You should. Not because you’re some bold warrior for free speech valiantly defying the woke mob like you seem to think, but because you’re just flat out wrong. You’re spreading disinformation and acting like you’re standing up for facts.
Trans women who are engaged in medical transition are either taking high dose androgen blockers, or have had their source of androgens removed entirely. In fact, the average medically transitioning trans woman has less testosterone than the average cis woman. I know trans women who work out, who engage in physical sports and even combat sports. They struggle immensely with the fact that their bodies just flat out refuse to build muscle. I know people who do the kind of exercise and eat the kind of diet that would put the average guy at 200-220lbs within a year, and their bodies resolutely refuse to go past 140-160.
Trans women are at an astonishing disadvantage in sports. The few who excel do so either because they’re in sports where those disadvantages don’t matter (in which case, there’s no advantage to be concerned about either) or do so in spite of those disadvantages. This can be seen in the numbers; until recent panics started leading to bannings, many international sports including pretty much all of the olympics allowed trans women to compete as their stated gender, and yet trans women are actually under-represented among trophy and medal holders. Statistically, by sheer population ratio, they should be winning more than they are.
Transphobes love to latch on to any individual example of a trans woman performing well as if it justifies their argument, but when looked at in aggregate the statistics show that there is no danger of unfairness being posed by trans women in sports. No amount of bullshit about “bone density” and other meaningless shit that has never been suggested to matter in these competitions until hateful bigots needed an excuse can change the reality that sports are doing just fine. The only reason more trans women are winning in sports now is because more trans women are competing in sports, because more people feel comfortable openly expressing this part of their identity.
Does the changes to bone structure and density and muscle composition fade away?
Look it may all come under the negligible banner and that’s totally fine but the thing is that hand waving concerns and attacking anyone that has questions as transphobic doesn’t help when there legitimate concerns at high level sports.
The fact that you consider bone density as “meaningless shit” doesn’t do your argument any benefits as its widely considered beneficial for sports performance.
I honestly struggle to understand how trans women are disadvantaged if they’ve been through puberty as boys
If hormone levels are irrelevant to performance, why do cis male athletes dope?
Your premise that trans women who have been on HRT for years are physically and functionally identical to teenage boys isn’t based in reality. If HRT did nothing to your body nobody would take it.
Except i didn’t say that hormones were irrelevant to performance. Unfortunately its never such a binary situation.
I was talking about the physical effects of hormones while going through puberty.
If this persists then there will be advantages.
If it degrades over time then how long does it take?
Lots of professional sport is undertaken by late teen or early twenties athletes, will they still have ‘advantages’?
It really doesn’t matter in the vast majority of cases and possibly even all cases.
It is something that needs to be understood though given that it’s competitions that often feed into the professional scene and the data needs to support it
Before I respond in detail, let me ask, are you open to the possibility of changing your position? Because most folk aren’t, because facts don’t change minds when positions are held emotionally.
Here’s the thing, I don’t really have a position. I was asking questions because I don’t understand. To me it seems like there are physical advantages of going through puberty as a male and those advantages persist for a period of time.
My brief googling from several different sources backed that up but I’m certainly not an expert.
There also never seems to be any situations of FTM people excelling at sports like is reported of MTF. Happy to accept that might be a media bias issue.
I also don’t have any real ideological positions. Trans people are people and deserve to be treated as such I have no issue with that. I can only imagine the amount of pain and suffering they have to go through.
There just seems to be a lot of “trust me bro” type responses and down votes to any questions which in my opinion doesn’t help the situation.
There also never seems to be any situations of FTM people excelling at sports like is reported of MTF. Happy to accept that might be a media bias issue.
There are no cases of trans fem folk excelling either. At least not trans fem folk on hormone replacement for a decent period of time.
You’ll find studies talking about individual elements of physiology, and drawing extentions from that that. You’ll find studies that don’t take in to account the impacts of hormone replacement. And you’ll find studies written by transphobes with an agenda that outright lie.
But what you won’t find, no matter how hard you look, is any kind of evidence of systemic advantage. What you won’t find is any kind of study that looks at real world sporting outcomes, and shows evidence of trans folk winning more than they should. You’ll find plenty of examples of trans folk being accussed of having advantage for performing well, but unless your position is that trans folk can’t compete unless they are actively disadvantaged, you should expect to see trans folk win sometimes, and place highly sometimes. That only becomes an issue when it occurs more than you would expect given the participation numbers, and it’s at that point, the evidence evaporates.
I want to bring up Lia Thomas as a classic example of what the media portrayal looks like. She is portrayed as a mediocre swimmer, who became a great swimmer when she transitioned. But, there is bias at play in the way that story is told. In order to swim in the women’s category, she needed to be on hormone replacement for a period of time (2 years from memory). During that time, her performance was impacted, but she was still forced to swim with men. And those are the stats that the transphobes will bring up, to call her a mediocre swimmer. If you look at her stats from before she started hormones, her performance was at an elite level. And after the impact of hormones, her performance was elite by women’s standards too, but she set no world records, and she was soundly beat by many cis women. Yet the stories you hear, tell of a trans women breaking records, and magically becoming a contender. Because the stories are part of a wedge tactic, designed to normalise the idea of seperating trans women from cis women.
This research compares transgender male and transgender female athletes to their cisgender counterparts. Compared with cisgender women, transgender women have decreased lung function, increasing their work in breathing. Regardless of fat-free mass distribution, transgender women performed worse on the countermovement jump than cisgender women and CM. Although transgender women have comparable absolute V̇O2max values to cisgender women, when normalised for body weight, transgender women’s cardiovascular fitness is lower than CM and women. Therefore, this research shows the potential complexity of transgender athlete physiology and its effects on the laboratory measures of physical performance. A long-term longitudinal study is needed to confirm whether these findings are directly related to gender-affirming hormone therapy owing to the study’s shortcomings, particularly its cross-sectional design and limited sample size, which make confirming the causal effect of gender-affirmative care on sports performance problematic.
Now, it’s guilty of the very thing I pointed out earlier. It looks at a single attribute in isolation, and draws conclusions from it. But when you compare it with studies that find advantage in other areas, it becomes clear, that the answer will not be found in studies highlight individual areas. What does an advantage in height mean for example, if offset by cardiovascular disadvantage?
There is a reason we don’t see trans women dominating sports. And that’s because they don’t. Anything telling you otherwise, is pushing an agenda.
And of course, I’m pushing an agenda too. But my agenda is to not be excluded from the sports I love, and not to have sports used as an excuse to exclude me from other arease of society. My agenda is my safety.
I’ve posted things like this many times before, and rarely does it get anywhere, because people have already made up their mind. You claim to have not made up yours, but if you are reading this and your first instinct is to try and find rebuttals and arguments, then I’d suggest to you that maybe you have made up your mind already. If your first instinct wasn’t a defensive desire to argue and debate the topic, then well, you’re one of the rare ones…
Thank you for taking the time to reply in detail. That study makes for an interesting read although as you mention, it does highlight that there are statisticaly significant differences both positive and negative.
I’ll admit that I don’t like the way the conclusion is written in that it only covers negative or neutral aspects and ignores or ‘normalises’ the positive aspects behind body mass. Normalised performance is relevant for weight class sports but if trans men are generally bigger and therefore stronger overall then it becomes a bit moot.
The Absolute Average Power and peak power values in the reports correction are pretty significant.
This may very well be offset by the other negative impacts listed such as CV fitness etc
As you said, it’s a relatively narrow lens that makes it difficult to expand to a wider view.
You do make a very good point about performance vs participation and it does suggest a conclusion that any differences ballance each other out.
I’d like to see a study that could confirm that as it would be great evidence to show relative performance equality.
The low number of trans athletes (yes I’m aware of the irony/difficulty) would make such a study difficult.
Maybe the default position should be to let all trans people compete to allow for such studies.
On a personal note I hope you get to play the sports you love and that the world becomes more accepting. I wouldn’t hesitate to play (im too old and unfit to compete at anything!) with you or have my child compete against/with a trans person.
The irony here is that “simple reality” shows that in most sports, trans women don’t have advantage, and sometimes, have disadvantage in comparison to cis women. But that reality doesn’t align with peoples intuitive expectations of how it works, and thus, it’s incredibly easy to mislead people in to anti trans positions by using sports as a wedge tactic, which is exactly why it’s happening, and exactly why it’s working.
I could show you the studies backing up my claim, but experience tells me that you won’t be open to them. Facts alone don’t generally work convincing people to change their positions, because rarely have they arrived at those positions through facts alone. And given that you are vehemently arguing with people about a topic that doesn’t directly impact you and that you didn’t care about until politicians and talking heads started to use it to stir up fear and hate, chances are, facts have little to do with how you arrived at your position. Hell, you’re even waiving the need to look at the facts, by declaring that your position is reality, completely closing down the possibility you might be wrong.
You should. Not because you’re some bold warrior for free speech valiantly defying the woke mob like you seem to think, but because you’re just flat out wrong. You’re spreading disinformation and acting like you’re standing up for facts.
Trans women who are engaged in medical transition are either taking high dose androgen blockers, or have had their source of androgens removed entirely. In fact, the average medically transitioning trans woman has less testosterone than the average cis woman. I know trans women who work out, who engage in physical sports and even combat sports. They struggle immensely with the fact that their bodies just flat out refuse to build muscle. I know people who do the kind of exercise and eat the kind of diet that would put the average guy at 200-220lbs within a year, and their bodies resolutely refuse to go past 140-160.
Trans women are at an astonishing disadvantage in sports. The few who excel do so either because they’re in sports where those disadvantages don’t matter (in which case, there’s no advantage to be concerned about either) or do so in spite of those disadvantages. This can be seen in the numbers; until recent panics started leading to bannings, many international sports including pretty much all of the olympics allowed trans women to compete as their stated gender, and yet trans women are actually under-represented among trophy and medal holders. Statistically, by sheer population ratio, they should be winning more than they are.
Transphobes love to latch on to any individual example of a trans woman performing well as if it justifies their argument, but when looked at in aggregate the statistics show that there is no danger of unfairness being posed by trans women in sports. No amount of bullshit about “bone density” and other meaningless shit that has never been suggested to matter in these competitions until hateful bigots needed an excuse can change the reality that sports are doing just fine. The only reason more trans women are winning in sports now is because more trans women are competing in sports, because more people feel comfortable openly expressing this part of their identity.
I honestly struggle to understand how trans women are disadvantaged if they’ve been through puberty as boys. Every real world example I’ve seen of women competing against early pubescent boys goes very one way such as https://www.goal.com/en-gb/lists/alisha-lehmann-switzerland-euro-2025-hosts-thrashed-under-15-team/blt569915d6561b9a2a#csbd8503c0a0d0c04d
Does the changes to bone structure and density and muscle composition fade away? Look it may all come under the negligible banner and that’s totally fine but the thing is that hand waving concerns and attacking anyone that has questions as transphobic doesn’t help when there legitimate concerns at high level sports.
The fact that you consider bone density as “meaningless shit” doesn’t do your argument any benefits as its widely considered beneficial for sports performance.
If hormone levels are irrelevant to performance, why do cis male athletes dope?
Your premise that trans women who have been on HRT for years are physically and functionally identical to teenage boys isn’t based in reality. If HRT did nothing to your body nobody would take it.
Except i didn’t say that hormones were irrelevant to performance. Unfortunately its never such a binary situation.
I was talking about the physical effects of hormones while going through puberty.
If this persists then there will be advantages. If it degrades over time then how long does it take? Lots of professional sport is undertaken by late teen or early twenties athletes, will they still have ‘advantages’? It really doesn’t matter in the vast majority of cases and possibly even all cases.
It is something that needs to be understood though given that it’s competitions that often feed into the professional scene and the data needs to support it
Literally, yes…
Except I don’t think it’s that clear https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/61346517 https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/55/11/577 It might just be that a time window needs to be established in which case it’s all good.
Before I respond in detail, let me ask, are you open to the possibility of changing your position? Because most folk aren’t, because facts don’t change minds when positions are held emotionally.
Here’s the thing, I don’t really have a position. I was asking questions because I don’t understand. To me it seems like there are physical advantages of going through puberty as a male and those advantages persist for a period of time. My brief googling from several different sources backed that up but I’m certainly not an expert. There also never seems to be any situations of FTM people excelling at sports like is reported of MTF. Happy to accept that might be a media bias issue. I also don’t have any real ideological positions. Trans people are people and deserve to be treated as such I have no issue with that. I can only imagine the amount of pain and suffering they have to go through. There just seems to be a lot of “trust me bro” type responses and down votes to any questions which in my opinion doesn’t help the situation.
There are no cases of trans fem folk excelling either. At least not trans fem folk on hormone replacement for a decent period of time.
You’ll find studies talking about individual elements of physiology, and drawing extentions from that that. You’ll find studies that don’t take in to account the impacts of hormone replacement. And you’ll find studies written by transphobes with an agenda that outright lie.
But what you won’t find, no matter how hard you look, is any kind of evidence of systemic advantage. What you won’t find is any kind of study that looks at real world sporting outcomes, and shows evidence of trans folk winning more than they should. You’ll find plenty of examples of trans folk being accussed of having advantage for performing well, but unless your position is that trans folk can’t compete unless they are actively disadvantaged, you should expect to see trans folk win sometimes, and place highly sometimes. That only becomes an issue when it occurs more than you would expect given the participation numbers, and it’s at that point, the evidence evaporates.
I want to bring up Lia Thomas as a classic example of what the media portrayal looks like. She is portrayed as a mediocre swimmer, who became a great swimmer when she transitioned. But, there is bias at play in the way that story is told. In order to swim in the women’s category, she needed to be on hormone replacement for a period of time (2 years from memory). During that time, her performance was impacted, but she was still forced to swim with men. And those are the stats that the transphobes will bring up, to call her a mediocre swimmer. If you look at her stats from before she started hormones, her performance was at an elite level. And after the impact of hormones, her performance was elite by women’s standards too, but she set no world records, and she was soundly beat by many cis women. Yet the stories you hear, tell of a trans women breaking records, and magically becoming a contender. Because the stories are part of a wedge tactic, designed to normalise the idea of seperating trans women from cis women.
I’ll also point you at this study…
https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/58/11/586.full
Now, it’s guilty of the very thing I pointed out earlier. It looks at a single attribute in isolation, and draws conclusions from it. But when you compare it with studies that find advantage in other areas, it becomes clear, that the answer will not be found in studies highlight individual areas. What does an advantage in height mean for example, if offset by cardiovascular disadvantage?
There is a reason we don’t see trans women dominating sports. And that’s because they don’t. Anything telling you otherwise, is pushing an agenda.
And of course, I’m pushing an agenda too. But my agenda is to not be excluded from the sports I love, and not to have sports used as an excuse to exclude me from other arease of society. My agenda is my safety.
I’ve posted things like this many times before, and rarely does it get anywhere, because people have already made up their mind. You claim to have not made up yours, but if you are reading this and your first instinct is to try and find rebuttals and arguments, then I’d suggest to you that maybe you have made up your mind already. If your first instinct wasn’t a defensive desire to argue and debate the topic, then well, you’re one of the rare ones…
Thank you for taking the time to reply in detail. That study makes for an interesting read although as you mention, it does highlight that there are statisticaly significant differences both positive and negative. I’ll admit that I don’t like the way the conclusion is written in that it only covers negative or neutral aspects and ignores or ‘normalises’ the positive aspects behind body mass. Normalised performance is relevant for weight class sports but if trans men are generally bigger and therefore stronger overall then it becomes a bit moot. The Absolute Average Power and peak power values in the reports correction are pretty significant. This may very well be offset by the other negative impacts listed such as CV fitness etc
As you said, it’s a relatively narrow lens that makes it difficult to expand to a wider view.
You do make a very good point about performance vs participation and it does suggest a conclusion that any differences ballance each other out.
I’d like to see a study that could confirm that as it would be great evidence to show relative performance equality.
The low number of trans athletes (yes I’m aware of the irony/difficulty) would make such a study difficult. Maybe the default position should be to let all trans people compete to allow for such studies.
On a personal note I hope you get to play the sports you love and that the world becomes more accepting. I wouldn’t hesitate to play (im too old and unfit to compete at anything!) with you or have my child compete against/with a trans person.
To be fair, I am too! I still run, but lets just say, my halcyon days are behind me :P
Removed by mod
The irony here is that “simple reality” shows that in most sports, trans women don’t have advantage, and sometimes, have disadvantage in comparison to cis women. But that reality doesn’t align with peoples intuitive expectations of how it works, and thus, it’s incredibly easy to mislead people in to anti trans positions by using sports as a wedge tactic, which is exactly why it’s happening, and exactly why it’s working.
I could show you the studies backing up my claim, but experience tells me that you won’t be open to them. Facts alone don’t generally work convincing people to change their positions, because rarely have they arrived at those positions through facts alone. And given that you are vehemently arguing with people about a topic that doesn’t directly impact you and that you didn’t care about until politicians and talking heads started to use it to stir up fear and hate, chances are, facts have little to do with how you arrived at your position. Hell, you’re even waiving the need to look at the facts, by declaring that your position is reality, completely closing down the possibility you might be wrong.