It is just biology. Men have 10 times the amount of testosterone that normal women have. Now you want to get rid of that testosterone? O.K., but then it is going to take a couple of years for that to equilibrate. And men still have a larger frame with a larger cardiac output, a larger lung capacity
Yes, a larger frame, but trans women athletes have the same hemoglobin (supplying oxygen to the muscles) levels as their cisgender counterparts. So they end up powering their larger frame with a smaller engine. This was the basis of Harper's finding that--among distance runners--a B male runner with be a B trans women runner.
This is malarkey and Joanna Harper is full of hooey. Hemoglobin levels are only part of the story.
Hemoglobin levels simply indicate how much oxygen is in blood per unit of blood. Hemoglobin levels don't have any bearing on a person's total blood volume or on how fast a person's heart and circulatory system are able to transport oxygen-carrying hemoglobin cells to the muscles and other tissues.
Hemoglobin levels also don't give any indication of how easy or difficult it is for the blood to become oxygenated in the first place. That's a matter of breathing mechanics, lung size and power, airway cells and secretions, cardiovascular function, etc. All of which are areas in which there are significant physical differences between the sexes that give males a huge advantages over females in sports.
Adult and older adolescent males have hearts that are 25-38% larger and more powerful, and lungs that are 10-12% larger and more powerful, than the hearts and lungs of female people the same size and stage of development. Males of all ages also breath more efficiently than females - meaning males use less energy and put in less effort to get the same relative amount of oxygenated air into their lungs, and to expel CO2 from their lungs, than it takes females.
Once the blood in a human body is oxygenated, how fast it reaches the muscles and extremities is determined by the person's cardiovascular capacity - starting with the size and strength of the heart. Of particular importance is the left ventricle, the part of the heart that pumps oxygenated blood to the rest of the body using hemoglobin as the vehicle that contains and carries the oxygen and moves it into the cells of muscles and other tissues.
In all respects of heart size, power, speed and function, male athletes and non-athletes have the same kinds and levels of advantage over female athletes and non-athletes. Overall,
geometric and functional features scale universally on the order of 20–30% between female and male athletes
Males have huge advantages over females in the amount of oxygenated blood their left ventricles pump and how fast they pump it, meaning they are able to get more blood to their muscles faster regardless of how much hemoglobin is in their blood. For example, males have a 23% advantage over females in left ventricle stroke volume:
While the left ventricular stroke volumes of female and male athletes of 75 and 98 ml (Csecs et al., 2020) are 8 and 9% larger than in non-athletes with 69 and 90 ml (Rutkowski et al., 2020), the relative difference between female and male hearts remains comparable with -23% between athletes and -23% between non-athletes.
The differeneces in male and female hearts - their overall size, their microarchitcterure, the size and strength of the component parts, how differenent component parts they work and so on - are too enormous and complex to go into here. But the overall point is that these differences are large and significant, and they matter in sports performance.
Cardiovascular disease in women remains under-diagnosed and under-treated. Recent studies suggest that this is caused, at least in part, by the lack of sex-specific diagnostic criteria. While it is widely recognized that the...
Medical "transitioning" does nothing whatsoever to change the size, structure, strength functioning, efficiency etc of the male heart and lungs or the rest of the male body.
Males who have "transitioned" aren't "powering their larger frame with a smaller engine" like Joanna Harper claims. They are powering their large male frames with the exact same size engines - hearts, lungs, cardivascular and respiratory systems - they always had.
Males who have "transitioned" also have the same exact blood volume as they always had. This means they have the same amount of gas in the tank to provide fuel and oil to lubricate the moving parts and protect against overheating and blowng a gasket.
The only difference is that per unit of blood, males who've lowered their T into the female range have considerably less hemoglobin than they did before and are now a match to females on that one measure and that one measure alone.
The reality is that "transitioned" males are now powering their same-size V-8 engines and their same truck-sized or at the very least van-sized chassis, drive trains, auto bodies, fenders and all the rest with gasoline or petrol of a lower octane gasoline than they're used to.
Whereas the gasoline that does part of the job. of firing the engines of "transitioned" males used to be be airplaine fuel or the kind of automotive fuel known as "high-test" (ironic, huh?), now the gas in their tanks and running through their fuel lines is just plain "regular unleaded."
CAS employed the exact same reasoning in both Chand case and Semenya case. They reached different conclusions because they had different cases at hand.
Either you didn't read the actual decisions, or you don't know how to read legal documents.
Its core capability is write-only, not so much to read critically, not even its own writings.
There you go again, calling me "it" for the umpteenth time on these threads. Your go-to response to my posts is always to insult and dehumanize me, and to impugn my intelligence, knowledge and reading comprehension.
You never make any cogent arguments or provide evidence for your male-supremacist positions. You just show your total contempt for women (the female kind) who won't bend to your will by behaving like a bullying schoolboy or a tantrummy toddler stamping his foot and saying "nyah, nyah, nyah."
I hope the moderators leave up your latest post calling me "it." They're removed all the other ones. But I think it should be left up so that others can see what kind of person you are and the way the "be kind" crowd treat women (the female kind).
The hatred, rage, envy and covetousness that you and some other male people have towards female people and our sports and spaces just goes to show why women and girls need sports and facilities that you and other blokes like you can't access.
Its core capability is write-only, not so much to read critically, not even its own writings.
There you go again, calling me "it" for the umpteenth time on these threads. Your go-to response to my posts is always to insult and dehumanize me, and to impugn my intelligence, knowledge and reading comprehension.
You never make any cogent arguments or provide evidence for your male-supremacist positions. You just show your total contempt for women (the female kind) who won't bend to your will by behaving like a bullying schoolboy or a tantrummy toddler stamping his foot and saying "nyah, nyah, nyah."
I hope the moderators leave up your latest post calling me "it." They're removed all the other ones. But I think it should be left up so that others can see what kind of person you are and the way the "be kind" crowd treat women (the female kind).
The hatred, rage, envy and covetousness that you and some other male people have towards female people and our sports and spaces just goes to show why women and girls need sports and facilities that you and other blokes like you can't access.
I wasn’t even talking to you, sweetie. Why is it so prickling to not be afforded your preferred pronouns when you don’t to trans folk? For all I know, you could be a bot, and the frequent deficit of logical coherence in your otherwise grammatical posts certainly makes one wonder if it’s a language model bot belching out words.
Decide if I “hate” or “covet” women, and stop gendering me, consistent with the lack of any gender expression in my posts.
You're being disingenous in alleging that there's unanimity amongst the "CAS, US federal courts and al lthe other courts" in the world on the issue of whether males can be excluded from female sports because of their sex. Actually, the various court opinions contradict one another.
Even within the same judicial system, there is no unanmity from one case to the next (as the marked differences in the reasoning and language used by the CAS in the Chand and Semenya cases shows).
CAS employed the exact same reasoning in both Chand case and Semenya case. They reached different conclusions because they had different cases at hand.
Either you didn't read the actual decisions, or you don't know how to read legal documents.
Oh, mate, how lame. Also risibly arrogant. It really takes major chutzpah, an awfully inflated ego and oodles of uncalled-for overconfidence to contend that anyone who doesn't interpret a legal document the exact same way you do can't posssibly have read it - or doesn't know "how to read legal documents" at all. Sheesh.
In my view, both the language and the reasoning in the Chand and Semenya cases were light years apart. As I've explained on other threads, I believe a sea change took place between the time the two cases were decided. And I believe another sea change has taken place since the Semenya decision was issued, and is continuing to take place as we post.
But that's just my take. Take it or leave it. Since you and prickle keep saying that I am an imbecile and ignoramous who doesn't know how to read, my hunch is that you'll leave it.
However, it seems relevant to point out that when we dickered over our two diffeerent interpretations of the Semenya decision many months ago, I'm the one who said that the language and reasoning in the Semenya case, and the way it differed to the language and reasoning in Chand, had led me to believe that WA would next be moving to make the sort of policy changes WA announced in March of this year. Whereas you said the opposite.
Also, CAS is just one court in one jurisdiction. The claim you made that I took issue with is that "CAS, US federal courts and al lthe other courts" in the world all have the same opinion and are in total agree with you. I don't think that's true. At all.
But that's just my take. Take it or leave it. Since you and prickle keep saying that I am an imbecile and ignoramous who doesn't know how to read, my hunch is that you'll leave it.
Since transwomen and biological women have no difference in athletic ability, can someone explain how Lia Thomas went from the 462nd ranked male to the 1st ranked female in one season? That's a pretty amazing improvement, I wonder what she did to improve by that much?!
If that’s the argument, it’s easy to point to even similar intra-group examples like a sprinting nobody like Jacobs winning an Olympic gold or a Kiptum threatening the goat (sure, bring on the doping fallacy now).
But nobody is saying there is “no difference in athletic ability”, rather that the evidence is weak or mixed for rejecting the null hypothesis that there is no advantage post transition, and if there is in some sports, on what therapeutically mutable physiological characteristics the advantage depends is not well understood.
Since the mods deleted my post I guess I'll have to try again....
Thomas did not improve their rank as a result of getting faster, they actually got SLOWER and managed to go from 462nd to 1st even after transitioning. Marcell Jacobs won Gold and huge PR's, not after getting slower, so you can't compare the two. Pretty clear that that shows trans women still retain an advantage even with hormone intervention. The science backs this up. It's not at all unclear.
A Canadian-born researcher is helping to launch the first substantial study of transgender athletes in a bid to better understand how transitioning and hormone therapy affects athletic performance.
There is increasing debate as to whether transwoman athletes should be included in the elite female competition. Most elite sports are divided into male and female divisions because of the greater athletic performance display...
The findings raise questions about current Olympic guidelines, but the lead author cautions against using them to back bans in recreational and school sports.
Objective To examine the effect of gender affirming hormones on athletic performance among transwomen and transmen. Methods We reviewed fitness test results and medical records of 29 transmen and 46 transwomen who started gen...
Also, CAS is just one court in one jurisdiction. The claim you made that I took issue with is that "CAS, US federal courts and al lthe other courts" in the world all have the same opinion and are in total agree with you. I don't think that's true. At all.
So show us any court decision that does not follow the same reasoning as CAS did in both Chand and Semenya cases. (Yes, that's the same identical reasoning that you simply assume to be different, just because the outcomes were different.)
What tests can be conducted on what groups of people, and what results would "prove" that point?
There's no good way to do a performance test where the desired outcome of the participant is to is to under perform. If you're only allowed to race in the women's field if you run a mile slower than 5:00 then you just sandbag the test and blast the race.
I agree that the burden of proof that there is no retained advantage should be on the biological men seeking to compete in the women's field. An outcome based test like running or cycling is open to intentional misrepresentation, and a non-volitional parameter based test like blood tests or muscle biopsy does not capture the many sexually dimorphic variables that affect performance outcomes.
The fundamental issue is that transitioning to a different gender can be a choice. Some people surely truly feel as though their gender doesn't match their body. Some can be bad actors faking it for notoriety, plaudits, or victories. How do you possibly determine between the two, and the gray area in between?
Since there is no possible objective way to separate out the bad actors and no objective way to disprove retained advantage then the reasonable solution is to compete as your biological sex. Competing in sport as your stated gender is not an unalienable or fundamental right.
So you agree that there is no way to "prove" that trans women do not retain advantage over cis women after medically transitioning. But you think the burden of proof lies on the trans women. In other words, they should be banned because they cannot prove what is impossible to prove.
And that's because... you cannot weed out bad faith actors?
If that’s the argument, it’s easy to point to even similar intra-group examples like a sprinting nobody like Jacobs winning an Olympic gold or a Kiptum threatening the goat (sure, bring on the doping fallacy now).
But nobody is saying there is “no difference in athletic ability”, rather that the evidence is weak or mixed for rejecting the null hypothesis that there is no advantage post transition, and if there is in some sports, on what therapeutically mutable physiological characteristics the advantage depends is not well understood.
Since the mods deleted my post I guess I'll have to try again....
Thomas did not improve their rank as a result of getting faster, they actually got SLOWER and managed to go from 462nd to 1st even after transitioning. Marcell Jacobs won Gold and huge PR's, not after getting slower, so you can't compare the two. Pretty clear that that shows trans women still retain an advantage even with hormone intervention. The science backs this up. It's not at all unclear.
My strawman was a response to your self-admitted strawman. Thomas may well have benefited from retained advantage (or not) but the fact that she was 462nd among men is irrelevant, there being no defensible reason why a particular individual should rank the same in different sexes pre- and post-transition respectively. It’s an altogether arbitrary expectation.
I stand by my second paragraph and there are plenty of references in this thread as well as others including quoted statements from those conducting research on the topic of advantage, so I don’t need your personal research, thank you.
The article is actually making a very good point. Most men who want to be women are not great athletes. I know there are exceptions. But most are not.
This has been my experience. The M to F trans women I know in real life are all obese and unhealthy. Even with their "genetic advantage" they arwnt bearing most athletic women. Of the handful I know I don't think any could walk 3 miles let alone run it. No athletic assigned female at birth women are losing a race to any of them.
Since the mods deleted my post I guess I'll have to try again....
Thomas did not improve their rank as a result of getting faster, they actually got SLOWER and managed to go from 462nd to 1st even after transitioning. Marcell Jacobs won Gold and huge PR's, not after getting slower, so you can't compare the two. Pretty clear that that shows trans women still retain an advantage even with hormone intervention. The science backs this up. It's not at all unclear.
My strawman was a response to your self-admitted strawman. Thomas may well have benefited from retained advantage (or not) but the fact that she was 462nd among men is irrelevant, there being no defensible reason why a particular individual should rank the same in different sexes pre- and post-transition respectively. It’s an altogether arbitrary expectation.
I stand by my second paragraph and there are plenty of references in this thread as well as others including quoted statements from those conducting research on the topic of advantage, so I don’t need your personal research, thank you.
Thomas's previous rank is extremely relevant to this discussion, the fact that Thomas got slower yet jumped 461 spots up the rankings shows that they retained their advantaged. The evidence in this thread points very clearly to the conclusion that post-"transition" males retain their athletic advantage over females, you just choose not to acknowledge it because you don't want it to be true. Lia Thomas and many other examples support this conclusion. Case closed.
There's no good way to do a performance test where the desired outcome of the participant is to is to under perform. If you're only allowed to race in the women's field if you run a mile slower than 5:00 then you just sandbag the test and blast the race.
I agree that the burden of proof that there is no retained advantage should be on the biological men seeking to compete in the women's field. An outcome based test like running or cycling is open to intentional misrepresentation, and a non-volitional parameter based test like blood tests or muscle biopsy does not capture the many sexually dimorphic variables that affect performance outcomes.
The fundamental issue is that transitioning to a different gender can be a choice. Some people surely truly feel as though their gender doesn't match their body. Some can be bad actors faking it for notoriety, plaudits, or victories. How do you possibly determine between the two, and the gray area in between?
Since there is no possible objective way to separate out the bad actors and no objective way to disprove retained advantage then the reasonable solution is to compete as your biological sex. Competing in sport as your stated gender is not an unalienable or fundamental right.
So you agree that there is no way to "prove" that trans women do not retain advantage over cis women after medically transitioning. But you think the burden of proof lies on the trans women. In other words, they should be banned because they cannot prove what is impossible to prove.
And that's because... you cannot weed out bad faith actors?
Yes, pretty much exactly. If it was easy to prove or disprove then it would be a non-issue.
Imagine only China (or any country) develops a new drug that increases strength by 10%. WADA would certainly ban the drug if they could get a hold of it for testing. China won't release it to other countries, so WADA is left with 3 choices: Test the Chinese athletes in a lab (which they could sandbag to keep the drug legal), test the biomarkers of the Chinese athletes to determine probable advantage, or look at the competition results and infer if an advantage is gained. They are all incomplete and imperfect data sets, but that does not mean they are unusable.
The only logical way to determine the advantage in either this hypothetical of with transgender athletes is to look at all three data sets and determine the likelihood and size of any advantage. In the case of transgender athletes the results show a preponderance of MTF athletes in the top percent of female events relative to their population. Results of outcome based performance tests lean towards a relatively high advantage, and biomarkers are more of a mixed bag but generally lean towards an advantage. None of this counts as proof of an advantage, but it certainly points in that direction. If that data is enough to exclude trans women from female events is up to the sporting bodies.
My strawman was a response to your self-admitted strawman. Thomas may well have benefited from retained advantage (or not) but the fact that she was 462nd among men is irrelevant, there being no defensible reason why a particular individual should rank the same in different sexes pre- and post-transition respectively. It’s an altogether arbitrary expectation.
I stand by my second paragraph and there are plenty of references in this thread as well as others including quoted statements from those conducting research on the topic of advantage, so I don’t need your personal research, thank you.
Thomas's previous rank is extremely relevant to this discussion, the fact that Thomas got slower yet jumped 461 spots up the rankings shows that they retained their advantaged. The evidence in this thread points very clearly to the conclusion that post-"transition" males retain their athletic advantage over females, you just choose not to acknowledge it because you don't want it to be true. Lia Thomas and many other examples support this conclusion. Case closed.
Glad you closed the case on this case coz its bizarre premise is utterly uninteresting intellectually. Thomas going from 462 (or 135 or 573 or some low rank) to 1 simply follows from elite cis men competition being dramatically better than elite cis women competition, but there is no way to predict from that observation how much of the presumed male advantage was retained during transition and how much she actually improved over the time to counter the effect of transition therapy.
My strawman was a response to your self-admitted strawman. Thomas may well have benefited from retained advantage (or not) but the fact that she was 462nd among men is irrelevant, there being no defensible reason why a particular individual should rank the same in different sexes pre- and post-transition respectively. It’s an altogether arbitrary expectation.
I stand by my second paragraph and there are plenty of references in this thread as well as others including quoted statements from those conducting research on the topic of advantage, so I don’t need your personal research, thank you.
Thomas's previous rank is extremely relevant to this discussion, the fact that Thomas got slower yet jumped 461 spots up the rankings shows that they retained their advantaged. The evidence in this thread points very clearly to the conclusion that post-"transition" males retain their athletic advantage over females, you just choose not to acknowledge it because you don't want it to be true. Lia Thomas and many other examples support this conclusion. Case closed.
On the other hand, June Eastwood did not retain her advantage over female runners. Maybe there’s a different effect since running is weight-bearing.
But that's just my take. Take it or leave it. Since you and prickle keep saying that I am an imbecile and ignoramous who doesn't know how to read, my hunch is that you'll leave it.
Haven't read all the other pages as all the scientific back and forth is really moot.
I really feel for those who are not happy with the sex and gender they were born , hell its a 1 : 10 to power of 2,685,000 odds of you being here in the history of life, so it is what it is.
However, that sympathy seemingly doesn't stop the trans sports supporters from calling you trans phobic just for trying to protect the integrity of female sport...and when I say 'female' I mean 'female sex'.
Seriously , be who you want to be and do what you want in the confines of your privacy, but don't sit on the fence and bully those who are born as the female sex and are happy with it.
The author of the article doesn't seem to realize that there is a lot of research in this area. Many, but not all, refereed articles are referenced in the above posts.
As a rule of thumb, it appears that men have an 10-12% advantage over women (depends on the sport) and M-T-F transitioners have a 5-6% drop in performance.
Measures of testosterone are not all that relevant, as years of exposure to the hormone causes developmental differences that estrogen may not erase.
The headline reads "attacks." I think there is a lot of good science out there, not attacks. Some conclusions are open to discussion, but the author clearly has an agenda.
The article is actually making a very good point. Most men who want to be women are not great athletes. I know there are exceptions. But most are not.
This has been my experience. The M to F trans women I know in real life are all obese and unhealthy. Even with their "genetic advantage" they arwnt bearing most athletic women. Of the handful I know I don't think any could walk 3 miles let alone run it. No athletic assigned female at birth women are losing a race to any of them.
"[A]ssigned?" What rot. Except in extraordinarily rare cases, a baby's sex is observed and recognized at birth. It is not assigned. Cut the cr*p.
So you agree that there is no way to "prove" that trans women do not retain advantage over cis women after medically transitioning. But you think the burden of proof lies on the trans women. In other words, they should be banned because they cannot prove what is impossible to prove.
And that's because... you cannot weed out bad faith actors?
Yes, pretty much exactly. If it was easy to prove or disprove then it would be a non-issue.
Imagine only China (or any country) develops a new drug that increases strength by 10%. WADA would certainly ban the drug if they could get a hold of it for testing. China won't release it to other countries, so WADA is left with 3 choices: Test the Chinese athletes in a lab (which they could sandbag to keep the drug legal), test the biomarkers of the Chinese athletes to determine probable advantage, or look at the competition results and infer if an advantage is gained. They are all incomplete and imperfect data sets, but that does not mean they are unusable.
Umm.. isn't this what biological passport is used for? You can suspend an athlete even if he does not test positive for any specific banned substance.
But in this case, WADA could ban the substance on the basis that China does not share it for testing. If China contests that at CAS, they will be told to share the drug with WADA for testing. If they do, then the burden shifts to WADA to prove the substance has performance enhancing effect.
How is this example relevant to transgender issue? If a trans athlete fails to submit the required medical data to the sports governing body, then she can be declared ineligible for the absence of data. Cece Telfer was not allowed to compete at the US Olympic trial in 2021, because the blood test data she provided had some lapses. (This was not out of malice. She apparently could not afford to pay for the test for some months.)
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