AdaTrans women have no advantage in elite sport, new report finds
MelmiTo be clear, the report doesn't claim it's proven that trans women have no advantage in elite sports, but rather that the biomedical evidence is inconclusive and that the methodology of existing studies has been highly flawed.
It does go into some potential sociological factors which is good, and it draws attention to the fact that these studies are seemingly often conducted from a place of transphobia to begin with.
I suppose it's hard to do science on it as it's such a loaded topic, and the number of trans athletes is relatively small.
Right. I think that's a very important distinction.
To take it a step further, I think it's probably quite intuitive and obvious that if you're born a male, go through puberty as a male, you will have a different body composition than a female. Even with hormone suppressors. They are claiming there is no evidence that this is an advantage.
Well it is, absolutely, depending on the sport. I don't know that it could be proven that bone density, for instance, helps people perform better. But I know that some sports there is an advantage to being taller. And hormone suppressors aren't going to reduce that advantage. So that alone is definitive proof that being born a male and going through puberty as a male is advantageous in certain sports (as male's are taller on average, than females). I don't know how you could argue that isn't true.
Then do we ban cis women who are tall or have a high bone density from women's sports? Do we allow trans women who don't have these advantages? Why single out trans people? If you judge that certain advantages are too much, why ban all trans people specifically?
chelseaThis is it, exactly.
Every time I've gone and looked into it, the research seems to indicate that trans women who've been on HRT for a year or two do retain some advantages due to testosterone-fueled puberty, but those advantages they may retain are well within the bounds of what's expected between cis women. In other words, sure, maybe a trans woman is taller than she'd be had she not gone through T-puberty, but there are cis women who are also tall, and we're not banning them on that basis. The same goes for any other advantages they (trans women) retain.
We are banning them specifically because they gained that advantage by going through puberty as a gender they aren't competing as. And none of those other women competitors had the ability to do that.
That is the difference. And I think that's a fine reason to ban someone from competing (AT A HIGH LEVEL, NOT CHILDREN'S SPORTS).
And I'm saying that's a bogus reason to ban trans women from women's sports. If their advantage is no greater than that of the advantages between cis women, then including medically transitioned trans women in women's sports does not un-level the playing field.
Emphasis on medically transitioned.
Some people seem to think that lgbt activists want to make it so that any male athlete could just put on a wig, say "I'm trans now", steal medals from women and then detransition the next day. (As depicted in that Futurama episode.)
Letting trans people who have medically transitioned for several years compete is a very different beast from letting anyone who claims to be trans compete.