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Comment by AnIdiotOnTheNet | Hacker News Reader

Possibly.

When you get right down to it, "gender" is really just a categorization of behavioral traits. This is what we mean when we say that gender is a social construct. I mean, what are people so worried about with trans people? That they use the "wrong" bathroom, wear the "wrong" clothes, use the "wrong" pronoun? These are all arbitrary bullshit.

If we had genderless bathrooms and accepted that people could wear whatever they want and got rid of gendered pronouns, maybe we really wouldn't need special gender-affirming care.

I have it on good authority that having the "wrong" genitalia for your gender is legitimately distressing, but perhaps that is just part of the expression of the social construct of gender and if the person had grown up without the concept of gender they wouldn't care what their genitalia were. Regardless, it wouldn't be an different than any other form of plastic surgery as far as I'm concerned.

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Increased societal acceptance of men wearing clothing and styling themselves in a way that is considered feminine, is a different type of thing to eradicating female-only safe spaces. The latter is still necessary due to human sexual dimorphism. The former is just adornments.

Sexual dimorphism in humans has significant overlap. Many females are well above average male strength and many men are well below average female strength. I therefore submit that it doesn't really make any sense to use this as a basis for what constitutes a "safe space".

Posting this from an alt because I've almost gotten in trouble for mentioning this. But the overlap is not that big:

> Hand-grip strength has been identified as one limiting factor for manual lifting and carrying loads. To obtain epidemiologically relevant hand-grip strength data for pre-employment screening, we determined maximal isometric hand-grip strength in 1,654 healthy men and 533 healthy women aged 20-25 years. Moreover, to assess the potential margins for improvement in hand-grip strength of women by training, we studied 60 highly trained elite female athletes from sports known to require high hand-grip forces (judo, handball)

> 90% of females produced less force than 95% of males. Though female athletes were significantly stronger (444 N) than their untrained female counterparts, this value corresponded to only the 25th percentile of the male subjects.

> The results of female national elite athletes even indicate that the strength level attainable by extremely high training will rarely surpass the 50th percentile of untrained or not specifically trained men.

Source: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17186303/

Yet there are hundreds of female rock climbers who will kick my ass on any crag in existence. We're not like spiders where the males are super tiny and easily eaten by the females, or even cardinals where the male has really colorful plumage. The differences are not super significant.

This is comparing two entirely different things. Rock climbing is a very complex sport in which the physical advantages that females have, such as flexibility are of similar importance to strength. Being able to get a high foot will give you much more leverage on the stronger muscles of your legs which is especially important when your forearms are screaming at you. Female climbers are also usually more efficient than male climbers which is needed as they are on average less strong. The difference between female strength and male strength in climbers is still significant, but the difference in performance less.

I'm fairly certain Alex Puccio will kick my ass at any sport you care to name, and I'm sure that goes for the vast majority of men.

Luckily someone already did research into this (the other commenter linked it) and it’s likely she’d only be able to kick half of men’s asses at best.

Which would still be pretty impressive and unlikely.

This whole “actually there’s a big overlap” misconception is easily defeatable by noting that no women play in the NBA, NHL, MLB, or MLS. If there is a big overlap in physical capability, why haven’t women started going for the millions of dollars available in these open leagues? Are they too lazy, or too stupid?

I'm going to need a citation on that. I very much doubt even 25% of the men in the world could do what she does.

The big overlap is with the rest of the population. Of course little advantages in a population are going to be exaggerated if you only sample the top 1% of people!

You managed to reply to a whole comment thread without reading the existing citation, why do you need it repeated?

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17186303/

The data from this study is helpfully visualized here: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/4vcxd0/alm...

You said "in any sport" and not bouldering, so this finding will apply. You can also consult the rest of the literature such as it is. Or spend some time in a mixed-sex group strength training program and just observe.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7253873/

> Results indicate that untrained men have greater upper and lower body strength than trained women athletes in terms of both absolute and relative strength.

Irrelevant, because it requires training, which is not at all what we're talking about when we're talking about the general population.

> Results indicate that untrained men have greater upper and lower body strength than trained women athletes in terms of both absolute and relative strength.

Let me know when half of men can iron cross their way across a difficult move with their "greater upper body strength".

The strength of strength-trained females being less than 50% of non-strength-trained males is not “irrelevant” at all.

You’ve chosen an arbitrary and niche sport and athlete because you literally don’t have any other examples at hand and have conveniently made it impossible to test. No one is foolish enough to boulder at this level without training.

She would lose a simple wrestling match against the vast majority of men regardless of their training.

Ok, so what's your point here? Men are just too dangerous to ever be allowed near women? Women need to have their own bathrooms to feel safe, even though peopel raping or otherwise assaulting the same gender happens too?

This is all a flimsy as fuck excuse to hate on trans people.

My point is that your claim that “The [strength] differences are not super significant” is clearly false (obvious to any child, really) and your climbing-specialist counterargument is insufficient to overcome that.

I don’t care about the rest of whatever you’re on about. Pseudoscientific nonsense is pseudoscientific nonsense no matter what the motivation or source, and I’m glad to see you’ve apparently conceded that your pseudoscience is nonsense and have moved on to the predictable red herring ad hominems.

> My point is that your claim that “The [strength] differences are not super significant” is clearly false

I disagree, but perhaps that's because the term "sexual dimorphism" was used, which is really a very minor effect in human biology compared to a lot of animals. Besides which, we have tools which can negate brute strength in a confrontation anyway.

> your climbing-specialist counterargument is insufficient to overcome that.

I concede this. I did not do a particularly good job making my case.

> have moved on to the predictable red herring ad hominems.

This entire thread is about trans people and the subject of "female safe spaces" was brought up as an argument against allowing people to transition. Forgive me if I assumed your arguments were ultimately in service to that, but you made no claim otherwise.

> the subject of “female safe spaces” was brought up as an argument against allowing people to transition

No, it was brought up as a counter to your claim that single-sex spaces have no value (“the ‘wrong’ bathroom… arbitrary bullshit” in your comment).

Nobody in response mentioned anything about transitioning or trans people at all.

You are welcome to make the case that the strength dimorphism shouldn’t be taken into account for individual scenarios, but the idea that it doesn’t really exist or is generally insignificant is frankly gaslighting and insulting to people born female.

The user who responded has made several transphobic posts, and this is entire discussion is inherently about trans issues.

That you and others would decide to attack my bad argument without attempting to make a statement about trans issues in itself is... well, something I can respect actually, I just find it difficult to believe, and also it is beside the point of the entire discussion thread.

> but the idea that it doesn’t really exist or is generally insignificant is frankly gaslighting and insulting to people born female.

...maybe. Worth considering. Anyway, I've conceded that I have made a bad argument, which is what you are claiming is all you care about in this instance.

You are talking about "safe spaces". A woman's ability to rock climb better than a you doesn't make her much safer. If you were in a locker room with a woman, even if she was better at rock climbing, chances are, if you attempted to physically assault her, she would easily be overpowered.

I thought we did science on here. Pointing out specific examples in a population when the topic is about the average is counter-productive. Kind of a logical fallacy there.

There's a reason that sports are separated by sex. There's a reason why men are the perpetrators and victims of most crime.

And women are more nurturing on average, which is why they should stay home and take care of the kids. It's genetics.

Suffice it to say, I don't buy that this is all a good argument for why people shouldn't be allowed to transition.

Nobody said it was an argument for that thank you very much.

But it is bad science to point out individuals in a population as the rule rather than exceptions to the rule.

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