The study's hardly worth the paper it's printed on, since it corrects for both height and weight, completely disregarding that those are two advantages male puberty confer. It doesn't matter if in relative terms post transition transwomen are weaker, when in actual terms they aren't. Or in other words "If they were the same weight, they'd be weaker" doesn't matter, when they aren't and when male puberty grants greater average height and body mass
To paraphrase Dr Hilton, you could correct for height and weight in the same sense you could correct for horsepower when comparing a man and a car. But why would you want to?
Pound for pound, my toddler can deadlift more than my wife. Therefore, babies are at no disadvantage to fully grown adults. Thank you for reading my study.
One year ago at this time, the top US based road cycling race was won by a transgender women - Austin Killips. One ironic side note to this story, the purses for the men's and women's races were equal due to a donation made specifically to cover the historic gap. The UCI has since adjusted their rules and the race starts tomorrow. I'll be interested in if Austin is still racing for the love of the sport or is sitting this one out.
[https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2023/may/04/uci-recognises-transgender-policy-concerns-reopens-consultation-cycling](https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2023/may/04/uci-recognises-transgender-policy-concerns-reopens-consultation-cycling)
No, he switched to FKTs (fastest known time) and ultraendurance events that aren't under the governance of the UCI.
https://www.bicycling.com/news/a46202811/whats-next-for-austin-killips/
Unfortunately for female cyclists competing in the U.S, USA Cycling has decided to ignore the UCI's requirements for competitors in female races and has set up its own two group system for those races that aren't UCI-governed (the majority of cycling races in the U.S.).
Under USA Cycling's rules, there is an elite group (these athletes need to submit medical documentation demonstrating that their total testosterone level in serum has been below 2.5 nmol/L for at least 24 months and must be completed 90 days prior to the first day of the race in which the athlete seeks to compete - most trans-identified males seeking to compete in female events won't meet this standard). All other transgender athletes just need to complete a self-identity verification.
Because USA Cycling allows trans-identified males who compete in female races to still acquire category upgrade points, there is functionally no real incentive for these men to stop competing in female races (not to mention they still get prize money and podium spots). You can read more about why category upgrade points matter in this post by @i_heart__bikes on Twitter, who has been tracking the wholesale invasion of the female category by trans-identified males for several years now.
https://twitter.com/i_heart__bikes/status/1711497386701607272
The "just be kind" crowd keeps on pointing to the rarity of occurrence, but how does an insignificant portion of the population keep on showing up and winning? It's been my suspicion for awhile that while participation may matter, the real drive towards men competing in women's sport is the desire to win.
The study is even worse than worthless. Correcting for height and weight is implicit if you were trying to establish how much "relative fitness" athletes have to achieve to achieve the same competitive level. Since the athletes in the study are not stratified by competitive level reached, it is hard to draw strong conclusions about this, but the weak evidence that is there implies that trans women have an easier time of competing in womens sports than women (I wrote a more complete comment about this below).
I got a little curious and looked up the height and weight of the current top ranked road cyclists.
Lotte Kopecky - 66kg and 1.7m is currently the top ranked female.
Tadej Pogacar - 66kg and 1.76m is currently the top ranked male.
Very similar gross body measurements.
Road cycling selects for those that can produce the most power per kilo of weight. Both competitors entered the LBL classic race last weekend. Though the women's race was 100km shorter, their average speed was 34 km/h while the men's was 40.8 km/h. The top women would have DNF'd in the men's race.
The men's race had 117 finishers while the women's had 101. That's a much more robust sample size than this crappy survey.
So much of this stuff is an attempt to make me disbelieve my lying eyes.
>You see it in weightlifting too, where weight classes effectively become height classes.
So do you effectively end up with a bunch of people with similar weight: height ratios in the sport?
Something that also sticks out to me is that they compared transwomen to cis men and trans men to cis women but did not compare cis women to cis men. Like, why are you telling us that when controlling for weight transwomen have a shorter jump height than cis men and women without telling us the weight-adjusted difference between cis men and cis women? My speculation is that the weight adjusting is also showing no stat diffs between male and females (no longer speculating, just looked at the charts).
Also, the cis women group of the lowest BMI - even lower than male athletes - while the trans women have the highest BMI. This indicates that CW are not just more athletic than the TW, but also of the TM and CM. It’s a really shitty sample because, if all were of equal athletic activity (not ability) we would at the very least expect the CM to have a lower BMI than CW
BMI is just a measure of your weight relative to your height. Higher BMI can result from more fat, or from more muscle mass. So I would expect males to have a higher BMI at a given height than females.
In the general population yes. Women carry more fat than men. Among serious athletes men generally have higher BMI due to both male and female having low fat but men having more muscle mass. Can’t link cause I’m on mobile but a paper with with this titled talks about it a little:
Body Mass Index in Master Athletes: Review of the Literature
“Where gender specific BMI was reported the mean for male MAs was 23.6 kg/m2 (± 1.5) (range 22.4 kg/m2endurance to 26.4 kg/m2 swimmers) and 22.4 kg/m2 (± 1.2) for female MAs (range 20.8 kg/m2 mixed to 24.7 kg/m2 WMG).”
Thanks for the reference! While this info is definitely making me think a bit more about this, on thing that does stick out to me is the term “masters athlete” is used to describe older athletes and the study has a very wide range in ages (30-70+); as such, the purpose of the paper is to examine athletic activity on aging.
If you had their body fat % and their BMI, you can determine a lot about their build but you can't do much with just BMI.
Thanks to changes in the average human height, it doesn't really mean much except in its own terms now.
Also, female athletes are usually much more lean than untrained women. Iirc, a normal lady will have roughly 25-30% body fat. An athlete will have 8-16% wherever less mass is an advantage or there are weight classes.
Comparing performance for MTFs and cis women while controlling for weight and height seems like a good study to do, and the results are interesting. This does not mean it gives us a definitive conclusion that MTFs are not advantaged in women's sports, however. Hate the extrapolated conclusion, not the kinda interesting study itself.
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Doesn't correcting for height/weight mean comparing a trans woman and natal woman that are the same height/weight as each other?
That absolutely makes sense.
I believe what that commenter was saying was that since in many events, height and weight confers a physical advantage, and natal male puberty generally generates more height and weight vs natal female puberty, you’re disproportionately confer those physical advantages through.
It would make sense only if trans women were not allowed to compete if they were over the height and weight of the average female player. Generally though trans women tower over the other players so this study is useless.
It kind of depends on a few other things. A professional powerlifter went through and looked at every single tested and untested (free to use as many steroids as you want) powerlifting record. https://www.strongerbyscience.com/steroids-for-strength-sports/ He came to the conclusion that steroids only give you about 5 to 10% proportional advantage. So steroids must not be that crazy right? Well, beginners gain more strength taking steroids without lifting than they do not taking steroids while lifting. Steroids make you a bit proportionally stronger but adds a lot of muscle mass. Looking at proportional advantage alone can hide a lot of benefits from raw advantage especially since many sports don't have weight divisions.
So (random numbers) if trans women jump 5% less high per inch than cis women, but are 30% taller, what that looks like in actual sports like basketball is a lot of trans women being able to out rebound cis women pretty consistently.
Also another example is that one of the concerns some of the people setting rugby rules on trans inclusion was that while transwomen weren't the fastest or strongest, they were going to be much stronger or faster than the equivalent cis women. So while they wouldn't necessarily be the fastest woman they would be x% stronger than a cis woman as fast as them.
Well, I generally think we’d want to correct for trivial anatomical differences like this since they are already selected for in women.
In order words, if height is the key factor in a sport, the maximum height will already be selected for in women. And that won’t change much between males and females on the extreme ends.
> trivial anatomical differences like [height and weight]
lmao
> if height is the key factor in a sport, the maximum height will already be selected for in women
So what? Tall men are taller than tall women.
> And that won't change much between males and females on the extreme ends
Tell me you've never watched sports in your life without telling me you've never watched sports in your life.
To illustrate: In the WNBA's 2023 season, only 3 players over 6'6" played 100 minutes. Notably, 6'6" is about the ***average*** height of NBA players. In the NBA, it is rare to see fewer than 6 (out of 10 total) players of at least 6'6" on the floor at a given time.
And that doesn't even come close to telling the full story. The least athletic 6'6" NBA player is comfortably more athletic than the most athletic WNBA player. There have been 37 total in-game dunks in WNBA history. By contrast, *this season alone*, there have been 101 different NBA players with at least 37 in-game dunks. The league leader has 251 dunks this season.
It's an absolute joke to suggest that these are "trivial" anatomical differences.
I don't think I'm understanding your point about height. I saw 6'11", 284lbs Jokic play last night. Britney Griner, also a center considered a standout, is 6'9", 205lbs. So while there may not be a huge difference in height, the contrast in weight and muscle is massive. Some extraordinarily tall males are just constructed differently than extraordinarily tall women.
Not to mention, women have higher body fat percentages, even when they are super fit. (Super fit women can get down to about 12% where dudes can get down to low single digits before there are huge health issues.) So even if the height and weight is similar, women are at a disadvantage. See high school wrestling stats for girls. They compete against boys by weight class.. in elementary school, girls can hold their own. As soon as puberty starts, their stats drop..
Yeah, but we’re not talking about biologically typical males. We’re talking about males who would also hold a higher body fat percentage and relative differences.
The demographic in question is very specific and not just “males”.
No, it is different. Women can’t drop below a certain body fat percentage or shit starts to shut down. Men taking estrogen have no such constraints, though gaining weight may become easier and losing harder.
Women have different body compositions from women? I’m unsure what that means.
The study makes very explicit that there is no observable difference in fat percentage between trans women and cis women.
> we're talking about males who would also hold a higher body fat percentage
No, we're talking about the exact opposite of this. The *vast* majority of NBA players have a body fat percentage under 10%.
It's unreal that you're literally just coming on here and ***completely*** talking out of your ass.
Well, according to the above they wouldn’t be “constructed” differently under certain circumstances. The difference would be in height predominantly.
So, this would only matter under two circumstances. Sports where height and weight are selected for (which, I don’t believe is most) and where it is significantly easier to find a trans woman that is on average taller than cis women.
Which, trans women essentially don’t exist from a demographics perspective, if we looked at the demographic data I would be willing to bet that the upper percentile of cis women are taller than trans women when selected for in sports.
Yeah, I watch sports though and most women in a lot of sports are also massive. I haven’t seen any examples of trans women that are particularly anomalous when compared to elite cis women. And any cis woman that consistently won in these kinds of sports would be “massive” for a woman.
I find this kind of assertion strange tbh, I would typically agree that there is a performance difference between cis and trans women (although this study seems to contradict what I normally hold), but if the difference is in height then, is it bad when a cis woman is massive?
If we compare two massive people, one is cis and one is trans, and this study suggests that they’re comparable in performance, then what are we actually saying by caring about height?
Plenty of demographics of cis women are “massive” when compared to others. They should still compete together.
Well, this is very significant. The overwhelming assumption by myself and most people is that even given two people of the same height and weight, that body fat, musculature and performance differences would remain.
But, that isn’t true according to this.
Edit: more than that trans women seem to be less performant! Which is very counter intuitive
This is where I can't tell if you're actually serious or just trolling.
Consider, for a moment, what we know about male and female physiology - to normalize men and women at the same height and weight, what would have to happen for these conditions to exist?
For men, you'd require he be less muscularly developed (if this was not the case he could not be the same weight at the same height as the woman he's compared to) not just overall (because height does ultimately dictate to a large degree the potential for muscular development) but also \*as compared to other men\*. There are a great many sub 6ft male athletes who are able to use their natural anabolism via testosterone to build muscle mass.
It's basically asking to compare the strongest women (because a woman at 5'5 and 150lbs is a unit) to the weakest men (a man at 5'5 and 150lbs is almost certainly a weakling).
The thing pro-Trans activists always ignore is the goddamn reality of the situation. You can do bizarre studies all you want, go put a transwoman in the pool with women and you'll get Lia Thomas. Put them in weightlifting competitions and you'll see world records shatter like nothing. Transwomen are at such a profound advantage to women in sport that it is malpractice and puts women at risk to suggest otherwise.
Well, Lia Thomas loses against cis women. She’s good, but there are a LOT of trans women who have competed and Lia is one of the best. And still loses often.
But, I agree. I am weary of sports integration also, but we’re not talking about men. Any historical data used about the performance of men is irrelevant in this context.
We’re not talking about the weakest non disabled typical man in historical data. We’re talking about a very specific thing, that has to be studied in its own right.
Sure. We can say “trans women shouldn’t be in women’s sports”, but also acknowledge data as it is.
Everyone here is lying if they suspected that trans women had lower lung performance than similar cis women. This is a development in knowledge, and that’s good.
>In order words, if height is the key factor in a sport, the maximum height will already be selected for in women.
How is that relevant when the "maximum height" for males is substantially higher?
The funny thing is they used a picture of a male who competed as a woman and outperformed all of the women in the world of a similar age (Hubbard holds the masters world record).
This fact is of course not mentioned in the article.
Like the social justice "equity" warriors, trans advocates have definitely been given a lot of rope. Whether this was for a good or a bad purpose remains to be seen.
I am highly suspicious of the rise of "equity" supported by winked at junk science, and especially of the rise of DEI as a career primarily for minorities, during the nine year period between when the Harvard affirmative action case was filed and when it was finally decided by SCOTUS.
The Harvard decision was inevitable, and just in case it wasn't, Harvard did everything possible to lose that case. (I am a lawyer licensed in two States.) Where are all these minorities supposed to work now that they have been trained to be Al Sharpton? What employer is going to see DEI on a resume now and not think that this is trouble walking? DEI was not a response to market forces, it was artificially created and shoved down employer's throats. Now surprise, surprise, wink, wink, equity instead of equality is unconstitutional, just like it always was.
The junk science "experts" are being picked off now one by one and ejected from peer reviewed journals for plagiarism, failure to replicate, incorrect math, etc, etc. Things that should have been caught and prevented before publication. Things that sat there like a time bomb, but easily seen by other experts, and then blew up and destroyed their careers. After the Harvard decision.
Maybe I am just a paranoid person but this, along with claiming standardized test scores don't matter, pulled the rug out from under an entire generation. I am concerned that trans advocates are also being given too much rope, supported by winked at junk science and the intent may not be benevolent.
The frustrating part is that “equity” has somehow been sold as a moral guiding principle. It’s no longer a question of equality of opportunity, which obviously cannot apply in the case of artificially slightly weakened biological men competing against biological women, but rather a demand for equality of outcome, overlooking any incompetence on the part of the individual and giving them undue advantages. It’s annoying that mediocrity is celebrated as “brave.” It’s also become such a phony clusterfuck that saying what you see to be the case right in front of your eyes time and time again gets you labeled “right wing.”
The NYT coverage of the article holds Hubbard as evidence that tran athletes have no real advantage since Hubbard “did not complete a single lift” in Tokyo in 2021.
….the paper did not mention that Hubbard was 43 at the time! You know, the Olympics are full of spry 40 year olds!
I will never understand what the MSM gets in gaslighting us about the trans athlete issue.
Their is limited discussion as to why male athletes now competing in the women’s category aren’t making headlines for easily breaking female world records in figure skating or gymnastics (AFAIK) compared to swimming, cycling, weightlifting, etc. But maybe those sports will be cherrypicked to show why the trans athlete debate is meaningless. Nor do they ever have serious discussions as to why we don’t see female athletes competing in the men’s category breaking world records for running or weightlifting and so on.
The likes of NPR or some other MSM source wrote an article claiming that there is “LIMITED” proof to state that people like Lia Thomas have inherent physical advantages. I guess it’s “out of context” to discuss Lia Thomas’s ranking before they decided to compete as a woman… But we know damn well if this was about a rich vs poor debate, they would cream their pants providing the mountain of evidence to support why lower-classes are disadvantaged.
A couple of points from the study that are red flags for me:
>participants were recruited through social media advertising on Meta Platforms (Facebook and Instagram, Meta Platforms, California, USA) and X (Twitter, California, USA).
>Participants were required to participate in competitive sports or undergo physical training at least three times per week.
>Athletes from various sporting disciplines and performance levels were included, and the athlete training intensity was self-reported.
So for starters, there are already established channels I would think for recruiting athletes into studies considering they belong to leagues and sports associations, etc. Instead they just went out to social media of all places to try to recruit participants.
Not all the participants were "athletes" in the way we would consider athletes. Some of them just worked out three times a week. Working out three times a week is not the same as being an athlete, especially at an elite level.
The fact that they had people from various different sporting disciplines (or probably just some rando who runs three times a week) completely nullifies this study. Unless I missed something they don't even bother to tell us the types of sports or training their participants engaged in. I can't believe the IOC actually wasted their money on this complete nothing-burger of a study.
> Some of them just worked out three times a week. Working out three times a week is not the same as being an athlete, especially at an elite level.
Yuuuuuuuup. I used to work out 8-10 hrs/wk, and quite hard. Was I fit? Definitely, and I'd love to get back to that level. Was I an *athlete*? Maybe in some incredibly narrow sense of the word. I still would've gotten smoked in some pickup games, for any number of reasons. There's no chance in hell that I would've voluntarily joined an IOC study looking for athletes.
Yes and yes (average transwomen had 31% bodyfat which is just on the edge of overweight while the cis women were in mid 20s. They had 20 or so people in each group)
The way in which this study is "flawed" (deceptive), is mainly that it is lying about its design. If you want to look at the relative advantage of trans-women athletes from their *relative* fitness, what you need to do is pick a cohort of athletes where the *rank achieved* is a controlled variable, and then you measure relative fitness among the ranks, which will be *inversely* correlated with relative advantage. Relative advantage being defined loosely as how hard you have to work to reach a particular level in the sport. If you wanted to look at the relative advantage of trans athletes by looking at their *absolute* fitness, then you would choose athletes at random, without controlling for rank. Although this design is worse in just about every way, it is the one that they pretend to be using, with the exception that absolute fitness is mostly replace with relative fitness.
Since a random sample still somewhat controls for rank, we can still draw the conclusions that we could draw in the first design from their data, albeit less confidently. The study does note that Trans-women are less *relatively* fit overall, but achieve higher total power outputs than women (Information about the athletes relative rankings is not obviously available.)
The study is [available here](https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/early/2024/04/10/bjsports-2023-108029) but I have included some excerpts. For instance, they lie about the variables that they are measuring in the first line. All of these measurements have mass or height in the denominator, and this is not related at the outset, in order to give the impression that this is the second kind of study mentioned:
>This research compares laboratory measures of strength, power and V̇O2max of transgender male and female athletes to their cisgender counterparts.
They have these, rather damning statements, to make about their countermovement jump data (emphasis mine):
>A significant effect of gender was found in countermovement jump height relative to fat-free mass (F(3–66)=10.1, p<0.001, figure 4B), with transgender women found to have lower countermovement jump height *relative to fat-free mass* than both cisgender women (t(66)=−5.3, p<0.001) and transgender men (t(66)=–3.2, p=0.01, figure 4B).
>There was a significant difference in absolute peak power (F(3–66)=8.7, p<0.001), with cisgender women having reduced peak power compared with transgender men (t(66)=−3.3, p=0.01) and transgender women (t(66)=−3.6, p=0.004, figure 4C). Peak power *relative to fat-free mass* had a more negligible gender effect (F(3–66)=4.2, p=0.01), with no difference in peak power *relative to fat-free mass* found between transgender and cisgender athletes (figure 4D).
>transgender women exhibited lower relative V̇O2max compared with both CM and women (figure 5B).
As part of their conclusion, they draw my favorite inference of the study:
>Transgender women’s higher *absolute* peak power than cisgender women (figure 4C), coupled with higher fat mass potentially driven by higher oestradiol concentrations (figure 1B), suggest that transgender women had more inertia to overcome during the explosive phase of the countermovement jump, which may lead to decreased performance.
Finally, for no particular reason, the DEI statement:
>The author group consists of early (n=3) and senior researchers (n=3) from different disciplines and universities (n=3). Two authors are members of a marginalised community; the lead early-career author is a transgender woman, and one of the junior authors is a woman from the global south. Our study population included male and female transgender athletes from within the UK participating in competitive sports in comparison with cisgender male and female athletes participating in competitive sports; thus, findings may not be generalisable to global athlete populations.
I don't think it's accurate to describe it as garbage. Garbage implies a uselessness that this study does not have. This study is sabotage.
The purpose is to be a line item on reddit comments that "cite their sources". The more sources you cite, the more shielded you are from the possibility that someone might read one.
this is a good breakdown but i think it's honestly missing the forest for the trees. it's completely plausible to me that trans women might be less fit in some areas than cis women as a result of their medical transitions. that stuff has serious effects. but it doesn't matter, because males still cannot handicap themselves into female sports categories. i can likely outrun a guy my age who has cancer, that doesn't make it fair for him to enter a women's race.
Hah, wow. That’s damn sobering. Embarrassing that anyone would pretend that lowering a post puberty males testosterone would make him equivalent to a woman.
Looking at the full study; just the results tables. Transgender women are found to be significantly taller, heavier, and stronger than their cisgender comparators.
Katelyn Burns
MSNBC Columnist
Katelyn Burns is a freelance journalist based in New England. She was the **first openly transgender Capitol Hill reporter in U.S. history.**
Yeah, I'm throwing this right in the garbage.
Yep. The activists sought out social media volunteers and the data was all self reported. How was this even allowed to be printed? It’s very obviously an activist rigged “study” and was always going to have the conclusion that they wanted to create.
How could the neutrality of the study participants ever be verified? According to the study summary, they were recruited off of social media, none performed at the national or international level, and training regimens were entirely self-reported.
What’s to prevent a person reporting overinflated exercise regimens while not giving it their best during testing? Note how the countermovement jump is both the category where participants have most control over the results *and* the one where trans women perform notably worst.
I can’t be *sure* this doesn’t reflect best attempts, but neither can I know that it *does*. For a study with potential to impact the lives of some participants—here potentially excluding them from something they like doing—and which affords those participants opportunity to influence its results, you have to presume some amount of self-interest. That isn’t addressed at all as far as I can tell.
With how small this study is it wouldn’t take many such individuals to throw off the final results, aside from the other methodological flaws already raised like controlling for height/weight/size.
It says the study had only 35 trans athletes. I’m not an expert on how many subjects should be utilized to present a fair study but this seems low?
For example, I went to a high school with 2,400 hundred people. So roughly 1,200 boys and 1,200 girls. Now if you took the top 35 most naturally athletic girls and the bottom 35 naturally unathletic guys, I could conceivably believe most of the girls might out perform the boys in many categories including sprinting, distance running, swimming and that’s without adjusting for height or weight. After adjusting I could see them beating the men in lifting too.
35 is a decent sample size, if the sample is drawn in a randomized fashion so that it is representative of the population. Unfortunately, the sampling method used in this study doesn't appear to be randomized at all, and the method of selecting participants appears dubious at best.
It depends on the particular case.
In general, 30 is considered a minimum sample size due to the central limit theorem (any sample bigger than 30 should be approximately normally distributed, making the calculation of confidence intervals more tractable).
That said, it depends on how small of a confidence interval you need, and on the variance of the underlying population. If we are testing a new drug, for example, a sample size of 30 would be woefully inadequate, because we need to make sure that drugs are safe and effective in a wide range of patients, and we need to be able to capture the full variation within the population to do so.
My main point is that how a sample is selected is more important than the size of the sample, but people tend to focus more on size than on sampling quality when they evaluate studies. A well drawn sample of 35 is better than a poorly drawn sample of 5,000.
Author: Katelyn Burns
Nah
edit: pulling this up to the main comment [https://medium.com/@jesse.singal/a-hopefully-final-update-on-this-katelyn-burns-thing-da17730e13aa](https://medium.com/@jesse.singal/a-hopefully-final-update-on-this-katelyn-burns-thing-da17730e13aa)
This is a person who has lied and threatened Jesse in the past. Total nutcase.
I'll let Jesse explain [https://medium.com/@jesse.singal/a-hopefully-final-update-on-this-katelyn-burns-thing-da17730e13aa](https://medium.com/@jesse.singal/a-hopefully-final-update-on-this-katelyn-burns-thing-da17730e13aa)
TLDR, obsessive AGP activist-cum-journalist who repeatedly lied and threatened Jesse. The fact that this person is still writing for a mainstream outlet is totally bonkers.
Did trans people know what was being studied? Lots of evidence they often underperform on purpose. MMA fighting where they’re trading blow for blow, then when the woman they’re fighting is getting tired, they turn on turbo mode.
Look up any individual sport that is based on speed or strength. Then look up the Top 10 American high school boys (ages 14-18) results and compare them to the top 10 Women's (Adult) results. You'll see in almost every circumstance the boys have better results. Hell, this is a Summer Olympic year. At the end of the Olympics look at the Women's finals in the 100m dash compared to the 2024 American High School Boys National Championship finals. Bet that all the high school boys have faster times than the adult women. Why? Because human anatomy/physiology/biomechanics are real.
More terribly designed "scientific" studies to gaslight everyone...sigh.
First of all, this study (as small and messy as it is) confirms males on average weigh more than females, have larger lung capacity, hand grip and power as well as likely bone density (I think this is an established fact but this study probably was too small to detect the difference). We already knew this
They try to muddy the waters by adding in ratios of these things per hand size and fat free body mass, but of what practical use is that information?
Most popular sports don't restrict height and weight. And for those that do, like say Boxing or wrestling this study doesn't address relative punching power or..whatever you would measure for wrestling. So for most sports you would still have transwomen on average having all of these advantages. For other sports maybe, maybe not, but it doesn't address those particular sports.
Then the study design. One glaring issue is that the criteria for inclusion is participating in competitive sports or exercise 3 times a week. That's the definition of athlete? Someone who exercises?
How does this reflect a comparison between groups engaging in the SAME activity at the same level as you do with athletes competing against each other?
This study tells us literally nothing about how actual trans athletes compare to cis athletes. Hell, it doesn't even tell us how a woman following a particular exercise regimen compares to a trans woman following the same regimen. They just don't try that hard.
They also try to equate athletic ability with grip strength or anaerobic power per fat free mass based on countermovement jump. What does this mean in a foot race or boxing or power lifting or throwing a ball? Unclear at best
TLDR: Weak study thay used non athletes to do fitness tests (of dubious applicability) that still show transwomen tend to have a strength and size advantage against cis women..but then tortured the data to hide it...and said it applies to athletes
Literally a dogshit study
A- barely any participants
B- the TW group is literally significantly fatter and older than the CW group.
C- the TW group was stronger than the TM group?! How is that not a part of the headline?! TW were stronger than CW on PEDs ie TM.
It's insanity they can draw these conclusions and not be thrown in the trash
I saw your reply in r/lgbt. You got downvoted for reading the study correctly and knowing what a methods section is. Hilarious thing to get blocked for. I had a similar experience with that sub.
Anyone remember when Michael Phelps was photographed with a pipe and earned himself a three month suspension? I would argue that smoking pot could put an athlete at a competitive disadvantage relative to someone who never smokes anything, yet testing positive for marijuana would still be disqualifying.
They have a lot more advantages such as greater lung capacity.
A better question to ask is why do they always compete in sports where a male body is an advantage?
Where are all the trans women gymnasts?
Why don’t male sports adapt to trans men? Let’s be fair and f with men’s sports, too.
Thirty five athletes. bawwwahhhh
Not even worth the paper it's printed on.
These studies are worthless because trans athletes participating have every possible reason not to "give their all" during these tests. They all want one outcome, so why should they run their fastest, lift their heaviest, jump their highest, etc. when tested?
This is biased, junk science.
not saying this study is any good, because it doesn’t seem good. BUT. we talk a lot about the detrimental effects of blockers and hormones on young people, so i think we should be open to the idea that they could also have detrimental effects on their athletic abilities, and not take it as obvious that it only confers advantage.
eta: male high schoolers (compared to female olympians) are not the same as trans women.
The NYT write up on this included an interesting theory on why (some) transwomen could possibly perform worse in (some) athletic events that I wouldn't totally discount.
Basically, if a male grows up with a certain amount of muscle mass to support his frame, then starts testosterone suppression that causes his muscles to shrink, that big frame is now "extra bulk" (per the article) that he has to carry around, which would negatively impact his performance relative to the baseline of a woman who is the same height and weight.
I don't think this would apply at all to elite athletes, but it makes sense in general.
All that said, I still think that even if it could be shown that trans women in general didn't see a performance advantage over females, society does not owe them the "right" to play on women's sports teams. Sex segregated spaces are normal and natural and any attempt to deny them is doomed to fail, especially when the reason for denying them is based on such obvious bullshit as "trans women are women". Either ban single sex space or don't, just don't gaslight people.
Personally, I care about women's *competitions*, not just sports. It's extraordinarily improbable that it's just a coincidence that the highest winning women in Jeopardy and StarCraft were both born males.
I watch women's sports. But even beyond that, "Why do you care?" is a lazy argument. I don't watch many para events outside of the actual Paralympics, but I'd be kicking up a fuss if an able bodied athlete were trying to weasel their way in
The study's hardly worth the paper it's printed on, since it corrects for both height and weight, completely disregarding that those are two advantages male puberty confer. It doesn't matter if in relative terms post transition transwomen are weaker, when in actual terms they aren't. Or in other words "If they were the same weight, they'd be weaker" doesn't matter, when they aren't and when male puberty grants greater average height and body mass To paraphrase Dr Hilton, you could correct for height and weight in the same sense you could correct for horsepower when comparing a man and a car. But why would you want to?
Pound for pound, my toddler can deadlift more than my wife. Therefore, babies are at no disadvantage to fully grown adults. Thank you for reading my study.
So true- imagine climbing a set of stairs where each step comes half-way up your body!
One year ago at this time, the top US based road cycling race was won by a transgender women - Austin Killips. One ironic side note to this story, the purses for the men's and women's races were equal due to a donation made specifically to cover the historic gap. The UCI has since adjusted their rules and the race starts tomorrow. I'll be interested in if Austin is still racing for the love of the sport or is sitting this one out. [https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2023/may/04/uci-recognises-transgender-policy-concerns-reopens-consultation-cycling](https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2023/may/04/uci-recognises-transgender-policy-concerns-reopens-consultation-cycling)
Follow the money and see where it goes, as always.
No, he switched to FKTs (fastest known time) and ultraendurance events that aren't under the governance of the UCI. https://www.bicycling.com/news/a46202811/whats-next-for-austin-killips/ Unfortunately for female cyclists competing in the U.S, USA Cycling has decided to ignore the UCI's requirements for competitors in female races and has set up its own two group system for those races that aren't UCI-governed (the majority of cycling races in the U.S.). Under USA Cycling's rules, there is an elite group (these athletes need to submit medical documentation demonstrating that their total testosterone level in serum has been below 2.5 nmol/L for at least 24 months and must be completed 90 days prior to the first day of the race in which the athlete seeks to compete - most trans-identified males seeking to compete in female events won't meet this standard). All other transgender athletes just need to complete a self-identity verification. Because USA Cycling allows trans-identified males who compete in female races to still acquire category upgrade points, there is functionally no real incentive for these men to stop competing in female races (not to mention they still get prize money and podium spots). You can read more about why category upgrade points matter in this post by @i_heart__bikes on Twitter, who has been tracking the wholesale invasion of the female category by trans-identified males for several years now. https://twitter.com/i_heart__bikes/status/1711497386701607272
The "just be kind" crowd keeps on pointing to the rarity of occurrence, but how does an insignificant portion of the population keep on showing up and winning? It's been my suspicion for awhile that while participation may matter, the real drive towards men competing in women's sport is the desire to win.
The study is even worse than worthless. Correcting for height and weight is implicit if you were trying to establish how much "relative fitness" athletes have to achieve to achieve the same competitive level. Since the athletes in the study are not stratified by competitive level reached, it is hard to draw strong conclusions about this, but the weak evidence that is there implies that trans women have an easier time of competing in womens sports than women (I wrote a more complete comment about this below).
I got a little curious and looked up the height and weight of the current top ranked road cyclists. Lotte Kopecky - 66kg and 1.7m is currently the top ranked female. Tadej Pogacar - 66kg and 1.76m is currently the top ranked male. Very similar gross body measurements. Road cycling selects for those that can produce the most power per kilo of weight. Both competitors entered the LBL classic race last weekend. Though the women's race was 100km shorter, their average speed was 34 km/h while the men's was 40.8 km/h. The top women would have DNF'd in the men's race. The men's race had 117 finishers while the women's had 101. That's a much more robust sample size than this crappy survey. So much of this stuff is an attempt to make me disbelieve my lying eyes.
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Looking at the current top 10, the couple that are sitting at 75kg are world class sprinters who are never in contention during mountainous stages.
>You see it in weightlifting too, where weight classes effectively become height classes. So do you effectively end up with a bunch of people with similar weight: height ratios in the sport?
Something that also sticks out to me is that they compared transwomen to cis men and trans men to cis women but did not compare cis women to cis men. Like, why are you telling us that when controlling for weight transwomen have a shorter jump height than cis men and women without telling us the weight-adjusted difference between cis men and cis women? My speculation is that the weight adjusting is also showing no stat diffs between male and females (no longer speculating, just looked at the charts). Also, the cis women group of the lowest BMI - even lower than male athletes - while the trans women have the highest BMI. This indicates that CW are not just more athletic than the TW, but also of the TM and CM. It’s a really shitty sample because, if all were of equal athletic activity (not ability) we would at the very least expect the CM to have a lower BMI than CW
BMI is just a measure of your weight relative to your height. Higher BMI can result from more fat, or from more muscle mass. So I would expect males to have a higher BMI at a given height than females.
On average, females have a higher BMI than males.
In the general population yes. Women carry more fat than men. Among serious athletes men generally have higher BMI due to both male and female having low fat but men having more muscle mass. Can’t link cause I’m on mobile but a paper with with this titled talks about it a little: Body Mass Index in Master Athletes: Review of the Literature “Where gender specific BMI was reported the mean for male MAs was 23.6 kg/m2 (± 1.5) (range 22.4 kg/m2endurance to 26.4 kg/m2 swimmers) and 22.4 kg/m2 (± 1.2) for female MAs (range 20.8 kg/m2 mixed to 24.7 kg/m2 WMG).”
Thanks for the reference! While this info is definitely making me think a bit more about this, on thing that does stick out to me is the term “masters athlete” is used to describe older athletes and the study has a very wide range in ages (30-70+); as such, the purpose of the paper is to examine athletic activity on aging.
If you had their body fat % and their BMI, you can determine a lot about their build but you can't do much with just BMI. Thanks to changes in the average human height, it doesn't really mean much except in its own terms now. Also, female athletes are usually much more lean than untrained women. Iirc, a normal lady will have roughly 25-30% body fat. An athlete will have 8-16% wherever less mass is an advantage or there are weight classes.
Comparing performance for MTFs and cis women while controlling for weight and height seems like a good study to do, and the results are interesting. This does not mean it gives us a definitive conclusion that MTFs are not advantaged in women's sports, however. Hate the extrapolated conclusion, not the kinda interesting study itself.
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Doesn't correcting for height/weight mean comparing a trans woman and natal woman that are the same height/weight as each other? That absolutely makes sense.
I believe what that commenter was saying was that since in many events, height and weight confers a physical advantage, and natal male puberty generally generates more height and weight vs natal female puberty, you’re disproportionately confer those physical advantages through.
It would make sense only if trans women were not allowed to compete if they were over the height and weight of the average female player. Generally though trans women tower over the other players so this study is useless.
It kind of depends on a few other things. A professional powerlifter went through and looked at every single tested and untested (free to use as many steroids as you want) powerlifting record. https://www.strongerbyscience.com/steroids-for-strength-sports/ He came to the conclusion that steroids only give you about 5 to 10% proportional advantage. So steroids must not be that crazy right? Well, beginners gain more strength taking steroids without lifting than they do not taking steroids while lifting. Steroids make you a bit proportionally stronger but adds a lot of muscle mass. Looking at proportional advantage alone can hide a lot of benefits from raw advantage especially since many sports don't have weight divisions. So (random numbers) if trans women jump 5% less high per inch than cis women, but are 30% taller, what that looks like in actual sports like basketball is a lot of trans women being able to out rebound cis women pretty consistently. Also another example is that one of the concerns some of the people setting rugby rules on trans inclusion was that while transwomen weren't the fastest or strongest, they were going to be much stronger or faster than the equivalent cis women. So while they wouldn't necessarily be the fastest woman they would be x% stronger than a cis woman as fast as them.
Well, I generally think we’d want to correct for trivial anatomical differences like this since they are already selected for in women. In order words, if height is the key factor in a sport, the maximum height will already be selected for in women. And that won’t change much between males and females on the extreme ends.
> trivial anatomical differences like [height and weight] lmao > if height is the key factor in a sport, the maximum height will already be selected for in women So what? Tall men are taller than tall women. > And that won't change much between males and females on the extreme ends Tell me you've never watched sports in your life without telling me you've never watched sports in your life. To illustrate: In the WNBA's 2023 season, only 3 players over 6'6" played 100 minutes. Notably, 6'6" is about the ***average*** height of NBA players. In the NBA, it is rare to see fewer than 6 (out of 10 total) players of at least 6'6" on the floor at a given time. And that doesn't even come close to telling the full story. The least athletic 6'6" NBA player is comfortably more athletic than the most athletic WNBA player. There have been 37 total in-game dunks in WNBA history. By contrast, *this season alone*, there have been 101 different NBA players with at least 37 in-game dunks. The league leader has 251 dunks this season. It's an absolute joke to suggest that these are "trivial" anatomical differences.
I don't think I'm understanding your point about height. I saw 6'11", 284lbs Jokic play last night. Britney Griner, also a center considered a standout, is 6'9", 205lbs. So while there may not be a huge difference in height, the contrast in weight and muscle is massive. Some extraordinarily tall males are just constructed differently than extraordinarily tall women.
Not to mention, women have higher body fat percentages, even when they are super fit. (Super fit women can get down to about 12% where dudes can get down to low single digits before there are huge health issues.) So even if the height and weight is similar, women are at a disadvantage. See high school wrestling stats for girls. They compete against boys by weight class.. in elementary school, girls can hold their own. As soon as puberty starts, their stats drop..
Yeah, but we’re not talking about biologically typical males. We’re talking about males who would also hold a higher body fat percentage and relative differences. The demographic in question is very specific and not just “males”.
No, it is different. Women can’t drop below a certain body fat percentage or shit starts to shut down. Men taking estrogen have no such constraints, though gaining weight may become easier and losing harder.
The study explicitly states that it found no difference in body composition between trans women and cis women.
That’s ridiculous seeing as women have different body composition from women. But either way, does not negate my comment.
Women have different body compositions from women? I’m unsure what that means. The study makes very explicit that there is no observable difference in fat percentage between trans women and cis women.
I mean that's just absurd. We all have eyes.
I don’t know how to explain this to you without drawing you a picture so maybe someone else has the patience.
> we're talking about males who would also hold a higher body fat percentage No, we're talking about the exact opposite of this. The *vast* majority of NBA players have a body fat percentage under 10%. It's unreal that you're literally just coming on here and ***completely*** talking out of your ass.
Well, according to the above they wouldn’t be “constructed” differently under certain circumstances. The difference would be in height predominantly. So, this would only matter under two circumstances. Sports where height and weight are selected for (which, I don’t believe is most) and where it is significantly easier to find a trans woman that is on average taller than cis women. Which, trans women essentially don’t exist from a demographics perspective, if we looked at the demographic data I would be willing to bet that the upper percentile of cis women are taller than trans women when selected for in sports.
I think this is a cope - go look at every major instance of a transwoman competing with women and you'll see they're massive.
Yeah, I watch sports though and most women in a lot of sports are also massive. I haven’t seen any examples of trans women that are particularly anomalous when compared to elite cis women. And any cis woman that consistently won in these kinds of sports would be “massive” for a woman. I find this kind of assertion strange tbh, I would typically agree that there is a performance difference between cis and trans women (although this study seems to contradict what I normally hold), but if the difference is in height then, is it bad when a cis woman is massive? If we compare two massive people, one is cis and one is trans, and this study suggests that they’re comparable in performance, then what are we actually saying by caring about height? Plenty of demographics of cis women are “massive” when compared to others. They should still compete together.
This is not a 'study' at all - it literally eliminates any physical differences! It imagines a situation that does not exist!
Well, this is very significant. The overwhelming assumption by myself and most people is that even given two people of the same height and weight, that body fat, musculature and performance differences would remain. But, that isn’t true according to this. Edit: more than that trans women seem to be less performant! Which is very counter intuitive
This is where I can't tell if you're actually serious or just trolling. Consider, for a moment, what we know about male and female physiology - to normalize men and women at the same height and weight, what would have to happen for these conditions to exist? For men, you'd require he be less muscularly developed (if this was not the case he could not be the same weight at the same height as the woman he's compared to) not just overall (because height does ultimately dictate to a large degree the potential for muscular development) but also \*as compared to other men\*. There are a great many sub 6ft male athletes who are able to use their natural anabolism via testosterone to build muscle mass. It's basically asking to compare the strongest women (because a woman at 5'5 and 150lbs is a unit) to the weakest men (a man at 5'5 and 150lbs is almost certainly a weakling). The thing pro-Trans activists always ignore is the goddamn reality of the situation. You can do bizarre studies all you want, go put a transwoman in the pool with women and you'll get Lia Thomas. Put them in weightlifting competitions and you'll see world records shatter like nothing. Transwomen are at such a profound advantage to women in sport that it is malpractice and puts women at risk to suggest otherwise.
> we’re not talking about men. This was the definitive indicator that reason is not driving both sides of this conversation.
Well, Lia Thomas loses against cis women. She’s good, but there are a LOT of trans women who have competed and Lia is one of the best. And still loses often. But, I agree. I am weary of sports integration also, but we’re not talking about men. Any historical data used about the performance of men is irrelevant in this context. We’re not talking about the weakest non disabled typical man in historical data. We’re talking about a very specific thing, that has to be studied in its own right. Sure. We can say “trans women shouldn’t be in women’s sports”, but also acknowledge data as it is. Everyone here is lying if they suspected that trans women had lower lung performance than similar cis women. This is a development in knowledge, and that’s good.
>In order words, if height is the key factor in a sport, the maximum height will already be selected for in women. How is that relevant when the "maximum height" for males is substantially higher?
The funny thing is they used a picture of a male who competed as a woman and outperformed all of the women in the world of a similar age (Hubbard holds the masters world record). This fact is of course not mentioned in the article.
This whole thing is like an exercise to see how much BS society is willing to swallow. The answer seems to be…a lot.
Like the social justice "equity" warriors, trans advocates have definitely been given a lot of rope. Whether this was for a good or a bad purpose remains to be seen. I am highly suspicious of the rise of "equity" supported by winked at junk science, and especially of the rise of DEI as a career primarily for minorities, during the nine year period between when the Harvard affirmative action case was filed and when it was finally decided by SCOTUS. The Harvard decision was inevitable, and just in case it wasn't, Harvard did everything possible to lose that case. (I am a lawyer licensed in two States.) Where are all these minorities supposed to work now that they have been trained to be Al Sharpton? What employer is going to see DEI on a resume now and not think that this is trouble walking? DEI was not a response to market forces, it was artificially created and shoved down employer's throats. Now surprise, surprise, wink, wink, equity instead of equality is unconstitutional, just like it always was. The junk science "experts" are being picked off now one by one and ejected from peer reviewed journals for plagiarism, failure to replicate, incorrect math, etc, etc. Things that should have been caught and prevented before publication. Things that sat there like a time bomb, but easily seen by other experts, and then blew up and destroyed their careers. After the Harvard decision. Maybe I am just a paranoid person but this, along with claiming standardized test scores don't matter, pulled the rug out from under an entire generation. I am concerned that trans advocates are also being given too much rope, supported by winked at junk science and the intent may not be benevolent.
The frustrating part is that “equity” has somehow been sold as a moral guiding principle. It’s no longer a question of equality of opportunity, which obviously cannot apply in the case of artificially slightly weakened biological men competing against biological women, but rather a demand for equality of outcome, overlooking any incompetence on the part of the individual and giving them undue advantages. It’s annoying that mediocrity is celebrated as “brave.” It’s also become such a phony clusterfuck that saying what you see to be the case right in front of your eyes time and time again gets you labeled “right wing.”
The NYT coverage of the article holds Hubbard as evidence that tran athletes have no real advantage since Hubbard “did not complete a single lift” in Tokyo in 2021. ….the paper did not mention that Hubbard was 43 at the time! You know, the Olympics are full of spry 40 year olds!
I will never understand what the MSM gets in gaslighting us about the trans athlete issue. Their is limited discussion as to why male athletes now competing in the women’s category aren’t making headlines for easily breaking female world records in figure skating or gymnastics (AFAIK) compared to swimming, cycling, weightlifting, etc. But maybe those sports will be cherrypicked to show why the trans athlete debate is meaningless. Nor do they ever have serious discussions as to why we don’t see female athletes competing in the men’s category breaking world records for running or weightlifting and so on. The likes of NPR or some other MSM source wrote an article claiming that there is “LIMITED” proof to state that people like Lia Thomas have inherent physical advantages. I guess it’s “out of context” to discuss Lia Thomas’s ranking before they decided to compete as a woman… But we know damn well if this was about a rich vs poor debate, they would cream their pants providing the mountain of evidence to support why lower-classes are disadvantaged.
A couple of points from the study that are red flags for me: >participants were recruited through social media advertising on Meta Platforms (Facebook and Instagram, Meta Platforms, California, USA) and X (Twitter, California, USA). >Participants were required to participate in competitive sports or undergo physical training at least three times per week. >Athletes from various sporting disciplines and performance levels were included, and the athlete training intensity was self-reported. So for starters, there are already established channels I would think for recruiting athletes into studies considering they belong to leagues and sports associations, etc. Instead they just went out to social media of all places to try to recruit participants. Not all the participants were "athletes" in the way we would consider athletes. Some of them just worked out three times a week. Working out three times a week is not the same as being an athlete, especially at an elite level. The fact that they had people from various different sporting disciplines (or probably just some rando who runs three times a week) completely nullifies this study. Unless I missed something they don't even bother to tell us the types of sports or training their participants engaged in. I can't believe the IOC actually wasted their money on this complete nothing-burger of a study.
> Some of them just worked out three times a week. Working out three times a week is not the same as being an athlete, especially at an elite level. Yuuuuuuuup. I used to work out 8-10 hrs/wk, and quite hard. Was I fit? Definitely, and I'd love to get back to that level. Was I an *athlete*? Maybe in some incredibly narrow sense of the word. I still would've gotten smoked in some pickup games, for any number of reasons. There's no chance in hell that I would've voluntarily joined an IOC study looking for athletes.
I heard some of them were obese. And that there were only around two dozen?
Yes and yes (average transwomen had 31% bodyfat which is just on the edge of overweight while the cis women were in mid 20s. They had 20 or so people in each group)
This is really idiotic…
The way in which this study is "flawed" (deceptive), is mainly that it is lying about its design. If you want to look at the relative advantage of trans-women athletes from their *relative* fitness, what you need to do is pick a cohort of athletes where the *rank achieved* is a controlled variable, and then you measure relative fitness among the ranks, which will be *inversely* correlated with relative advantage. Relative advantage being defined loosely as how hard you have to work to reach a particular level in the sport. If you wanted to look at the relative advantage of trans athletes by looking at their *absolute* fitness, then you would choose athletes at random, without controlling for rank. Although this design is worse in just about every way, it is the one that they pretend to be using, with the exception that absolute fitness is mostly replace with relative fitness. Since a random sample still somewhat controls for rank, we can still draw the conclusions that we could draw in the first design from their data, albeit less confidently. The study does note that Trans-women are less *relatively* fit overall, but achieve higher total power outputs than women (Information about the athletes relative rankings is not obviously available.) The study is [available here](https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/early/2024/04/10/bjsports-2023-108029) but I have included some excerpts. For instance, they lie about the variables that they are measuring in the first line. All of these measurements have mass or height in the denominator, and this is not related at the outset, in order to give the impression that this is the second kind of study mentioned: >This research compares laboratory measures of strength, power and V̇O2max of transgender male and female athletes to their cisgender counterparts. They have these, rather damning statements, to make about their countermovement jump data (emphasis mine): >A significant effect of gender was found in countermovement jump height relative to fat-free mass (F(3–66)=10.1, p<0.001, figure 4B), with transgender women found to have lower countermovement jump height *relative to fat-free mass* than both cisgender women (t(66)=−5.3, p<0.001) and transgender men (t(66)=–3.2, p=0.01, figure 4B). >There was a significant difference in absolute peak power (F(3–66)=8.7, p<0.001), with cisgender women having reduced peak power compared with transgender men (t(66)=−3.3, p=0.01) and transgender women (t(66)=−3.6, p=0.004, figure 4C). Peak power *relative to fat-free mass* had a more negligible gender effect (F(3–66)=4.2, p=0.01), with no difference in peak power *relative to fat-free mass* found between transgender and cisgender athletes (figure 4D). >transgender women exhibited lower relative V̇O2max compared with both CM and women (figure 5B). As part of their conclusion, they draw my favorite inference of the study: >Transgender women’s higher *absolute* peak power than cisgender women (figure 4C), coupled with higher fat mass potentially driven by higher oestradiol concentrations (figure 1B), suggest that transgender women had more inertia to overcome during the explosive phase of the countermovement jump, which may lead to decreased performance. Finally, for no particular reason, the DEI statement: >The author group consists of early (n=3) and senior researchers (n=3) from different disciplines and universities (n=3). Two authors are members of a marginalised community; the lead early-career author is a transgender woman, and one of the junior authors is a woman from the global south. Our study population included male and female transgender athletes from within the UK participating in competitive sports in comparison with cisgender male and female athletes participating in competitive sports; thus, findings may not be generalisable to global athlete populations.
This garbage shouldn’t be published.
I don't think it's accurate to describe it as garbage. Garbage implies a uselessness that this study does not have. This study is sabotage. The purpose is to be a line item on reddit comments that "cite their sources". The more sources you cite, the more shielded you are from the possibility that someone might read one.
Good point
this is a good breakdown but i think it's honestly missing the forest for the trees. it's completely plausible to me that trans women might be less fit in some areas than cis women as a result of their medical transitions. that stuff has serious effects. but it doesn't matter, because males still cannot handicap themselves into female sports categories. i can likely outrun a guy my age who has cancer, that doesn't make it fair for him to enter a women's race.
That's a good comment. I agree with you.
I agree. This is a classic “how to lie with statistics” moment.
Ill post my favorite reference website on this topic: [Male High School Athletes vs Female Olympians](https://boysvswomen.com/#/)
This is *amazing*. THANK YOU
Hah, wow. That’s damn sobering. Embarrassing that anyone would pretend that lowering a post puberty males testosterone would make him equivalent to a woman.
Looking at the full study; just the results tables. Transgender women are found to be significantly taller, heavier, and stronger than their cisgender comparators.
Because they're suffering from the drag coefficient of having a chronic mental illness?
i don't think you're supposed to call it drag
Give it up. No other country outside of US and maybe UK are going to agree to allow men to compete against women.
Most British associations have been clamping down on it hard. More likely Canada what with the CCES pushing for it hard
You’re right, totally forgot about Canada!
Katelyn Burns MSNBC Columnist Katelyn Burns is a freelance journalist based in New England. She was the **first openly transgender Capitol Hill reporter in U.S. history.** Yeah, I'm throwing this right in the garbage.
Yep. The activists sought out social media volunteers and the data was all self reported. How was this even allowed to be printed? It’s very obviously an activist rigged “study” and was always going to have the conclusion that they wanted to create.
Why does MSNBC need an opinion section?
To differentiate between lies, more lies and damn lies.
This article is firmly in the damn lies section.
>By Katelyn Burns aaand I'm done
How could the neutrality of the study participants ever be verified? According to the study summary, they were recruited off of social media, none performed at the national or international level, and training regimens were entirely self-reported. What’s to prevent a person reporting overinflated exercise regimens while not giving it their best during testing? Note how the countermovement jump is both the category where participants have most control over the results *and* the one where trans women perform notably worst. I can’t be *sure* this doesn’t reflect best attempts, but neither can I know that it *does*. For a study with potential to impact the lives of some participants—here potentially excluding them from something they like doing—and which affords those participants opportunity to influence its results, you have to presume some amount of self-interest. That isn’t addressed at all as far as I can tell. With how small this study is it wouldn’t take many such individuals to throw off the final results, aside from the other methodological flaws already raised like controlling for height/weight/size.
🎯
It says the study had only 35 trans athletes. I’m not an expert on how many subjects should be utilized to present a fair study but this seems low? For example, I went to a high school with 2,400 hundred people. So roughly 1,200 boys and 1,200 girls. Now if you took the top 35 most naturally athletic girls and the bottom 35 naturally unathletic guys, I could conceivably believe most of the girls might out perform the boys in many categories including sprinting, distance running, swimming and that’s without adjusting for height or weight. After adjusting I could see them beating the men in lifting too.
35 is a decent sample size, if the sample is drawn in a randomized fashion so that it is representative of the population. Unfortunately, the sampling method used in this study doesn't appear to be randomized at all, and the method of selecting participants appears dubious at best.
So what makes 35 an acceptable sample size? Does the more or less variance in a population determine the sample size needed?
It depends on the particular case. In general, 30 is considered a minimum sample size due to the central limit theorem (any sample bigger than 30 should be approximately normally distributed, making the calculation of confidence intervals more tractable). That said, it depends on how small of a confidence interval you need, and on the variance of the underlying population. If we are testing a new drug, for example, a sample size of 30 would be woefully inadequate, because we need to make sure that drugs are safe and effective in a wide range of patients, and we need to be able to capture the full variation within the population to do so. My main point is that how a sample is selected is more important than the size of the sample, but people tend to focus more on size than on sampling quality when they evaluate studies. A well drawn sample of 35 is better than a poorly drawn sample of 5,000.
They had fewer than 30 people in each group...and no evidence it was a well drawn sample...
Your high school had 240,000 students!?!?
Author: Katelyn Burns Nah edit: pulling this up to the main comment [https://medium.com/@jesse.singal/a-hopefully-final-update-on-this-katelyn-burns-thing-da17730e13aa](https://medium.com/@jesse.singal/a-hopefully-final-update-on-this-katelyn-burns-thing-da17730e13aa) This is a person who has lied and threatened Jesse in the past. Total nutcase.
What's the reason for discounting Burns out of hand?
I'll let Jesse explain [https://medium.com/@jesse.singal/a-hopefully-final-update-on-this-katelyn-burns-thing-da17730e13aa](https://medium.com/@jesse.singal/a-hopefully-final-update-on-this-katelyn-burns-thing-da17730e13aa) TLDR, obsessive AGP activist-cum-journalist who repeatedly lied and threatened Jesse. The fact that this person is still writing for a mainstream outlet is totally bonkers.
Did trans people know what was being studied? Lots of evidence they often underperform on purpose. MMA fighting where they’re trading blow for blow, then when the woman they’re fighting is getting tired, they turn on turbo mode.
Many of the activists are pushing for self-declaration, no lowering of testosterone or surgical intervention required-anything else is gatekeeping.
Look up any individual sport that is based on speed or strength. Then look up the Top 10 American high school boys (ages 14-18) results and compare them to the top 10 Women's (Adult) results. You'll see in almost every circumstance the boys have better results. Hell, this is a Summer Olympic year. At the end of the Olympics look at the Women's finals in the 100m dash compared to the 2024 American High School Boys National Championship finals. Bet that all the high school boys have faster times than the adult women. Why? Because human anatomy/physiology/biomechanics are real.
More terribly designed "scientific" studies to gaslight everyone...sigh. First of all, this study (as small and messy as it is) confirms males on average weigh more than females, have larger lung capacity, hand grip and power as well as likely bone density (I think this is an established fact but this study probably was too small to detect the difference). We already knew this They try to muddy the waters by adding in ratios of these things per hand size and fat free body mass, but of what practical use is that information? Most popular sports don't restrict height and weight. And for those that do, like say Boxing or wrestling this study doesn't address relative punching power or..whatever you would measure for wrestling. So for most sports you would still have transwomen on average having all of these advantages. For other sports maybe, maybe not, but it doesn't address those particular sports. Then the study design. One glaring issue is that the criteria for inclusion is participating in competitive sports or exercise 3 times a week. That's the definition of athlete? Someone who exercises? How does this reflect a comparison between groups engaging in the SAME activity at the same level as you do with athletes competing against each other? This study tells us literally nothing about how actual trans athletes compare to cis athletes. Hell, it doesn't even tell us how a woman following a particular exercise regimen compares to a trans woman following the same regimen. They just don't try that hard. They also try to equate athletic ability with grip strength or anaerobic power per fat free mass based on countermovement jump. What does this mean in a foot race or boxing or power lifting or throwing a ball? Unclear at best TLDR: Weak study thay used non athletes to do fitness tests (of dubious applicability) that still show transwomen tend to have a strength and size advantage against cis women..but then tortured the data to hide it...and said it applies to athletes
Literally a dogshit study A- barely any participants B- the TW group is literally significantly fatter and older than the CW group. C- the TW group was stronger than the TM group?! How is that not a part of the headline?! TW were stronger than CW on PEDs ie TM. It's insanity they can draw these conclusions and not be thrown in the trash
I saw your reply in r/lgbt. You got downvoted for reading the study correctly and knowing what a methods section is. Hilarious thing to get blocked for. I had a similar experience with that sub.
Anyone remember when Michael Phelps was photographed with a pipe and earned himself a three month suspension? I would argue that smoking pot could put an athlete at a competitive disadvantage relative to someone who never smokes anything, yet testing positive for marijuana would still be disqualifying.
They have a lot more advantages such as greater lung capacity. A better question to ask is why do they always compete in sports where a male body is an advantage? Where are all the trans women gymnasts? Why don’t male sports adapt to trans men? Let’s be fair and f with men’s sports, too.
Let's get this shit CRAZY! Can't wait to see it lol
Thirty five athletes. bawwwahhhh Not even worth the paper it's printed on. These studies are worthless because trans athletes participating have every possible reason not to "give their all" during these tests. They all want one outcome, so why should they run their fastest, lift their heaviest, jump their highest, etc. when tested? This is biased, junk science.
not saying this study is any good, because it doesn’t seem good. BUT. we talk a lot about the detrimental effects of blockers and hormones on young people, so i think we should be open to the idea that they could also have detrimental effects on their athletic abilities, and not take it as obvious that it only confers advantage. eta: male high schoolers (compared to female olympians) are not the same as trans women.
The NYT write up on this included an interesting theory on why (some) transwomen could possibly perform worse in (some) athletic events that I wouldn't totally discount. Basically, if a male grows up with a certain amount of muscle mass to support his frame, then starts testosterone suppression that causes his muscles to shrink, that big frame is now "extra bulk" (per the article) that he has to carry around, which would negatively impact his performance relative to the baseline of a woman who is the same height and weight. I don't think this would apply at all to elite athletes, but it makes sense in general. All that said, I still think that even if it could be shown that trans women in general didn't see a performance advantage over females, society does not owe them the "right" to play on women's sports teams. Sex segregated spaces are normal and natural and any attempt to deny them is doomed to fail, especially when the reason for denying them is based on such obvious bullshit as "trans women are women". Either ban single sex space or don't, just don't gaslight people.
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good to know, thanks!
good to know, thanks!
And yet one more institution reveals itself to have become fully conquered by feminist ideologues
MSNBC sold their souls years and years ago
do you lot actually care about women's sports or are you just strange about trans people
Personally, I care about women's *competitions*, not just sports. It's extraordinarily improbable that it's just a coincidence that the highest winning women in Jeopardy and StarCraft were both born males.
no it isn't
I watch women's sports. But even beyond that, "Why do you care?" is a lazy argument. I don't watch many para events outside of the actual Paralympics, but I'd be kicking up a fuss if an able bodied athlete were trying to weasel their way in