Steve Magness DESTROYS NPR segment on whether testosterone is performance enhancing

Katrina Karkazis is an idealogue, not somebody who sincerely considers all of the evidence in a neutral manner. Without getting into details, I'm privy to an argument she had with another academic about DSD male athletes in women's sports. The entire substance of her argument was that anybody who says they're a woman is a woman. I'm not kidding. That was her argument, and she cherry-picked evidence to lead her back to that conclusion over and over again.

Also, people should consider reading Carole Hooven's book T: The Story of Testosterone, The Hormone that Dominates and Divides Us.

Karkazis is a cultural anthropologist; many in this crowd believe that truth is relative/culturally constructed, and they search for evidence to prove their point rather than test their preconceived notions using evidence. Carole Hooven, along with other researchers were deplatformed at an American Anthropological Association conference because of their "dangerous" view that sex is real.

Who do you want to believe on testosteron in athletes: a cultural anthropologist or a genuine sports scientist (Ross Tucker) ?

For those stupid enough to believe the cultural person instead of the science person: google Jarmila Kratochvílová.

Or Renate Neufeld:

In 1977, one of East Germany's best sprinters, Renate Neufeld, fled to the West with the Bulgarian she later married. A year later, she said that she had been told to take drugs supplied by coaches while training to represent East Germany in the 1980 Olympic Games.
"At 17, I joined the East Berlin Sports Institute. My speciality was the 80m hurdles. We swore that we would never speak to anyone about our training methods, including our parents. The training was very hard. We were all watched. We signed a register each time we left for dormitory and we had to say where we were going and what time we would return. One day, my trainer, Günter Clam, advised me to take pills to improve my performance: I was running 200m in 24 seconds. My trainer told me the pills were vitamins, but I soon had cramps in my legs, my voice became gruff and sometimes I couldn't talk any more. Then I started to grow a moustache and my periods stopped. I then refused to take these pills. One morning in October 1977, the secret police took me at 7am and questioned me about my refusal to take pills prescribed by the trainer. I then decided to flee, with my fiancé."
When she defected to the West, Neufeld brought with her grey tablets and some green powder she said had been given to her, to members of her club, and to other athletes. West German doping analyst Manfred Donike reportedly identified them as anabolic steroids. Neufeld said she had stayed quiet for a year for the sake of her family back in East Germany. But when her father then lost his job and her sister was expelled from her handball club, she decided to tell her story.

Um. Anyone that knows anything knows that an anthropologist's opinion on testosterone is NOT FACT, as they are not an educated scientist, physician, biologist, or any sort of expert, and is just another personally biased opinion just like everyone else's.

Sir or Ma'am (almost certainly sir)you just proved his point. It is mental illness for a man to think he is a woman, and vice versa. Now people with mental illness are not necessarily bad people, not at all. We're all struggling with something. They're struggling with something. Pretending they're not is not the kind, generous, humane gesture that you think it is. It does people no favors.

So yes, Malmo is right that you cannot win a debate and talk actual sense into people like yourself, who are being histrionic and illogical on this issue when someone suggests reality is reality.

This is new territory for everyone. It's going to be messy and imperfect at first, but at least athletes get to compete in a category in which they feel comfortable. I know of one person in my local area who registered as non-binary — who is most likely not — to prove some sort of cis-bro point. That person no longer registers as non-binary so I think it probably backfired on them. Honestly, if it doesn't affect you, then why the outrage?

It is possible to be against high testosterone-producing trans women’s participation in female sports without being an angry, ignorant, redneck.
Magness classifies as a reliable source who’s an educated intellectual without an agenda of hate.

I think we could come around to a common sense approach to transgender women in sports more quickly if it weren’t for the ignoramuses spewing hate.

Scientists are reluctant to state the obvious for fear of being associated with the idiots, even though they agree with the basics. Those born with testes have a massive advantage over females.

Telling trans or intersex women they can’t participate in female sports isn’t fair but it less unfair than allowing them to do so.

Testosterone is the magic sauce in sports. Duh.

I think if you took a poll of men who are against trans (XY) women competing against XX women, most men on here:

- Are more interested in women who do extraordinary things athletically rather than sexualising them

- Believe the USWNT should be paid more than the USMNT.

- Support Title IX, and for example, believe that the women who compete in March Madness should’ve been given the same warm-up facilities as the men

- Support self determination amongst women (i.e., women rather than men deciding what rules and standards should be applied on women-specific issues like whether to wear bun-huggers, speed shorts, split shorts, or whether the women should have switched from the 3000m to 5000m, etc.)

So yeah, any man who supports women’s sports in all of the above has not only the right, but the obligation to speak LOUD AND CLEAR in support of his sister, mother, wife, girlfriend, daughter or any other woman in supporting XX women’s rights to compete against other XX women without testosterone-advantaged XY women encroaching upon thier space.

There’s a documentary called “What is a woman?” That explains it.

All of the “gender experts” say that a woman is anyone who identifies as a woman.

Maybe that is true, especially for women in events requiring muscular strength. Not sure what is behind "what she and other researchers in the field told me ... ". Magness didn't really elaborate on that in his tweet.

Maybe. But the NPR broadcast also appealed to other researchers: "... what she and other researchers in the field told me ..."

It's true that Karkazis's field has been infected with ideology and that the expertise of an anthropologist is different than that of other kinds of scientists. We also tend to trust people with particular forms of expertise, but this is ultimately a shortcut and an unscientific one. Truth claims should be judged on their merit, not the credentials or background of the people who make the claims. Nobody should believe particular people just because they're "experts."

I mentioned Karkazis's field because it is invested in critiquing science from a fashionable social constructionist viewpoint, and she has definitely adopted these perspectives. Her association with prestigious universities leads many people to trust her as an expert, despite her faulty arguments. But her arguments would be faulty even if she were a biologist or doctor.

The objectivity ideal in science means separating the researcher from the object studied. When we trust experts because they're experts, we violate this principle. Obviously, there are good reasons to prioritize the truth claims of experts, but they are also fallible and prone to bias like all people. Similarly, one's status as a lay person does not mean that their truth claim is biased.

Considering DSD means that the determination of male or female is not clear, for a whole host of reasons, not sure what "DSD male" means.

Seems like the central point was not what Katrina Karkazis says, but what does the science say, and for whom, and for which events.

Is anyone aware of any of this science that casts doubt on testosterone and performance?

But to be clear, I don't see any obvious compromise that allows former men, or former women on gender reaffirming testosterone therapy, to compete against cis-gender women.

Allowing persons like Cal to compete against men, or against non-binary persons, seems like the best alternative.

DSD doesn't mean that the determination is unclear. It stands for Disorders of Sexual Differentiation. All this means is that sexual development did not proceed along the typical pathway. A female with congenital adrenal hyperplasia will have some unexpected masculine characteristics due to her high levels of T, but she's still female. There are very few individuals who cannot be clearly placed into a sex category. Many people get so frustred with the Semenya situation because Semenya is a male despite having malformed genitalia. Semenya is a male with a DSD, which is what I mean by DSD male. A woman with Turner Syndrome (XO chromosomes) is a DSD female.

I've seen science that allegedly casts doubt on testosterone and performance, but it's often flawed and sort of besides the point. Testosterone is just one variable in the complicated cascade of sexual development. T has an impact throughout development (current T levels aren't the only thing that matters for performance), and it is not the only thing that confers male athletic advantage.

In terms of flaws in T and athletic performance research, one common flaw is study design. Researchers generally cannot ethically dope people to compare their performance before and after supplementation, so they often rely on non-experimental designs. In these studies, it's very difficult if not impossible to control for other performance-related variables, especially since we don't even know what many of those variables are. This inability to control for other variables makes it difficult to isolate the impact of T and may even mask it.

For example, Kipchoge has a VO2 max of around 71, if I remember correctly. Many runners have a higher VO2 max. This doesn't mean that VO2 max doesn't impact performance. It probably means either that VO2 max doesn't confer additional advantage once it reaches a really high level, or that there is simply not enough variation in elite runners on that variable to detect a difference even if it does exist.

These authors address the weakness of the research used in the Semenya case here:

link.springer.com

Scientific integrity and the IAAF testosterone regulations - The International Sports Law Journal

In April 2018, the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) announced new regulations governing the eligibility of certain female athletes with differences of sexual development accompanied by elevated levels...

Open link

Lastly, I'm not sure a separate category will solve the problems we're seeing because nonbinary females and males could easily argue that they should not have to compete against athletes on PEDs. Also, there are a whole host of identities, and people who are not non-binary will not be content to compete in that category.

Haha, this describes absolutely nobody who frequents LRC. Obviously you're being facetious. Good one.

Thanks for the clarifications and the link. I think I'm in agreement with the need for upholding scientific integrity, and the need to weed out, or correct, some of the bad science.

I think a third category is an improvement over just two (male and female), but given all the different conditions and scenarios, I guess you are right that it may still be unfair to some in the non-binary category. What do we do then? Create 60 categories?

It affects everyone, this denial of reality. Suppose I'm a convicted felon, guilty even by my own admission. I suddenly identify as innocent. Are you going to spring open the locks keeping me from freedom? My identifying as innocent is no less believable than the claim of most people claiming to be the gender opposite their sex.

And that's totally fine, except when it comes to fairness in sport. The argument that inclusion is more important than fairness is weak.