h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

>>No feminist can deny that men are superior to women in one respect: their sheer physical size and strength.<<

This may be true of men ON THE AVERAGE and women ON THE AVERAGE. It's also generally true that men who are the best in a given sport are better than the women in a given sport. So what? Sports is not about averages -- it's about the excellence of individuals. On September 20, 1973, Billie Jean King beat Bobby Riggs 6-4, 6-3, 6-3 in a tennis match before a television audience of 50 million. Should this match have been prevented because the odds favored Riggs, or because he had more to lose, in view of his chauvinist remarks beforehand?

Picture some characteristic of male athletes -- say, their top speed in running the mile -- graphed as a distribution, perhaps a bell-shaped curve. Then picture the same characteristic for female athletes. I guarantee that those distributions would overlap significantly. You write the snide observation: "German high jumper Dora Ratjen, who came fourth in the 1936 Berlin Games, turned out to be Herman Ratjen and was banned from future competition &#8211; not a great loss to sport if three women could beat him!" So here you have a view neatly insulated from argument: Men should always be able to beat women in sports, and those who can't aren't athletes to speak of. My guess is that any woman who could come in fourth in the Olympics (or even tenth, for that matter), could beat a heck of a lot of male athletes.

Imagine that black athletes were superior to white athletes on the average. Does that mean that they should be segregated to safeguard
white or black vanity? And does it mean that someone would have to come up with some kind of chromosomal test to distinguish between them? Such a test would be hard to devise, since the real discriminant (skin color) could not be simply linked to a gene, thus depriving the test of its pseudoscientific prestige.

In fact, this is true of gender determination as well. It's fairly common (on the order of tenths of a percent) that a male or female fetus has an extra sex chromosome, or that his or her hormones are insensitive to a sex chromosome, with the result that he or she grows up with the physical attributes of one sex, or another, or both. Someone who grows up with a body that is female in all respects may actually have an extra Y chromosome. So is that person supposed to be forbidden from competing with the men AND with the women? I thought sports was supposed to be about offering the best athletes a chance to compete, not about trying to confirm false assumptions about biology.

The author writes: "Chromosome testing was started in 1968 &#8211; before that, female athletes had to submit to a physical examination, which was extremely embarrassing and degrading," apparently unaware that the chromosome testing is even more embarrassing and degrading for those women with atypical genotypes.

Embarrassment and degradation is fed by misinformation, and I suggest that the author do some research, even a simple Web search, before adding to the problem.