Boys are Better Than Girls at Sports
I know no method to secure the repeal of bad or obnoxious laws so effective as their stringent execution.
- Ulysses S. Grant
I’m reading a book of critical essays by Daniel Mendelsohn of THE NEW YORKER, NEW YORK BOOK REVIEW, and NEW YORK TIMES REVIEW OF BOOKS in which he makes an interesting point about modern writing: ‘the new technologies and media that allow us to be private in public,’ such as [this blog,] smartphones, iPods, Facebook, and so on, are eroding the boundary between the inner and outer selves. This, in turn, alters writers’ senses of truth versus fiction. Readers must now be willing to discern the difference between ‘real reality’ and a writer’s reality.
A case in point is the recent “Separating Sports by Sex Doesn’t Make Sense,” in which Maggie Mertens, in September 17’s THE ATLANTIC magazine, argues that separation by sex is ‘harmful behavior,’ which is ‘rooted in the idea that one sex is inherently inferior.’ She willfully overlooks the fact that boys will always outperform girls in sports, even under the revised standards she advocates. As a writer and researcher, Mertens draws from multiple sources but gives little indication that she is an athlete or has spent any time among the strong, fit, and fast.
https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2022/09/sports-gender-sex-segregation-coed/671460/
I run the risk of looking like a big jerk here, so I should state a few things outright:
Of course not ALL boys can beat ALL girls in all things. There are plenty of women athletes who are vastly superior to men, be they Olympians like Katie Ledecky or more commonly the hundreds of accomplished Brazilian Jiu Jitsu students who can hold their own against men, for example.
Even if boys are by and large bigger, faster, and stronger than girls, girls are no less noble or worthy of respect in their athletic pursuits. I’m the father of daughters, both of them athletes, and I’ve unreservedly cheered at cross country races and hockey games though the years. The younger one is a dedicated strength athlete who has squatted 250, which I happen to think is just as awesome as my high school 460.
Perhaps Mertens is in fact a very good athlete, and in her travels she’s spent time with many female stars. That’s all well and good, but as elite as those women might be, they’re not the best in the world at what they do. The men are - and if Mertens is willing to put her private reality to the test, she’d see that this trend bears itself out in the wider world as well.
Her article in THE ATLANTIC has a dual approach: anecdotes that display the corruption in gender based segregation and references to studies that call into question the real extent of the difference between the sexes. We hear about a high school girl in the Bronx who wanted to play football but faced a physical exam and a battery of fitness tests that none of the boys had to undergo. Also in New York, a young man with a love of field hockey, the son of a long-time teacher and coach, was barred from playing by a vote among opposing schools in their prep-school league. The belittlement, he felt, ran against the girls from all the other teams, whose heads of school or athletic directors ‘didn’t think that they were strong enough or had the physical capabilities to play against me.’
Mertens cites statistics showing increasing numbers of girls joining football and wrestling teams. We hear that ‘Decades of research have shown that sex is far more complex than we may think. And though sex differences in sports show advantages for men, researchers today still don’t know how much of this to attribute to biological difference versus the lack of support provided to women athletes to reach their highest potential.’
‘Sex is dynamic,’ according to Science: social experiences can change levels of hormones on a second to second basis or even month to month, says one researcher. Another adds, ‘Part of the reason why we have this belief that boys are inherently stronger than girls, and even the fact that we believe that gender is a binary, is because of sport itself, not the other way around.’
Mertens goes on to say, ‘Researchers have noted for years that there may even be more diversity in athletic performance within a sex than between the sexes. One recent small study in Norway found no innate sex difference when it came to youth-soccer players’ technical skills. The researchers hypothesized that the gap they did find between girls and boys was likely due to socialization, not biology.’
Is Mertens operating in her own reality, something separate from ‘real reality,’ as critic Daniel Mendelssohn would say?
I think so. Actually, I think she’s laying the groundwork for another fictional construct, the feasibility of transgender athletes competing in school sports. If she can convince people that any differences between the genders is minimal, then she could make the case that any disruption caused by transgender participation would similarly be minimal.
My idea was to follow Ulysses S. Grant’s approach above. If an idea (or a law) seems especially bad, let’s implement and enforce it fully, the better to illustrate the misery or mayhem it would create. I had imagined inviting Ms. Mertens to some high school sports complex, where the athletic director could stage any number of games, the Varsity Boys Soccer Team against the Varsity Girls, and so on in hockey, swimming, and basketball - just to see how things turn out.
One can’t go around quoting Norwegian studies on youth soccer, with kids who are eight years old, and expect the comparison to remain the same through the years. In fact, what we should do is analyze sports in the wider world - which interestingly, the Duke University Law School’s Center for Sports Law and Policy has already done:
(by Doriane Lambelet Coleman and Wickliffe Shreve)
“If you know sport, you know this beyond a reasonable doubt: there is an average 10-12% performance gap between elite males and elite females. The gap is smaller between elite females and non-elite males, but it’s still insurmountable and that’s ultimately what matters. Translating these statistics into real world results, we see, for example, that:
Just in the single year 2017, Olympic, World, and U.S. Champion Tori Bowie's 100 meters lifetime best of 10.78 was beaten 15,000 times by men and boys. (Yes, that’s the right number of zeros.)
The same is true of Olympic, World, and U.S. Champion Allyson Felix’s 400 meters lifetime best of 49.26. Just in the single year 2017, men and boys around the world outperformed her more than 15,000 times.
To demonstrate this, we compared the top women’s results to the boys’ and men’s results across multiple standard track and field events, just for the single year 2017.”
[They display a series of tables, comparing results in events ranging from 100 meters to the 5000, as well as the pole vault, long jump, and high jump - including results from boys under 18 years old - all driving to the following conclusion:]
“Not only did hundreds and thousands of males outperform the best results of the elite females, they did so thousands and tens of thousands of times. (Yes, again, that’s the right number of zeros.)”
Coleman and Shreve make this blunt statement: ‘This differential isn’t the result of boys and men having a male identity, more resources, better training, or superior discipline. It’s because they have an androgenized body.’ Male athletes have more muscle mass and a better ability to use it than do females.
Among the places where Maggie Merten’s work has appeared is SPORTS ILLUSTRATED, ESPNw, THE YEAR’S BEST SPORTSWRITING (Triumph Books), and WOMEN AND SPORTS IN THE UNITED STATES (The University of Chicago Press). She’s been nominated for the 2021 Dan Jenkins Medal for Excellence in Sportswriting.
THE ATLANTIC is also mentioned in her biography, and maybe that’s a less athletic crowd than some of these other readerships, but I can’t imagine she’s going to fool a great many people with this latest piece. I have one last guess about what she might be driving at: elite athletes and varsity teams aside, couldn’t a set of boys and girls just start from scratch and play or train together without all the usual assumptions?
I’ve been part of a program exactly like that. [On this website, click ‘Coaching Experience.’] I was a coach for a high school sailing program, where on the water, one of our top three skippers was a girl, and other girls were solidly in the mix in race results.
I ran their off-season strength training program, which started in early January as school picked up after Christmas. For ten weeks, until we got on the water on St. Patrick’s Day, we followed a novice linear progression in the squat bench, deadlift, and press, as I provided coaching on technique and safety. All of these kids were new to the weight room.
I did this for two years; come that second January, none of the kids had touched a weight since St. Paddy’s the previous year. Sailing has Spring, Summer, and Fall seasons on the water.
Boys and girls threw themselves into the routine, training together, seeing each other as complete equals, and getting along fabulously. Everyone increased their strength - but at different rates. The senior and junior boys increased by the most in each lift, as their bodies were hormonally more primed for adaptation. I also made this observation: ‘The gains made by the girls, who were juniors and seniors, and the freshmen and sophomore boys were largely the same. This might suggest a certain hormonal equivalency between these groups.’
Those winter training sessions were as positive, equitable, and healthy as Maggie Mertens or any of her like minded readers could hope. Everybody had fun - but the boys were better at lifting.
