A few brief observations:
i) I'm no expert on intramural wrestling, but I imagine it would be very easy for a boy to seriously injure a girl. I'm not talking about a boy deliberately hurting a girl, but simply using the same techniques and making the same moves he'd use when wrestling a male opponent. Not only are boys naturally stronger, but boys who wrestle competitively are weightlifters to enhance their musculature. Although female wrestlers may lift weights as well, they can't add as much muscle mass or bone density as boys.
ii) While I admire boys who forfeit games because they think it's dishonorable to wrestle girls, I think that's a mistake. If girls (and women) enter male space and compete with guys on their own terms, guys shouldn't abandon the field out of misplaced chivalry. Men have to be men. We cannot surrender to a feminist, misandrist ethos in which guys aren't allowed express their natural masculinity.
Unfortunately, girls, as well as their willfully stupid parents, need to learn the hard way that there are intractable differences between men and women. We can't allow the destructive illusions of feminism to go unchallenged. Some girls will get hurt in the process, but they volunteered. If feminism prevails, that hurts everyone.
I do grant Olson's point that a boy might forfeit the match if he worries that full-body contact with a girl will trigger a very public, spontaneous erection. Perhaps cup protection gear would disguise it, although that might create a different problem if there's no place for that expansive pressure to go.
iii) Ironically, the transgender thugs are illustrating the athletic superiority of men.
This phenomenon goes back to the 80s when I wrestled in high school, although it was not framed in the transgender controversy but simply whether females should wrestle on a men's sports team against other boys. It was more frequent in public schools than one would think for the 80s. My Christian school had a policy to forfeit the weight class if this occurred in a match or tournament, which it did about two or three times in my four years as I recall.
ReplyDeleteIt's not like football where you have protective gear and pads and such to distance yourself from the other person's personal parts. In wrestling you are wearing tights and grabbing up and behind the other person's crotch for take downs, chest to chest for pinning your opponents, and other moves that results in very close physical contact. It will be interesting to see what will happen when transgender men take over women's wrestling in particular the world championships and the Olympics. Transgender women, however, will not overtake men's wrestling on the national or international scene.
1. Here are the most common wrestling injuries according to the Children's Hospital of Colorado (which is one of the top ten pediatric hospitals in the United States and which is in the wrestler Brendan Johnston's home state):
ReplyDelete-Ligamentous knee injuries such as meniscus and MCL tears
-Cauliflower ear (a condition of the outer ear that can cause deformity) may develop from friction or blunt force trauma to the ears if left treated
-Dislocations and sprains of the elbow or shoulder from the take-down and referee's positions
-Skin infections such as herpes gladitorium, impetigo, folliculitis, abscesses, and tinea (ring worm)
-Fractures of the fingers
-Concussions, usually caused from falls on the mat or collisions with other athletes
-Pre-patellar bursitis or Osgood Schlatter’s syndrome from direct trauma on the mat
-Ankle sprains
-Muscle strains of the lower extremities or the back
I think it's certainly possible for a teenage boy in the same weight class as a teenage girl he was wrestling to cause any of the above injuries. Indeed, I think it's arguable at least some of these injuries are even probable in a competitive wrestling match where the teenage boy is simply trying to wrestle the teeange girl like he would wrestle any other male opponent. That is, he's not taking it easy on her because she's a girl but treating her like any other teenage boy wrestling opponent.
2. Several studies have shown how "almost all men are stronger than almost all women". Here are a couple of examples: reddit and HowStuffWorks.
3. Take this study which looked at hand-grip strength.
I'm pretty confident a majority of scientists studying biophysics, exercise physiology, sports medicine, and other relevant subjects would say hand-grip strength is a fair measure of upper body strength in wrestling. For example, wrestling involves hand grappling and related moves. Also, hand use isn't isolated to the hand alone but in fact can often involve forearm, arm, shoulder, and other proximal components of the musculoskeletal system. And so on.
Continuing, the study looked at hand-grip strength in "1,654 healthy men and 533 healthy women aged 20-25 years" including "60 highly trained elite female athletes from sports known to require high hand-grip forces (judo, handball)".
Nevertheless, the study still found that in terms of hand-grip strength: "90% of females produced less force than 95% of males".
Moreover, while the study did find "female athletes were significantly stronger (444 N) than their untrained female counterparts, this value corresponded to only the 25th percentile of the male subjects".
Perhaps most unexpected of all was that the "results of female national elite athletes even indicate that the strength level attainable by extremely high training will rarely surpass the 50th percentile of untrained or not specifically trained men".
4. All this is just the tip of the iceberg of what could be said about male strength in comparison to female strength in sports (wrestling). One could easily go into far more breadth as well as depth about the biophysics of fractures and other injuries. Like how much force a boy in an equal wrestling weight class would need to exert on a girl in order to break her finger, wrist, arm, dislocate her shoulder, cause a concussion, cause spinal trauma, and so on and so forth.
Delete5. A side note on fractures. Some fractures are easier or harder to cause than other fractures. For one thing, there are different types of fractures. Like open vs. closed fractures (bone breaking through skin vs. not breaking through the skin), horizontally broken bone (transverse fracture), bone broken at an angle (oblique fracture), bone broken into three or more pieces (comminuted fracture), crushed bone (compression fracture), etc. Any of these are possible in this context, but some are more probable than others.
6. My understanding is there are two main types of amateur wrestling: Greco-Roman wrestling and freestyle wrestling. Some common moves in wrestling are the front head lock, head and throw, and suplex. Imagine a teenage boy performing any of these moves on a teenage girl.
7. Simply consider that boys wrestling other boys not infrequently cause boys to have shoulder dislocations (e.g. here, here), head concussions (e.g. here, here), and fractures (e.g. here, here). If a teenage boy can cause another teenage boy to have a shoulder dislocation, head concussion, or fracture, then (a fortiori) how much more likely would these be if he was wrestling a teenage girl?