Masters & Sex

A Paralympic trans-identifying male 50 year old is a brilliant n=1 to understand male advantage.

You don't need to be a developmental biologist to understand what's about to go down in Paralympic track & field. Rest your oar, Dr. Hilton. Italy's Valentina Petrillo is unequivocally a male, began "transitioning" in 2019, and upgraded his win streak in the men's category to a treble of national records in the female category.

Two interesting wrinkles in Petrillo's case. First, his age: he's 50 years old. Second, he's a para-athlete, with a visual impairment placing him in the T12 category.

Last year, I dove into Canada's record book for masters track & field, after a trans-identifying male broke the women's 45-49 age group national record for the 5000m. As I detailed in a Doomberg-ian 20+ tweet thread, across all age group records for track & field events, sex is equivalent to about two five-year age groups, e.g., the W50 record is on par with the M60 record for each event, and a female in the W35 group would be competitive against a male in the M45. Another way of putting it: for Canadian masters track & field, the male advantage equates to about 10 years of youth. One more sex-based soft fork of Brazilian jiu-jitsu's "Boyd Belt Law."

The Canadian data also indicated that the difference between the men's and women's record in a given age group was up to four times greater than the difference between the records in adjacent age groups for the same sex.

The graphs below show the Italian national age group records for the 100m, 200m, and 400m races.

The broad patterns are consistent with the Canadian data. Men are faster than women in every age group, and our times on the track get slower as our time left on this earth gets shorter. Likewise, the median difference between Italy’s male and female records in a given age group ranged from 16-20%. The median differences for the same sex in consecutive age groups was 5-9%. The most noticeable difference is that, in Italy, sex appears to be worth 3-4 age groups for these events.

Let's make it explicit that these records - the orange and purple dots - are for able-bodied Italian masters athletes in track & field. These are not para-athletes, like Petrillo.

The large star in the 50 age group of each graph is Petrillo's Italian national record for the women's T12/T13 para-athletics category, placed there because he was 50 when he set those records.

Petrillo's national records in women's para-athletics are faster than the age group records for able-bodied female athletes in the 100m, 200m, and 400m. His male advantage exceeds the physical, athletic, and social challenges of being a para-athlete in the same age group.

Petrillo will almost certainly be the oldest athlete on the track in Paris by many years. At last year's World Para Athletics Championships, the oldest T12 female athlete in any of Petrillo's three events was 33 years old. At the 2023 World Para Athletics Championships, a 41 year old woman competed in the T12 100m and 200m. All others, as well as all competitors in the T12 400m, were in their early 30s or younger.

But age ain't nothin' but a very contextual number, per the data from Canadian and Italian masters athletics. Petrillo, as a 50 year old male, is positioned to trounce a competitor in the F35 or F40 categories.

Petrillo's records are faster than the threshold times that were needed to advance out of the first rounds of the 200m and 400m in the last two World Para Athletics Championships. That all but guarantees that Petrillo will deny a female athlete a spot in the semifinals. Petrillo himself set the threshold time for the podium in the 2023 World Para Athletics Championships T12 200m and 400m, taking home bronze in both events. Within female para-athletics, being 50 years old is a trifle compared to being a male.

Before the reveal, a caveat: the results of my data analysis sometimes surprise me, but rarely does the raw data itself. This is one of those rare times. I've double checked, cross checked, and treble checked. If I'm wrong, I'm ready to own the correction.

The charts show Petrillo's national T12 record next to the masters (able-bodied) W50 age group record.

Here’s the thing: for the 200m and 400m, it's the same person. Petrillo holds the W50 age group records and the national T12 records for the 200m and 400m. Para-athletics and masters athletics fall under two different federations - FISPES and FIDAL, respectively. So even though it's the same athlete running the same distance, there are two independent record books.

Wanting to ensure that neither FIDAL's records nor my neural circuitry misfired, I looked for Valentina Petrillo in the official rankings of World Masters Athletics. There, I learned that Petrillo ran the W45-49 world leading time in the 200m in 2022, and the world #2 time in 2023; and was #4 in the world for the W45-49 400m in both years.

When I ingested (in a data analytical sense) the masters records, I didn't look at the names. I just wanted the result and category information, and I didn't muse - let alone think to check - whether a para-athlete would be in the masters record book. I know that Petrillo or any other para-athlete might compete in open or masters events. Petrillo runs without a guide, so it would be logistically simple for him and organizers of an open or masters meet. But I did not think a male para-athlete could outrun every female able-bodied athlete in a given national age group ever.

If that's ableist or sexist, I'll own the ableism. But it's almost anti-sexist, because I apparently overestimated able-bodied female athletes relative to male para-athletes.

No, that's directionally incorrect. I underestimated the male advantage. I had demonstrated, first with Canada and now with Italy, how the male advantage is like getting a refund of 1-1.5 decades if we choose, for whatever reason, to compete or measure ourselves against women. This present analysis suggests that the male advantage is like getting (or getting back) a physical capacity not directly related to athletic performance, but the absence of which diminishes performance through a combination of physical, competitive (e.g., seeing the lines on a track or using a guide), and social constraints.

I am uncomfortably close to checking some privilege here.

Advocates for the sex-defined female category in sports often point to parasports to highlight the fact that without categories, certain groups of people will have a very low ceiling for what they can achieve in sport. Everyone can show up and play, but able-bodied young males will be the overwhelming majority - if not the entirety - of athletes on the other side of any sort of performance threshold. Hence, sport has defined categories based on the most sport-relevant objective physical properties: sex, age, and disability status. Some sports, then, add categories that are similarly relevant within their sport, such as weight in boxing or wrestling.

A trans-identifying male para-athlete is a brilliant n=1 to validate that sex is the uber category. Sex > age, controlling for disability status; and sex > disability status, controlling for age.

Photo credit: Department for Culture, Media, and Sport / Flickr, under CC BY 2.0.