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Jane's avatar

Hard agree with everything Katie and Jesse say about the sex-segregation in sports article. I have one pedantic observation in support of Katie's comments and one question:

1. Pedantry: Boys are, on average, a little bigger than girls from birth and continue to be bigger throughout childhood, even before puberty. You can see a combined chart for infants and toddlers here: https://www.chartsgraphsdiagrams.com/HealthCharts/growth-birth-36-boys+girls.html. That's why the WHO, CDC, and your pediatrician use different charts to check boys' and girls' growth at well-child appointments. (The way this played out for me, as a child recreational soccer player, was that I could play on co-ed teams in elementary school, but neither I nor the much more skilled girls on my team were as good as most of the boys. Contrary to what that nutty study discussed on the podcast implied, size and strength matter a lot for who gets possession of the ball in soccer, and even by third or fourth grade your average girl is at some disadvantage when playing against a typical boy. That's obviously only much more true once boys hit puberty.)

2. Question: Do the people who think that females aren't disadvantaged in post-pubertal co-ed sports except by cultural factors like training think that, if a woman is overpowered by a man who sexually assaults her, that's just because she didn't have the right self-defense class or, perhaps, she didn't try hard enough to fight him off? Surely they wouldn't actually stand by this claim, but isn't that the implication of these denialist arguments?

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l'artiste manqué's avatar

I feel like the last time a sizable contingent came out in defense of women was the during 2015 NPR-vocal-fry "debacle".

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LL's avatar

HA hahaha. Fuuuuuck. I remember the episode of This American Life, when Ira Glass was like, this is sexism.

No. Get over yourself. You do it and it is equally annoying. Channah Jaffe-Walt's voice annoys me so much that I really cannot listen to her episodes. Let alone Zooey Chase. Alex Goldberg could be mad too

Hey. I can hate you and you can be a won an. Or man. Or white. Or black. You can be a black trans woman AND annoying af

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That TERF Owl's avatar

I gave up listening to NPR last year after being a regular listener, and I remember hating Zoe Chase’s fry-- Ira Glass’s too but I didn’t listen to his show often. I put it on during a drive recently (I’ve switched to listening to podcasts most often but was curious). I had 1A on & the host was talking to a young black woman poet (only mentioning her race bc her poems were specifically focused on race), & she did a reading of a poem and she had the WORST vocal fry. You’d think a poet that performs readings of her work would work on her vocal technique. She’s going to sound like a heavy smoker by the time she’s old. It drives me crazy. Back to podcasts! (No one I listen to has a fry, just got lucky.)

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LL's avatar

The big question - and why I stopped listening to NPR - would they have interviewed her if her poetry wasn't about black pioneers? Lile if she just wrote about the beauty of Utah and happened to be black.

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That TERF Owl's avatar

That’s a good question. She read one about her grandmother (I think) being a black Fraser Crane that struck me as “meh,” but I’m not a poetry aficionado so maybe it’s brilliant. 😂

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That TERF Owl's avatar

Jeebus, she barely has any Twitter following. (Not a marker of excellence but isn’t 700+ followers pretty small for someone published in the New Yorker? https://twitter.com/OhReallyRio?s=20&t=_5h5Mseoftmz_yOqwrxaag

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Moltar's avatar

To answer 2. anyone suggesting this has never played competitive team sports. They've never been in a fight, been assaulted. They live online and are the kind of people that see a game of catch happening and turn and walk away.

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Jackson's avatar

Generally when I've heard this whack-a-doodle claim, the idea is that the within gender variation is far greater than the across gender.

In your example, the response would be that they're not saying every man and every women are exactly equal in every physical way.

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Moltar's avatar

That's just a lying by statistics argument.

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User's avatar
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Sep 24, 2022
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LL's avatar

I think that was the entire point. A man attacks a woman, he is obviously stronger. But somehow in sports, there aren't really any differences.?

I believe the point was the hypocrisy of certain progressive viewpoints.

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Sep 24, 2022
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Human Being's avatar

Same with age divisions. You're not going to have 12-year-olds playing football with 22-year-olds, because the 22-year-olds are likely going to be much larger, stronger, and more physically powerful and the 12-year-olds could get seriously hurt.

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Brandon Adams's avatar

In all the sports I can think of the weight class is a ceiling, but not a floor. If you're 135 pounds and want to fight in the 140-150 class, you're allowed to.

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