[Fiend]

It seems it's okay to discuss sensitive gender issues on this forum so far, and this is a topic I've been wanting to post for a while to see what ideas people can explore, so here we go. This is meant to be separate from the general trans issues thread, and hopefully it will work to keep general TG issues there.

This topic about the question: Should what degree should trans-gender women be able to compete in biological women's sport events? And of course on here it can apply very much to climbing competitions.

A couple of assumptions (this is based on my understanding, not extensive research):
1. There is a consistent difference between biological males and biological females in most physical aspects of most sports (presumably including muscle mass, strength, speed, endurance etc), and this leads to a consistent difference in competitive sport performance, hence almost universal segregation of men's and women's competitive sports to provide a more equal playing field within the genders.
2. Since the difference is usually manifest as biological males having an advantage over biological females, the main TG-related issue would seem to be that TG women could have a possible advantage over biological women, and that the other way around, TG men are less likely to have a possible advantage over biological men, hence the focus of the question.

So back to the question:

 Should what degree should trans-gender women be able to compete in biological women's sport events, given that they could have an advantage over biological women due to having been born biological men had having gone through some advantageous physical development as biological men?

From chatting to a few friends, male and female, there seems to be a few "solutions":

1. Yes they should be allowed, subject to mild regulations such as hormone levels, as that's most fair to TG women - but this is then possibly unfair to biological women athletes due the possible advantage above.

2. No they should not be allowed as that's most fair to biological women - but this is then possibly unfair to TG women who are wanting to treated fully as female and thus express themselves as female athletes.

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), as this will have the closest possible result of being a level playing field as the TG women will be as close as possible physically as biological women - but this seems to have a whole lot of complexities as to what is suitably stringent and also what could be dangerous or premature for TG women.

4. No BUT there should be a separate category for TG athletes, as this would bypass the physical advantage issue - but there's unlikely to be nearly enough TG athletes for this to be feasible.


It seems to me there is no right answer, only "least wrong" ones. Having said that, in a very small sample size, it seems to be 2. i.e. No, that is the least wrong. My transphobic friends jump on that straight away with militant dogmatism that precludes any form of discussion or acknowledgement of it being a grey area and other answers being worth considering, but my open-minded friends, and myself, also conclude 2. (or maybe 2.5!) after some pondering and discussion, if only on the basis of ethical principles of the most happiness / least harm to the greater number of people.

However I would be interested to read other ideas!!

P.S. This can very obviously be viewed in the context: What would one feel ethically about the issue, as a spectator, interested follower, or indeed female climber, in terms of the IFSC climbing competitions (which I'm now back watching with interest)??

[petejh]

I’ll kick off by saying you’re asking the wrong question to get to a sensible answer.

A better question to ask would be:
What is ‘sport’ and what is sport’s purpose? To what extent should ‘sport’ be regulated (or not regulated) to provide as level a playing field as possible for all sporting participants? To what extent does amateur versus professional status in sport change the answer?

Figure that out, and the gender/transgender status of participants in ‘sport’ naturally follows.

But my knee-jerk answer would be ‘4’. Not enough participants? Well-done you got a silver for being second out of 3. Used to be the same for some age groups/genders in climbing comps but numbers grow over time to reflect increased prevalence in the population. That seems ‘fair’.

[sdm]

The separate female category exists because males are bigger, faster, stronger, and have a greater percentage of lean muscle mass. In most sports, this gives males a significant advantage that cannot be overcome by greater talent or work.

The separate female category allows females to compete where it would otherwise be impossible for them to compete at the top level. In contact/combat sports, it allows females to compete without the added safety risk of competing with bigger, faster, stronger people.

Once someone has gone through male puberty, they will always retain much of that advantage over someone who went through female puberty. Hormone treatment reduces the size of the advantage, but it does not remove it, a significant advantage remains for life.

So I can't see any way that someone who has been through male puberty can be accommodated in competitive female sport.

That then leaves us with the question of how best to accommodate transgender athletes within competitive sport. I don't have a satisfactory answer to this:
1) They cannot compete fairly and safely in women's sport, regardless of hormone treatment.
2) They cannot compete fairly and safely with men or they'll be subject to the same disadvantages.
3) Having a separate transgender category (or 2 categories?) seems exclusionary. In niche sports, there would be very few people to compete against. This still feels like the least bad option to me.

[Wellsy]

3

Especially as its not like athletes aren't already subjected to strict hormonal regulations anyway (which a lot of them circumvent)

[Will Hunt]

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.

[Fiend]

Pete: I'll kick it right back at you with the riposte that the question I've posted is the question people are actually asking (and is more interesting and of more practical concern than whether Rowling should be crucified upside down or boiled in acid (whynotboth?)), from what I see in the media and social media. I don't see as many people asking questions about the existential nature of sport - BUT I do think yours are very good questions too (along with the value of competition too).

Will: Washing one's hands of it and passing the buck is definitely a valid answer. But if it's done on a sport-by-sport basis, what would be an optimum answer for competitive climbing?? (Given we're all armchair experts on that)


Incidentally I just remembered that I came up with another likely wrong answer whilst discussing this before:

5. Yes but without any placing, i.e. allowed TG women to compete in women's sport for their own personal challenge / satisfaction, but they don't get positioned within any rankings, don't get medals etc - the sort of compromise that will probably be unappealing for both sides.

[Will Hunt]

It's not washing your hands of it to defer the decision-making to people who actually know what they're talking about. Nobody ever gave me the buck to pass.

I'm not even an armchair expert on competitive climbing. For instance, I don't know whether there are any climbing-specific developments that occur during puberty which would confer a lifelong unfair competitive advantage.
One thing I do know about climbing is that it's possible to do well at it by being good at different elements of it. Was it Margo Hayes who flexibilitied her way up La Rambla with a less burly sequence than the men who were trying it? That might not be so applicable to comp climbing and I don't know to what extent hormone therapies will make things more fair. I think Taylor Parsons might have touched upon it in the podcast but I can't remember the specifics.

[abarro81]

2 or 4 seems best to me. I dislike Will's idea - if there happens to be a sport where sex doesnt matter then just remove the categories full stop

[jwi]

2 or 4 seems best to me. I dislike Will's idea - if there happens to be a sport where sex doesnt matter then just remove the categories full stop

Show jumping comes to mind as a sport where gender does not seem to predict performance. There are a few more.

For most sports, anyone who has taken steroids has an unfair advantage over other athletes as the improvements to muscle cells are permanent. That is why I think that there should be lifetime bans after testing positive for steroids, regardless of circumstances. If someone who has taken steroids still see themselves as a competitive athlete, well tough luck. (This is quite a lot more common situation than trans athletes, and I do feel a lot stronger about this than the original topic.)

[JulieM]

We've discussed this in person so I guess you know my views on this. I think we have to go back to the fundamental question of the purpose of sex segregation in sport. It allows women to compete on a level playing field, allows the best women to succeed and recognises female excellence and without it the Olympics etc would be a total sausagefest. This is because men have natural physical advantages in strength, power, muscle mass, height, body composition that mean that in the vast majority of cases they'll be able to run/ride/swim faster, throw further, press more weight etc than a woman of equivalent ability. I think this this is fairly uncontroversial so the question then becomes; to what extent can this be mitigated by interventions (e.g. hormone treatment)?

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. 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. The Science of Sport podcast has done several very good episodes going through the data that are worth seeking out.

The second question then is how much unfairness are we prepared to tolerate in the name of inclusion? The argument here seems to be that there aren't that many trans women so what does is matter if a few women are denied podium positions, sports scholarships, sponsorship deals, olympic places etc because the principle of inclusion is more important. And that not upsetting or disadvantaging trans women by making them compete with men in an open category is more important than not disadvantaging cis women. This is a value judgment that sports bodies are entitled to make but they should be honest that they're making that trade off instead of pretending there's a way to balance safety, fairness and inclusion with no losers. Personally my preference is for either a trans category or for the men's category to become 'open' as the best way forward in most cases, but I do accept that this does come with some psychological/emotional drawbacks for the trans athlete community.

As to climbing specifically, I do feel like there's less of a male advantage than in other sports. As a few points of anecdata, I used to be very into ju jitsu but sadly, there were few women at my university club at a similar level. So I'd often be paired up with men and even when weight matched, could be easily overpowered if we were at the same sort of skill level. In fact I've done a fair few male dominated sports (road cycling and MTB) and invariably, comparing my results in sportives or enduros, I place considerably higher against women than against men. But at my level I've never really felt disadvantaged in climbing vs my male peers, probably because climbing is so much more complicated with head factors, technique, flexibility, route choice etc all playing into it. But at the top end the men are better, they do harder problems in comps etc, so my suspicion is that the weight of evidence would suggest that trans inclusion in women's comp climbing should probably not be allowed.

[slab_happy]

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

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.

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.

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.

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]

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)

Oh hi, it's me!

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]

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.

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.

[petejh]

Not a convincing argument imo slab_happy. Your points about athletic comparisons between males/females ignore the selection biases that exist to even make it into the category of 'professional sportsperson'. To even get to compete in an event reliant for success on athletic attributes, by definition requires the person to be above average in those attributes. So any half-decent professional sportsman in any sport reliant on athleticism - strength, power, height, muscle mass, speed, etc. (ignore sports like snooker, darts, etc.) - is starting from a physical baseline of being *not* an average male.
You could be correct that it might be the case that 'average athletic former man who's now a trans woman versus above average athletic woman = level playing field'. But it's definitely not a level playing field if someone retains remnants of male power, strength, speed, height, reach, aggression, etc. As well as the training adaptations bestowed by those attributes while they were male and progressing in their sport. As you yourself say.

re: medals. It's relatively early still in the prevalence of significant numbers of trans women competing professionally as women (where they're currently allowed to). Why in that case would we expect any trans woman to have medalled at an Olympics? How many are competing at the highest level? Genuine Q btw - I don't know, but I didn't think it was very many. Small numbers of trans professional sportswomen shouldn't be expected to become visible in an even smaller number of Olympic medalists until the numbers get much larger.

Also - option 4 in Fiend's list doesn't preclude 'pre-puberty'. That was your take, not his or (I presume) anyone else's. I'd say in my completely-unqualified-to-have-an opinion that pre-puberty is likely to be more even than post-puberty. Which is sort of what the sporting bodies are suggesting no?

[JulieM]

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.

I agree there's a need for more research but there is clearly a consensus on male advantage. As put in the Sports Council report last year;

"Adult male athletes have on average a 10-12% performance advantage over female competitors in swimming and running events, around 20% advantage in jumping events, and 35% greater performance in strength-based sports (e.g. weightlifting) for similar-sized athletes. When average-sized males are compared with average-sized females, the difference is such that the males are half as strong again as females.

According to data from the NHS, 50% of males are taller than more than 95% of females, with longer, straighter limbs, and bigger hands and feet. Males have greater muscle mass (concentrated in the upper body), bigger hearts and lungs, and greater stamina through higher hemoglobin (oxygen carrying capacity) than females."

So to justify any deviation from that, such as allowing trans women to participate in female sport, then the onus must be on those who want to make the change to provide the evidence that no male advantage is retained after transition.

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.

Have you read Hilton and Lundberg (2021)? Their analysis of longitudinal studies suggests that "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.". So only negating a portion of the male advantage, leaving male bodied athletes at an advantage over female. (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33289906/). And Harper et al (2021) also found that "values for strength, LBM and muscle area in transwomen remain above those of cisgender women, even after 36 months of hormone therapy.".

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 think that was just a cack handed way of avoiding having the discussion about banning trans women from rugby but I agree it was poor - better to deal with the issue as a whole rather than try to make case by case assessments. Of course, now that they have recommended rugby remains segregated by sex there are a host of people arguing that it should be done on an individual basis...

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).

The difference is about the way those attributes are dispersed through the population. For basketball, being tall is obviously a huge advantage and so most players are exceptionally tall. The average WNBA player is 5'11" - well above average for women but a pretty average height for men. So trans women are far more likely to possess the attribute of being tall than the average cis woman, giving them a massive advantage. Now you could argue that, because this is something that can't be trained for that it's not an unfair advantage in trans women but to me it doesn't feel very fair. However, the height thing is a red herring - the main issue with retained male advantage is, as mentioned above, strength, lean body mass and muscle area.

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.

Yet. It wasn't that long ago that the rules for trans participation were much more stringent. Until 2015, athletes had to undergo a full surgical transition to be allowed to compete. We're seeing a lot more trans athletes now and they're performing at a higher level. These things take a while to filter through and we're only now starting to see the effect of people who were 'very good but not world class' switching over into the women's category. Personally I think the various sporting bodies are better off considering the evidence now and making a decision on the principle of it rather than waiting for a trans olympic medal winner and then having to decide whether that was because of male advantage.

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.

Is there anything in either of their past careers to suggest that they were competing at the same level? Laurel Hubbard was a fairly average male lifter but made it into the Olympics at an age 20 years past most weightlifters' peak, Lia Thomas seemed to be much further down the field. More recently Austin Killips just won the Tour of the Gila as well as various cyclocross events, despite only taking up cycling 4 years ago.

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:

Harper's work here methodologically unsound - in addition to the small sample size, less than half the times could actually be verified independently which raises serious questions about how far the data can actually be trusted.

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.

I refer to you my point above - we are staring to get close to the point where a good enough male athlete transitions and is in a position to do just that. But should we wait for that or should we make a decision on the balance of evidence that suggests that male advantage exists and testosterone suppression doesn't eliminate it? Personally I think it's far better for sport, and for the individual athletes involved, to make a decision on the principles of it rather than having to decide, on an individual basis, whether someone's victory is because of their male advantage.

[JulieM]

A final point (that seemed to disappear in my last post) is that unfair advantage doesn't stop existing just because someone doesn't win. I couldn't win the women's TdF on an ebike but that doesn't mean it's not giving me an unfair advantage. I'm also pretty short and I reckon there are some 11 year old girls who are taller than me and better at climbing. That still wouldn't make it fair for me to compete in a kid's bouldering competition.

[slab_happy]

Also - option 4 in Fiend's list doesn't preclude 'pre-puberty'. That was your take, not his or (I presume) anyone else's.

First off, what I said had an "if" in it -- if excluding the category of "trans women" also excludes trans women who transitioned before puberty (which, logically, it does unless you state the exception).

Secondly, that is very much the take of a lot of people, including politicians such as Nadine Dorries who've demanded that anyone who was "biologically born a male" be banned from any women's sports, or all the people trying to get even pre-pubertal trans girls banned from school sports.

You can't just assume "oh well of course people who transitioned before puberty would be an exception" without stating it.

[webbo]

In another life time ago I raced in veterans cycling road races. Sometimes to make up a decent size field of 60, they would put juniors males aged 16 to 18 , vets males aged 40 plus and adult women together. Although in general these were regional races sometimes they were part of national series for women.
Usually a junior won followed by a vet or two then the women. You could put the results down to tactics but I would think it was down to physiology.

[slab_happy]

The difference is about the way those attributes are dispersed through the population. For basketball, being tall is obviously a huge advantage and so most players are exceptionally tall. The average WNBA player is 5'11" - well above average for women but a pretty average height for men. So trans women are far more likely to possess the attribute of being tall than the average cis woman, giving them a massive advantage.

But we're not talking about populations, we're talking about individual athletes. No-one competes as a population.

This has the nonsensical implication, as I said, that if I as a cis woman am tall, I am not at an unfair advantage, but if a trans woman is the same height as me, then she is.

Actually, it has the even more nonsensical implication that if a trans woman is much shorter than me, she's still at an unfair advantage over me because she's "far more likely to possess the attribute of being tall".

However, the height thing is a red herring

Agreed! Which is why I think people should stop citing it, and it makes me skeptical when people need to keep doing so.

And Harper et al (2021) also found that "values for strength, LBM and muscle area in transwomen remain above those of cisgender women, even after 36 months of hormone therapy.".

Which, if borne out by other studies, would be a solid argument for saying "okay, three years is insufficient, you need to have a longer period of testosterone suppression before competing in women's categories" -- I absolutely agree with you on that much.

However, the Harper review also found out that all those values dropped significantly -- 36 months is just the furthest for which they could find data, and they found very little of that.

So my response is "okay, let's get more data on what happens at 3 years, and then at 5 years, and etc. etc." because I think there's quite likely to be a point where the advantages are gone (apart from unchangeable things like height).

I wouldn't presume that you keep forever loads of extra lean body mass that you no longer have the hormones to maintain, because that's not how hormones or bodies work.

(As someone currently being beaten into the ground by perimenopause, I'm feeling painfully conscious of how you don't get to just keep the athletic ability you built up before when you go through a hormonal shift ...)

They also found that trans women had a markedly lower level of strength and muscle mass than cis men even before they started hormones,  so they're dropping from a lower baseline to begin with, which is completely fascinating:

Of interest, compared with cisgender men, hormone-naive trans-
women demonstrate 6.4%–8.0% lower LBM, 6.0%–11.4% lower
muscle CSA and ~10%–14% lower handgrip strength. This
disparity is noteworthy given that hormone-naive transwomen and
cisgender men have similar testosterone levels. Explanations
for this strength difference are unclear but may include transwomen
actively refraining from building muscle and/or engaging in disor-
dered eating or simply not being athletically inclined, perhaps influ-
enced by feelings of an unwelcome presence in sporting arenas.
Taken together, hormone-naive transwomen may not, on average,
have the same athletic attributes as cisgender men.

(I'm not making a point here, just can't resist quoting it because I'm a massive nerd, that detail was new to me and I'm geeking out.)

Personally I think it's far better for sport, and for the individual athletes involved, to make a decision on the principles of it rather than having to decide, on an individual basis, whether someone's victory is because of their male advantage.

I agree that we're currently in a godawful situation where women like Thomas and Hubbard and Killips follow all the existing rules in their sports and compete entirely legitimately, and then get trashed by the world for doing so. Or, as with Emily Bridges, where they follow the existing rules and then the rules get changed at the last minute apparently just to prevent them from competing.

That's not sustainable and that's a shitty situation for everyone. Even if you don't think they should be allowed to compete, they're doing so in good faith because they love their sports and want to do the thing they're good at, and they deserve better than being treated as culture-war fodder.

[User deactivated.]

Surely this:

For most sports, anyone who has taken steroids has an unfair advantage over other athletes as the improvements to muscle cells are permanent.

Contradicts this:

...because I think there's quite likely to be a point where the advantages are gone (apart from unchangeable things like height).

I wouldn't presume that you keep forever loads of extra lean body mass that you no longer have the hormones to maintain, because that's not how hormones or bodies work.

[JulieM]

But we're not talking about populations, we're talking about individual athletes. No-one competes as a population.

This has the nonsensical implication, as I said, that if I as a cis woman am tall, I am not at an unfair advantage, but if a trans woman is the same height as me, then she is.

It's not nonsensical, it's the difference between an attribute being exceptional vs commonplace. A 6ft man isn't exceptionally tall, he's pretty normal. A woman being 6ft tall is up near the top end of the distribution. Ditto hand size, lung size and all the other things that tend to come along with height.

Actually, it has the even more nonsensical implication that if a trans woman is much shorter than me, she's still at an unfair advantage over me because she's "far more likely to possess the attribute of being tall".

No-one is saying that there isn't some crossover between male and female physical traits, that would be obviously nonsensical. An individual trans woman may not have an advantage over you because of height (because you're tall for a woman) but I don't think we should be going down the route of individually assessing specific people as to whether their male traits are enough to give them an advantage, rather we should be deciding on the basis of research whether retained male advantage is unfair to women in elite sport.

Which, if borne out by other studies, would be a solid argument for saying "okay, three years is insufficient, you need to have a longer period of testosterone suppression before competing in women's categories" -- I absolutely agree with you on that much.

However, the Harper review also found out that all those values dropped significantly -- 36 months is just the furthest for which they could find data, and they found very little of that.

So my response is "okay, let's get more data on what happens at 3 years, and then at 5 years, and etc. etc." because I think there's quite likely to be a point where the advantages are gone (apart from unchangeable things like height).

Fine, so let's revisit this when we have more data. But no evidence of retained advantage beyond three years is not evidence that there is no retained advantage. Until we have that data the presumption should be, on the basis of the evidence we do have (the three year data and the knowledge of the size of the gap between male and female athletic performance), that male advantage exists and is not wholly negated by T suppression.

They also found that trans women had a markedly lower level of strength and muscle mass than cis men even before they started hormones,  so they're dropping from a lower baseline to begin with, which is completely fascinating:

Of interest, compared with cisgender men, hormone-naive trans-
women demonstrate 6.4%–8.0% lower LBM, 6.0%–11.4% lower
muscle CSA and ~10%–14% lower handgrip strength. This
disparity is noteworthy given that hormone-naive transwomen and
cisgender men have similar testosterone levels. Explanations
for this strength difference are unclear but may include transwomen
actively refraining from building muscle and/or engaging in disor-
dered eating or simply not being athletically inclined, perhaps influ-
enced by feelings of an unwelcome presence in sporting arenas.
Taken together, hormone-naive transwomen may not, on average,
have the same athletic attributes as cisgender men.

That is interesting and highlights two things. The first is the need for more studies in trained athletes, as a better baseline for comparison on the effects of hormone treatment. The second is that it is possibly one of the reasons that trans athletes have historically underperformed - we have a more accepting culture now of celebrating people's differences and a less obsessive focus on 'passing', meaning trans women hopefully feel under less social pressure to try to conform to feminine norms and try to minimise certain male characteristics.

I agree that we're currently in a godawful situation where women like Thomas and Hubbard and Killips follow all the existing rules in their sports and compete entirely legitimately, and then get trashed by the world for doing so. Or, as with Emily Bridges, where they follow the existing rules and then the rules get changed at the last minute apparently just to prevent them from competing.

That's not sustainable and that's a shitty situation for everyone. Even if you don't think they should be allowed to compete, they're doing so in good faith because they love their sports and want to do the thing they're good at, and they deserve better than being treated as culture-war fodder.

This I totally agree with! It's an awful situation where people have followed the rules in their sport and are singled out and vilified, called cheats etc. I'm not for a moment condoning that, nor am I suggesting that there is a wave of mediocre men transitioning purely to gain an advantage. But nor do I think that people expressing concern about fairness in sport is necessarily the result of deep-seated transphobia or a desire to exclude trans people from social activities (though I think there's obviously a strong undercurrent of that from some bad faith actors trying to weaponise this as a culture war issue when they've never cared about women's sport in the past). I'm also positive towards trans participation in grassroots or community sport, where competition and excellence isn't really the point of the thing (as long as safety isn't an issue).

[slab_happy]

In another life time ago I raced in veterans cycling road races. Sometimes to make up a decent size field of 60, they would put juniors males aged 16 to 18 , vets males aged 40 plus and adult women together. Although in general these were regional races sometimes they were part of national series for women.
Usually a junior won followed by a vet or two then the women. You could put the results down to tactics but I would think it was down to physiology.

But trans women on hormone therapy are not physiologically the same as cis men, so that's kind of irrelevant here.

How close (or not) they are physiologically to cis women in athletic terms is what's under debate, but they certainly have substantial disadvantages compared to cis men.

(Seriously, the guys here should take a moment to contemplate how you’d feel as a climber if you were told you needed to have a medical treatment that’d reduce your strength, reduce your explosive power even more, make you start to shed muscle mass, gain at least 10-15% or so additional body fat, and for bonus points make your skin thinner so you’re much more likely to get torn up while jamming. And how desperate you'd need to be to go OH THANK GOD, YES PLEASE, BRING IT ON.)

[spidermonkey09]

(Seriously, the guys here should take a moment to contemplate how you’d feel as a climber if you were told you needed to have a medical treatment that’d reduce your strength, reduce your explosive power even more, make you start to shed muscle mass, gain at least 10-15% or so additional body fat, and for bonus points make your skin thinner so you’re much more likely to get torn up while jamming. And how desperate you'd need to be to go OH THANK GOD, YES PLEASE, BRING IT ON.)

I'm learning a lot from this thread but this strikes me as missing the point. No one is suggesting anyone is transitioning for competitive advantage unless they're a moron. The point is surely whether it is fair to cis women if this hypothetical guy would then go on to compete in womens climbing comps. Obviously its a trade off between inclusion and fairness as several others have pointed out.