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Trans issues 2 - TG Women in Competitive Sport

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slab_happy:
{Okay, I just realized this turned into one of my ridiculously long posts, so apologies in advance for that.}


--- Quote from: JulieM on May 08, 2023, 12:17:44 pm ---From what I've read and listened to, it seems clear that no amount of hormone regulation can completely remove the male advantage gained through undergoing male puberty.
--- End quote ---

Personally, I don't think the science is anywhere near a consensus on this -- from what I've read, it's still very much being fought over. There's a massive shortage of research specifically on athletes (rather than trying to extrapolate from studies on untrained people), and almost all of the research reviews seem to be written by people with an agenda one way or another, which makes it hard to assess. I've got my personal biases, but I think there's room for good-faith discussion.

Nobody seems to be arguing about the fact that hormone therapy produces a major drop in performance across most dimensions; the question is just how much that is, how long it takes, and whether it's enough to remove all potential advantages.

And when people make claims about retained advantages from puberty, some of the time it's about things like height and bone density, which I raise my eyebrows at a lot.

Yes, people who go through a "male" puberty will tend on average to be taller, and height doesn't change significantly after hormone therapy, and being taller can be an advantage in some sports -- but that doesn't mean that a trans woman will have an unfair advantage over a cis woman who's the same height. Tall cis women also exist!  Short trans women exist! You're talking about stuff which is well within the natural range of variation for cis women too.

There was a mildly farcical thing a couple of years back when the Rugby Football Union announced that trans women players who were over 170cm tall or 90kg in weight would need to undergo a special assessment to see if they posed a risk to other players -- and a whole lot of cis women started pointing out that they exceed those limits.

(I'm over 170cm tall, and I think anyone who's met me in real life would be able to tell you that I would not be a safety hazard for anyone to play rugby with. Once they stopped pissing themselves laughing at the idea.)

It really strikes me as "off" to treat those things as examples of retained advantages and count it against against people that they can't change their skeletons, when it doesn't give them any advantage over a cis woman of the same height and build (and there are plenty of cis women with those heights and builds).

You have the logical implication that, in the entirely imaginary and implausible event of me getting into a climbing competition, it wouldn't be an unfair advantage for me to be the height I am, but if a trans woman competitor was exactly the same height as me, that'd be an unfair advantage caused by her being trans ...? Just does not make sense in my brain.

So that strikes me as very different from things like aerobic endurance and explosive power, which (if retained) clearly would provide specific advantages.


--- Quote from: JulieM on May 08, 2023, 12:17:44 pm ---If adult T suppression fully worked then you'd expect to see trans women performing at the same level relative to women as they did to their male peers before they transitioned but that doesn't seem to be the case - instead they go from good performances to winning medals, breaking records etc.
--- End quote ---

Except that no trans woman has ever won an Olympic medal (only one's even made it into the Olympics), and the only records being broken that I can find seem to be regional or age-group ones, and there really aren't that many of those.

I found one article on trans women winning medals and it had to resort to including billiards, darts and "disc golf" ("formerly known as frisbee golf" according to Google) to get the number up to 20, which suggests that the numbers are not exactly overwhelming:

https://www.outsports.com/trans/2022/3/1/22948400/transgender-trans-athlete-championship-national-world-title

Lia Thomas's best times aren't even near those of Katie Ledecky, the reigning record holder, and this round-up found out that her times wouldn't have been enough to win in most years out of the past 10:

https://www.essentiallysports.com/us-sports-news-swimming-news-lia-thomas-is-fast-but-stats-reveals-she-wont-even-make-it-to-top-10-against-katie-ledecky/

Most of the claims about athletes going from being good when competing as men to great as women seem to be based on micro-scrutiny of the careers of Thomas and of Laurel Hubbard specifically, and arguments about exactly how good they were or weren't when they were competing as men.

But Joanna Harper's work on trans distance runnners (which is very small scale, but among the very little research out there that's actually on trans athletes) found that people's age grades (their times compared to the records for their age and gender) stayed remarkably similar after transition.

Like I said, super small scale, it only involved eight people, we need more and better research, but I feel like that still puts it slightly ahead of trying to generalize based on two people:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/307766116_Race_Times_for_Transgender_Athletes

And you've had trans women competing in some sports as women since at least 1977 (when Renee Richards won a lawsuit to be allowed to compete in the US Open).

If there's this huge retained advantage, IMHO we should be seeing women's world records being annihilated, we should have seen it ages ago -- and instead the best trans women athletes are performing in a way which is completely in keeping with how very good women athletes in their sport are performing. They're not even at the very top! None of them have been truly exceptional or ground-breaking so far, just "very good"!

So we get into these micro-arguments about whether these two specific athletes went from "pretty good" competing as men to "very good" competing as women, or not. To me, that's just not enough to convince me that there's this obvious retained advantage.

slab_happy:

--- Quote from: Fiend on May 06, 2023, 07:32:21 pm ---3. Yes BUT subject to strict regulations about when the TG women have started hormone therapy and started transitioning, to prevent excess advantageous development as biological males (this has been proposed in some sports bodies, sorry no citations I'll leave that slab_happy)
--- End quote ---

Oh hi, it's me! :wave:

If you're thinking about the sports (e.g. World Aquatics) which have announced that they'll allow trans women to compete only if they can prove they did not experience “any part of male puberty beyond Tanner Stage 2 or before age 12, whichever is later" -- IMHO, that's actually cruel, because not only do incredibly few children get started on medical treatment that early, it's in a climate where half the world is doing its damnedest to ensure that even fewer are allowed to:

"We're going to ban gender-affirming medical care for kids -- but then we'll punish people because they weren't able to get it quickly enough!"

It might not be an unreasonable move in a world where it was normal and common and easy for trans kids to be getting medical treatment by the age of 12, and people who didn't come out and get treatment until later would be the rare unfortunate exceptions.

But it's a slap in the face when it's almost impossible for anyone to meet those criteria.

In the UK currently, I believe that to be getting puberty blockers by 12, you’d need to be out as trans, have convinced your family to get on board, have a referral, and get onto the GIDS waiting list by around age 7.  And there are some kids who are that loud and assertive about who they are, but it’s still a hell of a hurdle to expect a seven-year-old to clear!

However, regarding the miniscule group of people who did get treatment that early (and I don't know if there are even any competitive athletes from that group at the moment), I will note that as far as I can see, there's no conceivable way they could have an advantage. They can't retain any advantages from having gone through male puberty, because they never went through it.

(And pre-puberty, performance differences between boys and girls are more-or-less nonexistent.)

So if 2 and 4 would ban even those women who transitioned before puberty, I can't see any rationale for that except transphobia.

slab_happy:

--- Quote from: Will Hunt on May 07, 2023, 10:29:37 am ---None of the above.
There should be a balance struck between the rights of non-trans people to fair competition and the rights of trans people to inclusion, but you're not going to achieve that with a one-size-fits-all approach. There is far too much variation between sports and within the population of competing trans people to apply one pan-sport rule. Much better would be for a sport's governing body to have a panel of experts who know the sport and its science to make decisions on an individual basis. This body can hand down a guidance policy to the grass roots and, if they cannot make a decision or if there is an appeal, it can be referred up the chain.

There's probably practical issues within that model but that's my "in an ideal world" scenario.

--- End quote ---

This is a valid point. Different sports have really different demands and contexts.

I'm fascinated that roller derby is one of the few sports with a significant number of trans athletes (at least partly due to its ties with queer communities), and it's a fairly brutal full-contact sport, though one that has roles for players of a wide range of sizes and builds  -- and based on their experiences with inclusion, they've gone in from including trans women if they provide evidence of testosterone suppression to "fuck it, if you want to be in you're in":

https://www.teenvogue.com/story/anti-trans-laws-sports-roller-derby

abarro81:
Will try to find time to reply sometime when on my laptop not my phone, but I broadly disagree with most of slab_happy's analysis. Fortunately (from my perspective!) most of the elite sporting world also seems to. Agree that more research would, hopefully, make things easier

Stu Littlefair:
One of the issues you can take with slab_happy’s thoughts are that you can’t cherry pick height and bone density alone and say “well there are some tall women too”. There are two big problems here.

1) it’s not just these two traits, it’s height, bone density, muscle mass, aerobic endurance, etc etc. The best  evidence (and for sure it’s not perfect) tells us that none of those advantages can be removed entirely.

2) sure, there are some tall women, but an averagely tall man like Barrows is taller than 99.99 percent of U.K. women. So you take a tall, but not outstanding man who after transition would be an exceptional woman, which is kind of the whole point.

There are more things I disagree with in those posts, but I’ll leave something for barrows.

For the reasons slab_happy has pointed out I think option 3 is barbaric.

Despite being quite confident that trans participation in women’s sport is unfair to cis female athletes I still think you have to trade off inclusivity and fairness. Sport isn’t JUST about the Olympics and winning medals so there’s a case to be made for accepting some level of unfairness to cis women competitors for the benefits given by inclusivity at the grass roots level.

There’ll also be some sports where the male advantage is small enough that trans women could take part in female events without “too much” unfairness.

But in general, I feel that the male advantage is just too large (20% in jumps FFS!) and too hard to remove that the default should be that sports should have an open and a female category. And this is definitely true for contact sports or those with safety implications.

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