Mick Hartley

The boffins have been hard at work. Sex may be a more useful explanatory variable than gender identity for predicting the performance of athletes in mass-participation races, a new paper has found.

Published in BMJ Open Sports and Exercise Medicine, the authors believe their findings suggest it is valuable to include both sex and gender identity in data collection.

Dr John Armstrong, King's, Dr Alice Sullivan, University College London and George M Perry, an independent researcher from the USA, conducted a study analysing data on the performance of people who competed in the non-binary category of 21 races in the New York Road Runners database.

Outside of purely biological outcomes and criminology, little empirical work has been done to test the theory that gender identity is more important than biological sex as a cause of gender disparities in outcomes.

There are many theories that have received little attention from overworked scientists. The theory, for instance, that the colour of an athlete's underwear may be more important than their biological sex in sporting outcomes. Or their hairstyles. Do athletes named Brian perform better than athletes named George? Are gender disparities caused by astrological signs, or sunspots, or the day of the week on which the athletes were born? The list is, effectively, infinite. But at least a start has now been made.

The researchers found a sex gap in race times between athletes who identify as non-binary, and that there is no evidence that the gap between biological males and biological females is less for athletes who identify as non-binary. The results also indicate that non-binary athletes may have slower race times than other athletes once sex and age are controlled for.

Hmm. Perhaps they're too busy insisting on their pronouns (they/them) to bother with all that running and stuff.

Dr John Armstrong, Reader in Financial Mathematics at King's, said: “Gender identity is clearly important to many people, but nevertheless sex matters.

“Given the lack of empirical evidence supporting gender-identity theory, one should not assume by default that gender-identity is a more powerful explanatory variable than sex. Being an objectively measurable binary variable, sex has considerable explanatory advantages over gender identity.

“Our results illustrate that if we want to understand the needs of gender non-conforming individuals, it is vital to control for biological sex as it is likely to play a significant role in any analysis….”

For his next project, Dr. Armstrong is proposing to monitor bears, as to date there has been a marked lack of empirical studies into the question of whether or not they shit in the woods. Also, popes – are they really catholic?