might experience amenorrhea, which can affect not just fertility, as Christine Yu explains here in Outside, but can also damage cardiovascular health and bone strength. Bones break more easily when the body has been stressed like this, as Cain’s did. And yet still, losing your period can be “a badge of honor, a sign that you’re tough and working hard,” writes Yu. The mythology around amenorrhea enforces running as an act of control against the body.

Certainly, we should decry Salazar for his approach, but does Cain have some responsibility, too? Barry Bonds gets only opprobrium for his efforts; is the difference the fact that he was so dominant, that he won for so long? Or is it, because he is male (and yes, black), he is accorded full responsibility for his actions?

M2F Transsexuals Retain Strength Advantage Even After One Year Of Hormone Therapy

Fair Play For Women brings us a new Swedish study showing that even after one year of hormone therapy,

[There was] no change in a transwoman’s thigh muscle strength after 12 months of hormone therapy. Still a full 50% higher than female thigh strength. Even still higher than the thigh strength of a transman after 12 months on high T.

The number of trans women was still small (n=11), but the study was performed with much more rigor than prior studies in this area. The Fair Play piece concludes:

The IOC must immediately suspend its eligibility guidelines saying that male-born trans athletes can play in female teams if they reduce their T to 10 nmol/L for 12 months. There is no credible science to support this position.

They must also stop tinkering around the edges having meaningless debates on whether to lower the rules on T from 10nmol/L to 5 nmol/L. It doesn’t matter how low you set the T levels. Male muscle strength stays the same even at <1nmol/L FACT.

Sports bodies where thigh muscle strength gives a clear advantage in competition must suspend their trans eligibility rules immediately. Like Cycling, Rugby, Weight lifting, Athletics etc. No more women must lose their place on the podium to males.

Women's Soccer Players Make Less Money Because They Draw Smaller Audiences

With the US Women’s soccer team doing well at their World Cup bid (and a fracas involving whether or not they want to meet Donald Trump, yick), comes now the accusation that because the women's team has better TV ratings than the lackluster men's team, they should (at least) get paid as much as the men. Eric Boehm has a good explainer on Reason about why this is as it is. For some things (such as per diem and other related travel expenses), there's little justification for gender imbalance:

The Wall Street Journal reports that the U.S. men's and women's teams have generated about the same amount of revenue from games played since 2015, although those totals account for only about half of U.S. Soccer's annual income. Yet, as Rosen again points out, the women's team continues to get shortchanged when it comes to the percentage of the federation's budget spent on "advertising and P.R., travel and training budgets, and…per diems for food."

Okay, but those aren't the big ticket item of salary (something Bill DeBlasio recently demanded be leveled):

Major League Soccer teams drew an average of 21,000 fans last year, while NWSL games drew about 6,000. The TV contract MLS has with ESPN and other broadcasters generates $90 million a year. While neither league discloses revenue figures, it's a safe bet MLS earns considerably more—and, thus, its players do too.

Sensibly, Megan Rapinoe has some advice for how to close that gap:

"Fans can come to games," Rapinoe said. "Obviously, the national team games will be a hot ticket, but we have nine teams in the NWSL. You can go to your league games, you can support that way. You can buy players' jerseys, you can lend support in that way, you can tell your friends about it, you can become season ticket-holders."

Given the terrible, bitter fans (at least that one!), and greater male interest in sports generally, this seems a tall order.

The Univariate Fallacy, Caster Semenya, and Testosterone

Colin Wright continues his excellent string of explainers, this time on the Univariate Fallacy:

1/ The modern far Left has a political agenda to destroy/deconstruct biological realities under the guise of Social Justice. A common way they go about this is by dishonestly applying univariate statistics to multivariate problems. This is called the Univariate Fallacy.

Thread. pic.twitter.com/xi1n4Xkn3s

— Colin Wright (@SwipeWright) May 3, 2019

2/ This fallacy, when deployed, is commonly done using a single sentence buried within an article or essay couched around a broader narrative on the history of a particular type of oppression, such as sexism. Let me give you some recent examples of this fallacy in action.

— Colin Wright (@SwipeWright) May 3, 2019

He goes on to talk about several different pieces deploying this fallacy — which he later describes as

Realized I never really provided a simple definition of the Univariate Fallacy. Oops, sorry!

But basically it is this:

The claim that if there is no single, defining trait that can be used to separate two or more categories, then those categories do not exist.

— Colin Wright (@SwipeWright) May 3, 2019

One of his examples is a New York Times editorial claiming that "The Myth of Testosterone" is what fuels Caster Semenya's run (and the athletic superiority of men over women more generally):

Testosterone’s “authorized” biography, with its pat story about how it fuels male-typical athletic performance, is a powerful distraction from the hormone itself, occluding its fascinating, diverse and contingent actions within the body. Testosterone doesn’t drive a single path to athletic performance, nor even a small set of processes that can be linearly traced from more testosterone to more ability.

The idea that testosterone is the miracle molecule of athleticism, and, accordingly, that people with higher levels would obviously perform better, combines several beliefs: that “athleticism” is a kind of master trait that describes similar characteristics in different athletes, that “athletic performance” across different sports generally requires the same core skills or capacities, and that testosterone has a potent effect on all of them.

But that’s simply not true. The problem with trying to flatten athleticism into a single dimension is illustrated especially well by a 2004 study published in The Journal of Sports Sciences. The study analyzed testosterone and different types of strength among men who were elite amateur weight lifters and cyclists or physically fit non-athletes. Weight lifters had higher testosterone than cyclists and showed more explosive strength. But the cyclists, who had lower testosterone than both other groups, scored much higher than the others on “maximal workload,” an endurance type of strength. Across the three groups, there was no relationship between testosterone and explosive strength, and a negative relationship between testosterone and maximal workload. Though small, that study isn’t an outlier: Similar complex patterns of mixed, positive and negative relationships with testosterone are found throughout the literature, involving a wide range of sports.

In other words, the authors lard their argument with a straw man that ignores the main point — testosterone drives male puberty, which increases muscle mass, bone density and size, and a host of other side effects beneficial to athletic achievement. They also conveniently omit the fact that Caster Semenya is genetically male, despite being phenotypically female:

1) Caster Semenya Has XY Chromosomes

It’s absolutely mind-boggling that virtually every major outlet in the world reporting the Court of Arbitration for Sport ruling yesterday has failed to mention one of the most important facts of the entire case. Caster Semenya has XY chromosomes. It was generally accepted by people following the case closely that Semenya was XY, but now it’s been confirmed as fact since the CAS press release specifically says, “The DSD covered by the Regulations are limited to athletes with ’46 XY DSD’ – i.e. conditions where the affected individual has XY chromosomes.” If she wasn’t XY, the IAAF’s regulations wouldn’t apply to her and she’d have no reason to challenge them.

(In case you forgot what you learned in junior high biology, typically females have XX chromosomes while males are XY).

How the Associated Press, Reuters, NY Times, NPR, Washington Post, and BBC could all leave this CRUCIAL fact out of their reporting is beyond me. Not a single one of them mentioned it at all. It should have been in the lead paragraph of every story so people like my mother, who sent me a confused email after she saw an article on Semenya, can really understand what this is all about. Instead, the closest we get to the truth was that some of the articles talked about how Semenya has intersex “traits” or “characteristics.” Let’s be real, if you are an XY woman, you are the very definition of what virtually everyone would think of as intersex.

The woke academy has taken over science discussion.

Sunday Linkies

• The ACLU has come out in favor of M2F participation in biological women's sporting events, an announcement that was immediately panned by Martina Navratilova:

  I love you ACLU, but you are wrong on this. Unless you want to completely remake what Women’s Sports means, there can be no blanket inclusion rule. There is nothing stereotypical about this- it’s about fairness and it’s about science. Thank you.

  — Martina Navratilova (@Martina) March 13, 2019

  The ACLU's source for this claim is a data-free essay from ... Everyday Feminism.
• Reason ran a fine essay on sex differences in athletics that probably won't do much to change the current situation, larded as it is with loud advocates resting on spectral evidence that doesn't really address the differences between M2F transgender athletes and biological women. 
• A terrific thread from @FondOfBeetles showing how adolescent boys routinely break records set by the best women in track. Opening shot:

  In 2004, I was privileged to watch Kelly Holmes win the female Olympic 800m gold, in a run that kept everyone on tenterhooks until that final glorious sprint finish. Her finishing time was 1:56.38. 1/ pic.twitter.com/6EkVF5ZFxe

  — Dr FondOfBeetles (@FondOfBeetles) March 11, 2019

• A useful article from T Nation on the subject of transgender athletes:
  

  Most experts say that the average testosterone production for biological females ranges between 0.52 to 2.8 nmol/L. The Mayo Clinic put that range even lower (2). And while experts may vary in what they consider average among females, the consensus is almost always below 3 nanomoles/L.
  
  But remember, federations like the IOC require a male-born person to suppress and maintain testosterone production at 10 nanomoles/L.
  
  So even if a woman was genetically blessed with testosterone levels that reached 3 nmol/L, that would still be less than half of what a trans woman would be allowed to have during the competition. To look at it another way, her male-born competitor would have just over three times as much testosterone, even with hormone-altering drugs.

• Sex differences in the human brain show up before birth. The last refuge of the blank slate-ist is gone.
• Kirsten Gillibrand has zero endorsements. 
• Finland's government has collapsed following failed efforts to reform the country's healthcare delivery system.  This is interesting for a lot of reasons, not least because Finland has better per-capita spending on healthcare than France, which is often used as a model for US single-payer/M4A advocates (the light blue line below is Finland):
  
  
  

Nike's Cynical Kaepernick Calculation

Let us take as a given that Colin Kaepernick's national anthem protests are legitimate.

1. Without an actual organization, with concrete aims, to capitalize on the attention this is giving to the issue of young black men being killed by police, it is highly unlikely the situation will change.
2. This actually benefits Nike, in the same way that legalized abortion benefits anti-abortion crusaders on the right. Just as the latter can campaign on ending abortion without delivering, so can the former keep selling sneakers (and keep the public's eyes away from their Asian sweatshops) without moving the bar toward less deadly police encounters.

Whatever Kaepernick might have intended to change is now more entrenched, not less, with an even murkier path toward redemption.

The Sad, Futile, Career-Ending Gesture Of Colin Kaepernick

Everywhere today blared the news that Nike continued to pay Colin Kaepernick since his banishment from football.

Believe in something, even if it means sacrificing everything. #JustDoIt pic.twitter.com/SRWkMIDdaO

— Colin Kaepernick (@Kaepernick7) September 3, 2018

 Kaepernick, born of a white mother and a black father, and raised in California's Central Valley by white adoptive parents,  protested a number of controversial police shootings of blacks on social media, calling Alton Sterling's death a "lynching". In protest, he famously took a knee rather than stand for the national anthem, an act copied by many other players. And yet, if you were to look at his foundation and try to estimate what their aims were, you would find yourself stymied to make any sort of connection to ending senseless police shootings of young black men, besides the most tenuous ones. "Know Your Rights Camp" takes as its mission statement "to raise awareness on higher education, self empowerment, and instruction to properly interact with law enforcement in various scenarios." Aside from my universal banishment of all charities whose principal aim is "awareness", does this not seem like weak tea, the product of a meeting with lawyers and public relations types? If you were going to immolate your career for something, shouldn't it be more concrete and take direct action — such as political activism aimed to demilitarize the police (say)? As phrased, this sounds like "how to avoid being lynched" lessons.

Update 2018-09-04: Nike shares are down 4% following the news. This announcement may well prove disastrous to the sneaker manufacturer:

"The fallout was no surprise but Nike may be betting that the upside of a Kaepernick endorsement is worth angering conservative Americans and supporters of President Donald Trump," writes Bloomberg.

That might prove to be a bad bet, however. As Bleacher Report notes, a recent NBC News/WSJ poll found that a majority of voters (54%) thought Kaepernick's protest movement was "inappropriate," while just 43% said it was "appropriate."

Why Are Winter Sports Gender Segregated? Part 1: The Luge

I've written before about the absurdists claiming, without evidence, that men and women are perfectly identical on the athletic playing field — or would be if it wasn't for socially constructed limitations. This seems to come up every so often in areas where men and women play the same game, or at least similar games with the same name, with slightly watered-down rules for the women. Perhaps nowhere has this been more true than in tennis, as we saw this last summer when John McEnroe disrupted the zeitgeist by stating the obvious: a man at the peak of his game could whip a top woman without too much difficulty, claiming "if [Serena Williams] played the men’s circuit she’d be like 700 in the world"¹. This caused a good bit of predictable horrified tweeting from the chattering classes, but to her credit, Williams, who had embarrassed herself as a mouthy teen against #203-ranked Karsten Braasch, recognized the futility of a do-over:

“For me, men’s tennis and women’s tennis are completely, almost, two separate sports,” Williams said. “If I were to play Andy Murray, I would lose 6-0, 6-0 in five to six minutes, maybe 10 minutes. No, it’s true. It’s a completely different sport. The men are a lot faster and they serve harder, they hit harder, it’s just a different game. I love to play women’s tennis. I only want to play girls, because I don’t want to be embarrassed.”

But the case for sex segregation in the sports of the Winter Olympics would seem at least superficially different than tennis. Many of them are about going downhill very fast on waxed sticks or sleds, and as the acceleration due to gravity is 9.8 m/s² is true for everyone, it would appear those, at least, ought to negate most or even all of any sexual advantage. So, Maggie Mertens asks in Deadspin, why are winter sports sex-segregated? Why, for that matter, are there so many male sports for which there are no female analogues? Why, when men and women do participate in the same events, the course distances, and sometimes even rules are changed?

Luge

These questions need answering at some length. Mertens starts with the luge, which is maybe ideal for her argument. It's just a sled, so why is it that the men's Pyeongchang course (1,344.08m) is longer than the women's course (1,201.82m)?²

The sport in which you lay on a sled and hurtle yourself down an icy track the fastest wouldn’t immediately seem like it has any kind of bias favoring athletes of one gender or the other. But think again! The women competing in Pyeongchang will barrel down a track that’s 10.6 percent shorter than the men’s. That’s a difference of just 142m. And when it comes to doubles, women don’t have an event at all. Apparently only two dudes can lay on top of each other and fly down the ice on a sled.

I immediately grant the unfairness of having no women's double event, and possibly its absurdity, presuming there's no compelling reason to omit it. (There is a mixed doubles relay race.) I also concede the oddity of having a ladies start (reused for men's doubles). So why have sex segregation at all?

Looking at the final results page from the men's and women's luge events (both PDFs), doing the math and equalizing for course length, we find that gold medalist Natalie Geisenberger of Germany had an average speed of 93.4299 km/h, where her male counterpart, Austrian David Gleirscher, went a sizzling 101.492 km/h. That's 8.6% faster! Is the ice slicker for men?

One obvious answer might be that the initial push has a great deal to say about course times, and in fact if you compare the Gleirscher's fastest time (2.595s) with Geisenberger's (4.318s), you'll note that Geisenberger's is 66% longer than her male counterpart. Yet, at the end of the event, Geisenberger's average speed is 92% of Gleirscher's. Also, Gleirscher's averaged start time of 2.547s placed him in the bottom to middle of the pack of start times on each run; the consistently fastest luger at the start, Tucker West of the United States, who had two firsts, didn't even qualify for a fourth run. These in tandem strongly suggest the initial push isn't all that important, and/or we need to look more closely at why that difference might exist at all. So what else could account for it?

1. It appears that women have a longer distance to start their sleds, an artificial handicap. I base this on the fact that the men's doubles event (PDF), which begins at the women's start, has similar but shorter start times. (The shortest start time was recorded by the men's doubles gold medal winning team, Tobias Wendl of Germany, who clocked in at 4.174s, where the best time in the women's single, a tie between German Tatjana Huefner and Korean Aileen Kristina Frisch at 4.310s, is 96% of the men's speed. The average gold medal men's doubles course speed was 92.43 km/h, slightly slower than the women's single time.)
2. The track for the upper 142.86m of the men's course is steeper. I have no way of ascertaining this, and so ignore it.
3. Even if it is not steeper, the drop through the additional 142.86m provides enough boost to accelerate the men's sled to higher speeds. Using the average³ course 10% slope, we can work backwards to an estimated acceleration on an idealized course:
   
   
   A 10% slope is a rise:run of 1:10, or tan^-11/10 = 5.711°
   
   Acceleration due to gravity, adjusted for slope (ignoring⁴ friction due to ice), and assuming no other losses (as by non-ideal course traversal), we get
   
   a = 9.8 m/s² * sin(5.711°) = .9752 m/s²
   
   Distance is expressed by the equation
   
   x = 1/2at² + vt + x₀, where
   
   

   x = position in m
   a = acceleration in m/s²
   v = initial velocity in m/s (0 in this case)
   x₀ = initial position (also 0)

   This reduces to x = 1/2at², or transposing and substituting,
   
   t = sqrt(2*142.86 m/.9752 m/s²) = 17.12 s
   
   The final speed at the base for our idealized luger is thus
   
   v = .9752 m/s² * 17.12s * 3.6 km*s/m*hr = 60.09 km/h
   That's a pretty serious advantage! Of course, this is a back of the envelope guesstimate, without knowledge of the course details.
4. Wind speed on the course (if any). I also ignore this factor as evening out over time.
5. Strength and body control factor in steering and thus navigating the fastest path through the course.
6. Other, unknown factors.

The third element would appear to be, by far, the biggest factor. Looking through the results, you might notice a couple interesting things about the record keeping:

1. Average speed differs from finish line speed.
2. Fastest finish speed is not the same thing as a first place finish. German Andi Langenhan's second round finish speed of 130.5 km/h was a men's solo track best, but he only placed eighth with his time of 47.850.

 As this How Stuff Works article suggests, lugers have intense training regimens that would tend to confer advantages to men (as ever, emboldening is mine):

The start is the most important part of the race. It's the time when the slider is most in control, so his or her training can have the greatest affect on the outcome. Luge athletes build tremendous upper body strength for the start, when they'll propel themselves, their sled and any extra weights onto the course. Hand strength is also required for the start, when the slider paddles as quickly as possible for the first several feet of the course. Since a slider's body faces up to 5 Gs during a run, he must be in overall excellent physical and mental condition to manage the 50-second attack on his body and his focus.

In the summer months, luge athletes train hard to build upper body muscles through swimming, weight training and calisthenics. In the winter months, typical luge training includes practice runs every day. Sometimes, they'll practice only starts, developing strength, agility and technique.

So upper body strength — surprisingly — is the major focus of luge training, as is hand strength. And yet we see no compelling evidence that faster starts correlate to better finish times. As the luge is an event timed down to the third decimal (thanks to a .002 difference in the 1998 Nagano Olympics' womens' singles event, then within the margin of error of the timing system), superior male body control affecting steering could mean women might not end up on the podium very often. Yet at this point, I see no reason to rule it out entirely, either. While I see little reason to believe that male and female records will eventually match for sheer physical contests (in general, male and female records in summer Olympic games have reached a limit of about 90%), it is not obvious that this applies to the luge, at least.

---

¹ An interesting sidebar on Serena Williams' and John McEnroe's public throwdown comes in this Stats On The T post, which favorably compares Williams' serve speeds with those of top male competitors. But as the commenters following point out, service speed is only one part of the game, asserting (without specific data) Williams lacks the three-step sprint speeds of her male competitors. Given Williams' avowed refusal to play men, I take her as an authority.
² The governing body for luge events, the International Luge Federation, or FIL for its French acronym, Fédération de Internationale de Luge de Course, prescribes flexible course lengths in their posted rules (PDF); men's courses may be up to 1,350m, with a minimum of 1,000m for men's singles. All other courses must be no less than 800m, with no specified maximum; presumably the women's start is customarily set after the men's.
³ From FIL rules Supplement 1 §3.1.1, "The average gradient of a track from the men’s start to the low point should not exceed 10%." It could of course be lower, though in §3.1.1 of the general rules it says, "The start ramp should have a gradient of 20-25% and a length of min. 10m and max. 30 m." I don't know whether the start ramp is considered part of the overall time or not, but it seems reasonable that it would be. I have sent an inquiry to the US luge team's offices and await their response.
⁴ An earlier version of this post had an erroneous calculation for the acceleration due to gravity on the inclined plane that included friction, so I simplified it to ignore friction.

Transgender Weightlifter Smashes Women's Records

But, you know, gender is a social construct. I suspect Caster Semenya wants a do-over. I'm sure this is completely unrelated to testosterone.

The Witch Caster Semenya Must Be Burned

Malcolm Gladwell and Nicholas Thompson have another discussion piece at The New Yorker covering track and field events at the 2016 Summer Olympics. A hot topic this year is the woman Caster Semenya:

N.T.: ... [L]et’s move to the athletes, and one of the most important to watch: Caster Semenya, the South African middle-distance star, who has what are called “intersex conditions.” She has always identified as a woman, but she has many of the physiological features of a man, including internal testes and an exceptionally high testosterone level. Do you think she should be allowed to compete as a woman?

M.G.: Of course not! And why do I say of course not? Because not a single track-and-field fan that I’m aware of disagrees with me. I cannot tell you how many arguments I’ve gotten into over the past two weeks about this, and I’ve been astonished at how many people fail to appreciate the athletic significance of this. Remember, this is a competitive issue, not a human-rights issue. No one is saying that Semenya isn’t a woman, a human being, and an individual deserving of our full respect.

Gladwell justifies banning Semenya because her body produces too much testosterone:

David Epstein wrote a characteristically brilliant piece for Scientific American last week in which he quoted the philosopher Bernard Suits, who once described sports as “the voluntary acceptance of unnecessary obstacles.” And that’s what’s at issue here. Semenya is equipped with an extraordinary and anomalous genetic advantage. The previous policy of international track was that she could compete as a woman if she took medication to lower her testosterone to “normal” levels. That restriction has now been lifted. And so we have a situation where one woman, born with the biological equivalent of a turbocharger, is now being allowed to “compete” against the ninety-nine per cent of women who have no such advantage.

 Imagine walking this idea back to other sports. Basketball, particularly, would change dramatically: the 99th percentile of the general population is somewhere between 6'2" and 6'3" (PDF), yet the average center from the 2015 draft is 6'11". Football weeds out an astonishing 300 out of a potential one million or so high school candidates; what are we to say to those who didn't make it? Change the rules so big men can't play? And horse racing: Secretariat's twenty-two pound heart, nearly three times that of an average horse, fueled his astonishing runs, such as the 1973 Belmont Stakes:


Should we thus take ultrasounds of every race horse to determine heart size, and disqualify outliers? Sports generally are a game of populations, with competition excluding the unfit. That is, they celebrate genetic freaks. "The voluntary acceptance of unnecessary obstacles" does not and should never include the gifts of birth. In that, Semenya mounts a direct attack on liberal sexual blank slatism that confuses absence with prejudice, all the while tickling the nerve centers of the right energizing anti-doping frenzies. It's a wonder she wasn't burned at the stake.

The SJW Left Gets Its Hokum Greenlit With Pitch

The idea that sexual dimorphism is real apparently lies outside the realm of that which is permissible to discuss among Social Justice Warriors. I heard yesterday of a new series called Pitch about a first female major league pitcher; never mind that this is physiologically, um, extremely difficult due to little things like size and strength differences. For instance:

• The difference between the fastest male sprinter in the world, Usain Bolt, and the fastest woman sprinter, Florence Joyner, over a hundred meter course is almost an entire second. 
• There are two entire weight classes for women (48 and 53 kg) beneath that of the smallest man (56 kg) recognized in the International Weightlifting Federation records. Even the most comparable and larger women's weight class (58 kg) to the smallest male weight class, the women's records are still markedly lower (all units below in kilograms):

  Event	Men's Record (56 kg)	Women's Record (58 kg)	% difference
  Snatch	139	112	24%
  Clean & Jerk	171	141	21%
  Total	305	252	21%

• As of 2007, less than one percent of any observable population of women in the United States is 6'0" or taller (PDF), yet there are fourteen major league teams without a single pitcher below that height, per a 2015 ESPN article on the subject.

When Jackie Robinson fought for equal opportunity on the baseball diamond, all he asked for was the right to compete under the same rules as white players. At the time Branch Rickey scouted Robinson, there was demonstrable, convincing evidence that blacks were good and even great athletes: boxers (Jack Johnson and Joe Lewis), football players (Fritz Pollard), and famously, Olympic track star Jesse Owens were all great by any standard of their games. By being the first to sign Robinson (and many other Negro League stars), Rickey was able to arbitrage quality talent ahead of his major league competition, who for reasons that had entirely to do with superstition, i.e. prejudice, shut themselves out of those wells. But there is no woman analogue to any of these players versus men. There is no star second basewoman in the wings precisely because women cannot compete on a level playing field with men in athletic endeavors; most likely, such an individual would be barely capable of playing at the minor league level.

This is not prejudice speaking, not the silly "your uterus will fall out" nonsense that kept Katherine Switzer out of the Boston Marathon, but the voice of empiricism, i.e. the results of evolutionary sexual differential pressures. Women may be able to run long distances, but they still cannot keep up with men on any event; using the marathon as a specific example, the fastest woman is still thirteen minutes slower than the fastest man. And there are competitive advantages to speed, strength, and (among pitchers, especially) height: per the ESPN article above, the average major leaguer, since 1960, is 5-6% taller than the typical male in the general population. Why would we expect women, who are generally shorter than men, to make it through the same gauntlet of minor league failure that washes out so many taller men? And in the absence of an obvious competitive advantage adhering to a signing team, why on earth would a major league club want a woman player, other than as an Eddie Gaedel freak show and public relations stunt?

Update 2016-05-21: I wanted to present this list of male vs. female tennis matches as an example of the sorts of advantages size and strength confer. While the most famous is probably an over-the-hill Bobby Riggs vs. Billie Jean King match in 1973 (one which the aging Riggs lost overwhelmingly to King, 6-4, 6-3, 6-3), the rest, mostly even matches, went as you might expect:

• Martina Navratilova, nearly retired, lost 7-5, 6-2 to a 40-year-old, retired Jimmy Connors in 1992.
• The Williams sisters, then 16 and 17, unwisely boasted they could beat any 200 or under ranked male player. Karsten Braasch took them up on it and whupped both soundly, defeating Serena 6-1 and Venus 6-2. "I didn't know it would be that hard. I hit shots that would have been winners on the women's tour and he got to them easily," Serena said afterwards.
• And a number of others documented there: Bill Tilden vs. Susanne Lenglen, Bobby Riggs vs. Margaret Court, and in passing stories about Kim Clijsters and Lleyton Hewett, and Chris Evert-Lloyd being beaten by her low-college-tennis-level brother.

What's interesting to me is that the Negro Leagues evolved mainly as a place for black players to actually play. I have yet to even hear of a woman who wants to play against men at any professional level. That doesn't mean she doesn't exist, but she would be an extreme outlier.

That brings up another point: baseball is a game of populations. Finding the top talent is a matter of weeding out failures. Let us posit that the average ballplayer exactly equals the average population male height of 5'10". This means half the male population is that tall or taller. Yet you've already eliminated all but about 2.4% of the female population. So you're now starting to look at extreme outliers on population already just on the basis of height alone, and a tiny fraction of the overall population. How many such women would you have to find in order get even a handful that could compete at that level? How would you even get them into competition to discover that talent? The social issues alone are daunting, but the deck is stacked heavily against women as competitors.

You Should Care About This Thing: Transitive Fandom In Women's Soccer

The Women's World Cup (er, sorry, Women's World Cup) is something Americans need to care about even more than the other, bepenised kind, according to Meredith Bennett-Smith in Quartz. She never quite gets around to why anyone should care particularly about this event, though the numbers of late, 5 million viewers, seem to provide plenty of room for optimism on that front.

And yet.

I am tired of having to explain that I’m wearing a women’s national team jersey because, news flash, the World Cup is upon us. Maybe you’ve heard of it? Yes, the women have one too. And by the way, that No. 20 number emblazoned across my back just happens to belong to the greatest goal-scorer in the history of women’s soccer.

This is how you promote your favorite sport and players, by belittling anyone inquiring about it? By shrieking you should already know who this is, you dolt at people who almost certainly don't know the players in what is a niche market of a niche sport? Memo to FIFA and constituent clubs: don't hire this person as a marketing consultant.

I am tired of watching World Cup games in sports bars where the TV screens are split between three other games and bartenders turn the sound off at halftime.

Have you ever tried to be a baseball fan in September? You know, when the postseason races are really heating up — and the tsunami of football drowns out everything else, so that unless it's the local team in hot pursuit, or the Yankees or Red Sox, bars already turn their attentions to the NFL? If it isn't football or basketball, sports bars devote screen space on an as-we-feel-like it basis. It's even worse for hockey. So... I feel your pain, but petulance isn't going to change anybody's mind, or the channel.

But most of all, I am tired of feeling like every four years the very legitimacy of women’s athletics goes on trial, again. With the exception of maybe tennis and a handful of Olympic events, we have not achieved gender parity in professional sports. Not by a long shot. So while Mia Hamm may have once been mentioned in the same breath as Michael Jordan, the US women are tasked with the burden of proving that they—and by extension women athletes in general—deserve to be recognized as second-tier professional athletes, by being the best in the world.

And if that’s not a perfect metaphor for modern-day sexism, I don’t know what is. America’s women and girls (and boys) deserve better. Really.

And this is where the entirety of her argument really runs off the rails. You hear that, sports fans? It's your responsibility to like this thing she likes, because she likes it, and you're sexist if you don't. It's hard to imagine anything more narcissistic. She has a hard road; male interest in team sports remains greater than that of women, despite longstanding efforts to reach parity in that area, and one suspects that translates to spectator sports, as well. The notion that men might find women's soccer interesting in part because of the shape of the participants is met with predictable Victorian horror (Dave Zirin called it "screeching sexism and subtle-as-a-blowtorch homophobia"). Bull Durham's Annie Savoy was so named for a reason, but apparently players-as-eye-candy is strictly verboten when men might be the target audience. If anything, Bennett-Smith makes the case for staying away from women's soccer, if only to steer clear of harangue.