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Comedian Bill Maher’s exchange with science commentator Neil deGrasse Tyson on male-female “inequity” in sports underscores how unscientific scientists can be when captured by a “woke” agenda. Tyson has used his astrophysicist credentials to spout absurd views about day-to-day changes in gender identity while ignoring the dangers to women in private spaces, minors who get chemical castration, and free speech. Though the spat between Maher and Tyson may be a flash in the pan, the issues at stake matter. This includes safeguarding women’s sports from the intrusion of “transgender females.”

The Exchange between Maher and Tyson

Maher began by asking Tyson about the resignation of Scientific American editor-in-chief Laura Helmuth, who, after the election, attacked Trump supporters as “fascists” and the “meanest, dumbest, most bigoted” group.

Maher then pointed out that last year Scientific American published an article entitled “The Theory That Men Evolved to Hunt and Women Evolved to Gather Is Wrong” (Nov. 1, 2023) in which the female authors (one a biologist, the other a biological anthropologist) stated: “Inequity between male and female athletes is a result not of inherent biological differences between the sexes but of biases in how they are treated in sports.” Maher commented, “That’s nuts, and it sure ain’t scientific … Scientific American is saying basically that the reason why a WNBA team can’t beat the Lakers is because of societal biases.”

Tyson dismissed Maher’s concern, claiming mistakenly that the comment was only a tweet from the resigned editor-in-chief. He was also unwilling to criticize directly the statement that sports inequity for women was due to bias rather than biology. Instead, he attempted to salvage some truth from the statement, claiming: “Long distance swimming, women might actually have the advantage, you should look into that.” To this Maher retorted: “Yeah, maybe long-distance swimming … Well, I’m gonna file you under ‘part of the problem.’”

The Contradiction Between the Scientific American Claim and Their Evidence

As “nuts” as the quote from Scientific American was, the authors of the article conceded that there are biological differences between males and females that affect athletic performance, though not entirely in males’ favor:

Overall, females are metabolically better suited for endurance activities, whereas males excel at short, powerful burst-type activities. You can think of it as marathoners (females) versus powerlifters (males). Much of this difference seems to be driven by the powers of the hormone estrogen.

One can’t take “marathoners” literally, though, because the fastest women’s marathon time ties for 1465th fastest among all runners.

The article makes some interesting observations — for example, that females experience “less muscle breakdown than males after the same bouts of exercise” and that women are “able to perform significantly more weight-lifting repetitions than males at the same percentages of their maximal strength.”

The authors conclude: “If females are better able to use fat for sustained energy and keep their muscles in better condition during exercise, then they should be able to run greater distances with less fatigue relative to males.” They recognize that a counter-response would be: “Wait — males are outperforming females in endurance events!”

Their rejoinder: “But this is only sometimes the case. Females are more regularly dominating ultraendurance events such as the more than 260-mile Montane Spine foot race through England and Scotland, the 21-mile swim across the English Channel and the 4,300-mile Trans Am cycling race across the U.S.”

Even if this claim about females “dominating ultraendurance events” were true, it wouldn’t substantiate their next claim about male-female athletic inequity being due to bias rather than biology. In all other sports “males have inherent biological advantages, such as taller body height, … more muscle mass, greater muscle strength, larger hearts and lungs, higher maximal oxygen consumption, and stronger bones than similarly aged, gifted, and trained females.”

Records in Ultraendurance Events

Yet even their limited claim to female advantage is not accurate. The best we can say is that in ultraendurance events the disparity between women and men is not as great.  

Take the 21-mile swim across the English Channel. The record is held by a male (6:45), with the female record (7:25) 40 minutes slower. The time gap between the female record and overall record for two-way (16 hours 10 minutes) and three-way (28 hours 21 minutes) swims across the Channel are 1 hour 4 minutes and 6 hours 19 minutes, respectively. The longest distance ocean swim (155 miles) is held by a man (Pablo Fernandez of Spain), as also the longest river swim (299 miles; Ricardo Hoffmann of Argentina).

This doesn’t mean that women don’t shine in ultra-long swimming events. As regards current-neutral swimming, American Sarah Thomas holds the world record for the swims that are the longest (2017, Lake Champlain, 104.6 miles, over 67 hours), second-longest (2019, four-way cross of the English Channel, 84 miles, over 56 hours), and third-longest (2016, Lake Powell, 80 miles, over 56 hours). Penny Lee Dean held the English Channel world record (7:40) for 17 years (1978 till 1995). She still holds the world record in swimming from Catalina to California, a mark she set in 1976 (7:15:55).

As regards the 260-mile Montane Spine foot race, the records are all held by men, though women won two of the 34 events since 2012. With respect to the 4,300-mile Trans Am cycling race across the U.S., since 2014 there were 32 top-three finishers, of which two were women (with one finishing in first place in 2016, the 10th fastest all-time). A 2020 study found that “female ultra runners are [0.6%] faster than male ultra runners” after the 195th mile.

In sum, although women have achieved notable successes in ultraendurance events (swimming, footrace, bicycling), even in these events men still dominate. A 2018 study found that since the 1990s “sex differences between the world’s best athletes in most events have remained relatively stable at approximately 8–12%. The exceptions are events in which upper-body power is a major contributor, where this difference is more than 12%, and ultraendurance swimming, where the gap is now less than 5%.”

Of course, this does not mean that great women athletes are not better than most men. But it does mean that the best men beat the best women.

Why This Matters

The claim in Scientific American attributing “inequity between male and female athletes” to bias rather than biology is false. In sport after sport, males have a decided advantage over females: boxing, wrestling, weightlifting, football, soccer, basketball, baseball, hockey, golf, track, tennis, swimming, rowing, volleyball, skiing, skating, archery, squash, bicycling, judo, karate, lacrosse, etc. A partial exception is shooting. One study found that women are as good at shooting as men, but only so long as the target is stationary.

Why does this matter? It matters because we live in a day and age of craziness, where nonsense claims about “inequity between males and female athletes” being due to bias, not biology, go hand in hand with support for female-identifying males in female sports. Even when “transgender females” undergo hormone therapy, they still have a significant advantage. “Men have 30–60 percent higher muscle strength than women, and undergoing testosterone suppression decreases that strength by only 0–9 percent.” This puts real women at a major disadvantage. In contact sports, it also puts them in harm’s way.

Recognizing this obvious reality is not an anti-woman view. It is a pro-woman view because it preserves the integrity of female sports from unwanted, unfair, and unsafe male intrusion.

Robert A. J. Gagnon is a visiting scholar at Wesley Biblical Seminary and the author of “The Bible and Homosexual Practice: Texts and Hermeneutics.”