Even lazier: check out this related thread discussing porn/masturbation and memory training:
Less lazy, on the off-topic of gender in competitive athletics:
Binary genders are absolutely relevant and well-defined from a natural-procreation standpoint. Perhaps in this case you might want to add need ternary, to include a “not procreating” category. So if procreation is of primary importance in human society, as it was in all ancient societies, then primary use of binary/ternary genders makes complete sense.
But ultimately the binary gender in modern athletics is a poor approximation of the population. Take the thesis of Gattaca and apply it to gender. The non-genetically engineered man is able to perform his way past his genetically engineered competitors and practically become an astronaut (not a spoiler). I think that if we had genderless athletics from young ages, we would see a lot more top-level female competitors.
I don’t know why males dominate the WMC leaderboard, and I see absolutely no reason to segregate the competition.
But the hormone mix does have an effect, and so my question is the following: In a population with a continuum of endogenous hormone compositions, should we try to level the playing field by segregating Olympic athletics? Segregating based on procreation potential is certainly arbitrary at best. And, if we define athletic-female-gender simply by presence/lack of a Y chromosome, then that might leave transgender males in the female-with-hormone-abuse category. And transgender females might be asked to compete with no-hormone-males. This debate is happening now in CrossFit.
My personal thought: Ideally, we should let all the athletes compete together, and have a diversity of leaderboards. The transgender female will never be on the XX/Natural-Hormones leaderboard, but she may dominate the “legally-female” leaderboard, and she should be welcomed to compete side-by-side with all-gendered athletes, especially in individual events. Individual events should have standardized rules. Here is a discussion in archery.
But this model breaks down pretty badly for team events and even for relay events. We can’t have our cake, whole and unsliced, and eat it too. Choose two of the three. If we need comprehensive gender inclusion, and need for world sports teams to represent nations, and need to approximate competition on a “level playing field” for hormonal use, then we will never be satisfied.