I guess they have a point
NPR may be onto something. I have to agree that there's "limited evidence" that men have an inherent advantage over women in sports, in the same sense that there's limited evidence for essentially every proposition I can imagine. The evidence that the sun rises in the east, for instance, is limited to the number of times any of us has personally witnessed the phenomenon, as well as to our ability to aggregate the testimony of humans throughout recorded history--so far. I applaud NPR's stunning and brave determination not to jump to conclusions.
If any NPR staffers survive the current spate of layoffs, I look forward to their application of the same intellectual humility to all of the truisms routinely spouted by earnest radio personalities. Anthropogenic climate change threatens humanity? Joe Biden is the president of the United States? Childhood genital mutilitation is health-affirming? "There's limited evidence of that."
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This has been a moment of awakening, hasn't it? "Trust the science!" yell these same people, while running webpages called "I F***ing Love Science!" Yet the science also tells us that the sun will rise in the east, in addition to the whole testimony of human history; and both, likewise, tells us that men have substantial physical advantages over women. Yet we must remain absolutely skeptical that this could be true, or that it should have consequences that affect policy or law.
Skepticism on matters where science might lead one to be sometimes skeptical, however -- those matters are for dogma, which we shall also call "science."
George Orwell spoke of ideas so foolish that only an intellectual could believe them. Let me add Freudian and all its successor dynamic psychologies to the standard list.
I would ike to see someone in Congress introduce a bill outlawing separate men's and women's competitions in all sports at all levels: professional; national titles; Olympic; collegiate; high school; peewee - everything. If men do not have an inherent advantage over women in sports, why split them up?
If those who champion transgender participation in women's sports vote against the bill, it will be interesting to hear their reasons for doing so. If they vote for such a bill, it will be more difficult for them to claim they are women's "allies".
Oops, forgot to sign - Elise
For that matter, there's limited evidence that adult men have an unfair advantage over 6-year-olds in T-ball.
Well, there you go. Let's get rid of age-specific leagues, too. :+)
Elise
Elise, Elise, don't think that intellectual consistency means the least to them. How regressive of you. It's all about making the special people feel good now. And by that I don't mean the poor trans people, most of whom are sad cases, but the preeners who want to show they are more-accepting-than-thou.
I know, AVI, but I live in hope that my friends who buy into this nonsense are still reachable if the contradictions become too glaring. Naive of me, perhaps, but here I am.
Elise
Bill Maher makes a good point in this Powerline link, about sports being the last stronghold of meritocracy in America, but he misses the newest development, in which being the best in any particular sports category takes second place to pandering to a woke narrative. https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2023/03/bill-maher-defends-meritocracy.php The advantage of sports--to which I'm in most ways completely indifferent--has historically been that it's an endeavor in which there is broad agreement on what excellence entails, and on the desirability of applauding it when we see it for ourselves. A good way to kill sports would be to award the trophies according to some other (any other) scheme.
But at least then we'd only have killed professional sports. The danger is that we're doing it to social functions we actually need.
Since I watched "National Velvet" as an impressionable child, I've always enjoyed a story in which someone with natural ability breaks into a field he or she is irrationally barred from even trying to compete in. For bizarre reasons, our society used to think it was a good idea to keep blacks out of sports. I cheered the advance that erased that error. But we didn't achieve that advance by pretending that a group of people who weren't good at something were actually good at it after all, or by pretending that we didn't know what it meant to be good at it in the first place.
Bruno Bettelheim said that tin soldiers wouldn't go out of style, because children don't like playing with tin pacifists. You can go some way towards eliminating fun, but you can't create fun out of what's not fun. Some fakes can't be made to work. They can only drain the real life out of life when people are bullied into pretending they're "just as good."
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