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I'll say this, when I was in college I had a particularly silly, in my mind, professor. It was a general cultural anthropology class my freshman year. The teacher spoke about a study done with babies. It had to do with how baby boys and baby girls could crawl at the same speed. But mostly about how the parents assumed the boys would do better. The case showed they crawled around the same speed and their motor skills developed at roughly the same pace. He then used that to extrapolate that women have the same physical capabilities as men. Society telling them otherwise is the only reason they aren't winning strong man competitions, competing at the same level in the Olympics, etcetera. I believe I am a liberal but I dont think any suggestion regarding biology is automatically anti trans. I think promoting ideas like that professor did are disingenuous and harmful to both sides honestly.
While I don't think the two sexes have the same physical capabilities, I dislike how being a woman is such a hyperspecific category in sports like someone could be born AFAB and lived as a woman their entire life only to be found as intersex in some test and now they're automatically a man and should use masculine pronouns.
And as someone who is AFAB, growing up I was often discouraged from going outside, and the gym was off-limits, which would've been a disadvantage for me if it wasn't for calisthenics. It's not like the physical strength of a man and woman is so far apart either. Some people even claim that an out-of-shape man can overpower a trained woman. In Tug-of-War I'm able to win against an AMAB and I haven't had any HRT yet lol
I hear you and respect what you're saying. The difference on average is about 40%-60% based on what I've been able to find. In that, the average male is about 40%-60% stronger than the average female. Alot of that is based on ability to accrue muscle mass. Thats not to say some men are on the low end and some women are on the high end. Sure, you can beat a guy at a tug of war but thats not how population averages work. I'll link one study that shows this but I promise many more exist as well. My position is not that women shouldn't be in the gym, participating in sports or doing physically active things. My position is that when facts about the world are ignored, the speaker and their side are going to lose credibility.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7930971/
No you didn't say anything wrong re: women participating in physical activities, it's just that the professor had a point. Not that the two sexes have the same physical capability or ceiling (your professor didn’t even factor puberty and hormones), but that women aren't as strong as they could be because of how society treats them differently. Lots of girls aren't even allowed to go outside and play rough for example. Because they don't become as physically capable it becomes a feedback loop where people assume they are weak so they are discouraged from physically demanding activities.
And me mentioning the Tug-of-War thing wasn't about what you said but a statement against the people I mentioned beforehand who claimed that the physical disparity was so high that an out of shape man can beat a trained woman.
I hear ya. I don't disagree with your sentiment either. Women/girls/everyone should be pushed to engage with eachother in all endeavors. It gets harder as girls become women and boys become men though, especially in contact sports/play. We had a couple girls on my wresting team in high school and they genuinely crushed most of their male opponents. If society pushed women to compete or engage roughly the same they did men I think the gaps would be smaller. How much smaller? No idea.