How To Believe False Things
Intro
[you can skip this section if you don’t need context and just want to know how I could believe such a crazy thing]
In my chat community: “Open Play” dropped, a book that says there’s no physical difference between men and women so there shouldn’t be separate sports leagues. Boston Globe says their argument is compelling. Discourse happens, which is mostly a bunch of people saying “lololololol great trolling, what idiot believes such obvious nonsense?”
I urge my friends to be compassionate to those sharing this. Because until I was 38 I thought Men's World Cup team vs Women's World Cup team would be a fair match and couldn't figure out why they didn't just play each other to resolve the big pay dispute. My world shattered when I realized how false this is, which I describe in a lot more detail here (link).
I’ve had multiple people express disbelief that this is possible. Here is how it is possible.
Who Are You Going To Believe? Everything Everyone Says Plus Everything You See, or Some Science-Illiterate Jerks?
As I talk about frequently on this blog1, autistic people have a natural tendency to believe that when other people say things they are trying to truthfully communicate what they actually believe. Because otherwise what’s the point?? Several friends say “Yes ok, but you have eyes, right? You can see things yourself?”
Can I? What is it I saw, when I looked around?
I grew up in a suburb of a small Blue city in the 90s. I did not see men fighting women. My time was spent in school where teachers interact via words and chalkboards. My peers were children and their strength was proportional to what grade they were in, not their sex. My siblings were younger than me, so weaker. My babysitter was older than me, so she was stronger. All adults were functionally infinitely strong.
At recess I read books. I opted out of gym as much as possible, it was humiliating and vulgar. The only post-puberty phys ed class I was forced to take was sex segregated so I wouldn't have had any opportunity to see differences. In earlier gym classes I didn’t look around much. Why would I? Are people comparing themselves to see how many jumping jacks they can do? I just wanted it to be done with.
I didn’t watch sports, but even when I was exposed to them they were already sex-segregated, so how could I have observed that women are having a hard time against men? Mostly I just noticed that women were excluded from sports altogether. I was told this was due to sexism, which lined up with everything I had been told about the world, so obviously it was true.
But the Olympics!! What about the Olympics?
Men don’t compete against women, so a casual watching of a nearby TV during a conversation doesn’t give any observations. To notice a difference I would have to look for the reported numbers somewhere on the screen, write them down, and compare them across the events. Again, this is not a level of interest I held/hold for sports.
OK, but what about all of media everywhere?
I grew up in the 90s. My media diet consisted of awesome stuff like Aliens, Terminator 2, Buffy, Xena, Dark Angel, the various Star Treks, The Matrix, Farscape etc. The rule for who kicked ass was "the one that's the main character." If an action movie or series had a woman in it, she kicked ass.
My books were science fiction and fantasy and Marvel. What determined the winner of a fight wasn’t muscles, it was cybernetics and laser guns, or dark rituals and spell books and magic swords, or getting the best mutation.
The very earliest RPG I played did have a tiny points-neutral modifier for sex, but by the time I bought my second computer game even that was gone. Stats were allocated by the player, and could be modified by race (elf/dwarf/orc, human/ghoul/supermutant) but never by sex. Sex was purely an aesthetic choice. Why would whether you have a dick or not affect how hard you can swing a sword?
The one difference everyone did admit to was men have a modest advantage in upper-body strength, so they’ll do more pushups and pull-ups than women can.
So yes, everywhere I looked, men and women were basically identical. It’s actually very easy to not get any evidence of male physical advantage if you don’t spend much time interacting with the physical world and all your second-hand sources are politely not drawing attention to the embarrassingly unequal parts of reality. And every disparity that does exist is easily attributed to the deep sexism of society which is as well established as the heliocentric model of the solar system.
I hold that — given my experience — I was more justified in my belief than anyone who claims that men playing against women for the World Cup would be unfair. All it takes is trusting that people believe what they say over and over for decades across all of society, and getting all your evidence about reality filtered through those same people. Which is actually not very hard.
Seems a bit wild, but also totally understandable that you might think this, given what you knew at the time. It's probably very common among left-liberal circles to have a weaker form of this illusion.
For me it was more learning that about 97-98% of women couldn’t beat the median man in a fight, and that it’s mostly biological, when I’d previously guessed it would be more like 80% and more cultural. Hardly a revelation, but still, when I go back to films I watched as a kid (e.g. Kill Bill), I notice this disconnect—at the time, I thought it was completely realistic that a trained female martial artist could beat most men, now it seems like pure fantasy.
Oddly, I think this belief made me a tiny bit more misogynist—I saw real-life women being physically weak as a character defect, rather than a biological reality.
I'm personally lucky enough to have been involved in both martial arts and weightlifting from a fairly young age, though I grew up a very sports-negative youngster, much preferring books and art over sweating. Besides other lessons, what both taught me was that a man of my same age, height, weight, and fitness level can physically outperform me almost instantly with little training. There would have to be an extreme skill differential between me and a man larger than me (and almost all of them are) for me to prevail in physical combat.
It has been difficult for me to explain this to young women. They don't believe me, think I'm being sexist or anti-feminist. They think I'm making some kind of moral statement. They are confident in the sexes being physically identical and act in the world accordingly. It's pretty disconcerting.