I glossed past something in my last post. Emphasis mine:
[9:18] You see, I absolutely understand why we have and still do categorize sports based upon sex, as it’s simply the case that the vast majority of males have significant athletic advantages over females, but strictly speaking it’s not due to their sex. It’s due to factors that heavily correlate with their sex, such as height, width, heart size, lung size, bone density, muscle mass, muscle fiber type, hemoglobin, and so on. Or, in other words, sports are not segregated due to chromosomes, they’re segregated due to morphology.
I think it’s time we had a look at his science on this. Of the eleven scientific studies I counted in RR’s citations, only two dealt with muscle fibre composition:
Oertel, Gisela. “Morphometric Analysis of Normal Skeletal Muscles in Infancy, Childhood and Adolescence: An Autopsy Study.” Journal of the Neurological Sciences 88, no. 1 (December 1, 1988): 303–13. https://doi.org/10.1016/0022-510X(88)90227-4.
Staron, Robert S., Fredrick C. Hagerman, Robert S. Hikida, Thomas F. Murray, David P. Hostler, Mathew T. Crill, Kerry E. Ragg, and Kumika Toma. “Fiber Type Composition of the Vastus Lateralis Muscle of Young Men and Women.” Journal of Histochemistry & Cytochemistry 48, no. 5 (May 2000): 623–29. https://doi.org/10.1177/002215540004800506.
From that, we can extract the key charts on fibre composition. I’ll dim the irrelevant sections. [Read more…]