You might notice a few things here. 1. There are no black people. There are, in fact, hardly any people of colour (slightly more women than men, none in the couples).
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2. There are hardly any people over 35, and the ones who are there are still painfully good-looking. 3. There's is considerably more variation of body type among the men than the women.
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And 4. (this is most obvious in the couple shots) women are smaller than the men. Even the women athletes in these shots are small and slim, and in the couple shots we have men enveloping and bodily carrying women.
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Zoologists call this "sexual dimorphism". It's a problematic term but I'm gonna use it for a moment. Humans are a bit sexually dimorphic. More so than cats, considerably less so than, say, this lovely moth (image by Didier Descouens - CC BY-SA 4.0):pic.twitter.com/G3v1VWEdfl
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And this is where biologists & evolutionary psychologists come in with genetics, hormones, hunter-gatherer societies, etc. These are bodies, right? They are the way they are, it's all genes, and maybe a bit of exercise and nutrition. Nothing socially constructed here. Wrong.
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Physiology is a thing, but physiology is shaped and mediated by our social context.
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Look back at those pictures of "women". Those petite, delicate bodies, those faces we process as "beautiful". Those are the qualities that globally dominant Western cultures associate with "femininity".
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And sport is one of the institutions that fiercely guards and reproduces dominant ideas about gender, masculinity and femininity. This plays out differently in different sports.
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Generally, men and women compete separately. And for the purposes of sport "men" and "women" are defined as people whose bodies were assigned male or female at birth and whose gender matches that assignment.
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Sport, especially elite sport, really struggles to accommodate trans and intersex people. To the extent that they come up with increasingly ludicrous tests and definitions of what "men" and "women" are.
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Because MTF always beat women.
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