Commentary
World Athletics (WA), the international governing body for the sport of athletics, recently banned transgender women from competing in women’s events at international competitions. Some researchers were quick to criticize the decision, suggesting that it was discriminatory and based on no scientific evidence.
More recently, presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. said told CNN that he opposes transgender athletes from participating in women’s sports, arguing that “biological males” pose a direct threat to the integrity of women’s athletics.
He’s right. Research clearly shows that biological males have higher oxygen-carrying capacities than biological females. On average, men are faster and stronger than women. Moreover, they have less body fat, bigger muscles, larger hearts, and larger lungs.
When it comes to sports performance, the physical and physiological differences between men and women are well known. What’s less known, however, are the cognitive differences, and how they help biological men excel in sporting environments.
Let’s start with aggression. It’s common knowledge that men tend to be more aggressive than women. It’s also common knowledge that aggression can be an incredibly destructive force. However, in a competitive environment, where winners and losers are made, aggression can be a truly game-changing force.
As the sports performance specialist Chris Stankovich has noted, “Aggression can help a team out-physical an opponent, generate crowd enthusiasm, and create anxiety within the minds of the opponent.”
It can also help an individual in a one-on-one setting (think boxing, MMA, etc.) overcome an opponent. Both instrumental aggression, or aggression used as a means to an end, and hostile aggression, motivated by a desire to cause pain, can be of real benefit, helping to sow seeds of doubt and despair in the minds of opponents. In short, if aggression is channeled in the right direction, it can be the difference between winning and losing. Moreover, it can be the difference between defeating and destroying your opponent.
Then, there’s the matter of visuospatial abilities. When it comes to identifying visual and spatial perception, men are significantly better than women. Studies clearly show a strong relationship between sports performance and the ability to interpret visual information and respond with an appropriate motor response. Take an individual’s ability to identify the flight of a basketball, to catch the ball, and to lay it off successfully, for example. Men have considerably stronger connections between brain areas that control motor and spatial skills, allowing them to perform better at tasks that require high levels of hand-eye coordination. Almost every sport imaginable, including baseball, golf, table tennis, rugby, tennis, racquetball, ice hockey, basketball, boxing, and Jiu-jitsu, require excellent hand-eye coordination. Supreme athletes require supreme hand-eye coordination.
Men also display a greater ability to focus on specific tasks. Enhanced focus allows an individual to execute a task successfully (think hitting a three-point shot, for example) and zone out any unwanted distractions. As Rob Pascale and Lou Primavera write in Psychology Today, during high-pressure activities, “the male brain uses much more gray matter while the female brain uses more white matter.” This difference, they suggest, helps account “for the greater ability of males to focus on a specific task to the exclusion of what’s happening around them.”
As anyone who watches or participates in sports knows, the ability to make split-second decisions is of prime importance. Men, especially dominant men, make quicker decisions than women. This ability allows them to deploy highly-efficient cognitive strategies. To be clear, women score higher than men in numerous areas, particularly compassion-related tasks. However, on cognitive-related tasks, men tend to score higher. This matters. Sports are not just physical activities; they’re also cognitive activities.
Finally, there’s the matter of intelligence. Not IQ (no differences between the sexes exist), and not Emotional Intelligence, or EI (women tend to score higher) Instead, let’s talk about bodily-kinesthetic intelligence.
Exactly 40 years ago, Howard Gardner, then a Harvard-based psychologist, put forward his theory of multiple intelligences. Along with other types of intelligence like linguistic-verbal and logical-mathematical, Gardner discussed the importance of processing information physically through hand and body movement. Those who score high on bodily-kinesthetic intelligence, according to Gardner, excel at actions that require physical control and dexterous movements. In the four decades since Gardner’s theory, numerous studies have shown that males, on average, tend to exhibit higher levels of bodily/kinesthetic intelligence than females.
It’s clear to see that trans women shouldn’t be allowed to compete in biological women’s sports for a number of reasons. It’s also clear to see that these reasons go way beyond the physical and physiological. Any discussion involving trans women competing with biological women must also factor in profound cognitive differences. That’s because the brains of men and women are, quite literally, wired differently.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
