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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   25759 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 1, 2024

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It is a ticklish problem because genuine trans people who want to compete in sports will have to wait until the strength or whatever advantage is gone and they're down to general female levels. But that may take a year or two, and for elite sports, the years tick by very quickly, and being out of competition in your prime years may be a setback you never recover from.

However, I think that is a different case to the 'trans' athletes who demand that they be allowed maintain their usual level of testosterone or whatever because it's sexist/transphobic/medical gatekeeping to expect them to reach normal female ranges of hormones. That's not about fair competition, that's about "I'm so special I deserve this medal".

Someone needs to do a proper detailed meta-analysis on this question. The evidence I've seen has not been remotely favourable to the idea that puberty blockers and/or HRT bring trans women's athletic performance down to within a typical female range:

the International Olympic Committee (IOC) determined criteria by which a transgender woman may be eligible to compete in the female category, requiring total serum testosterone levels to be suppressed below 10 nmol/L for at least 12 months prior to and during competition. Whether this regulation removes the male performance advantage has not been scrutinized. Here, we review how differences in biological characteristics between biological males and females affect sporting performance and assess whether evidence exists to support the assumption that testosterone suppression in transgender women removes the male performance advantage and thus delivers fair and safe competition. We report that the performance gap between males and females becomes significant at puberty and often amounts to 10–50% depending on sport. The performance gap is more pronounced in sporting activities relying on muscle mass and explosive strength, particularly in the upper body. Longitudinal studies examining the effects of testosterone suppression on muscle mass and strength in transgender women consistently show very modest changes, where the loss of lean body mass, muscle area and strength typically amounts to approximately 5% after 12 months of treatment. Thus, the muscular advantage enjoyed by transgender women is only minimally reduced when testosterone is suppressed.

Agreed that I will never be persuaded that it's fair to allow males who haven't suppressed testosterone etc. to compete in female sporting events.

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