IOC study: Trans women athletes are at a relative disadvantage in many key physical areas relating to athletic ability and perfo

That's like when Pfizer runs a study on vaccine efficacy. Dog and pony show.

All the more reason for them to compete in their own separate category.

Undoubtedly written by a heshe

Tell me where you place the spork when you’re organizing your utensil drawer.

When they say something like (paraphrasing) "trans women perform worse on athletic tests than their cisgender counterparts," are they saying someone like Lia Thomas (born M then transitioned to F) would perform worse than a normal M, or a normal F? I realize that confusion of terms and definitions is part of the activists' ultimate aim -- heck, I think some of them care more about "upending existing structures" than they care about trans people on a human level -- but if they want to start pretending to be scientific or appeal to science in support of their claims, they need to be a lot clearer about what they are saying.

Also, are they taking the average trans person and comparing them to the average normal person? Does it take into account the difference when a skilled athlete like Lia Thomas or Juniper Eastwood transitions? As to cases like that, does their science still insist that we all pretend our eyes don't see what we keep seeing?

No one cares.

They have no place in female sport.

Or maybe it's because we athletes who were average as men like Lia Thomas and Laurel Hubbard DOMINATE women's competition. Anyone with eyes can see the obvious

This type of stuff just shows how unreliable "studies" can be

It won’t be a scientific study at all.

I suspect it’s little more than a survey, anecdotally observing that some of the Trans athletes were fat and overweight in comparison to the women. All that proves is that a higher proportion of the Trans individuals are mediocre athletes.

As you say, any empirical study that observed muscle development, strength, aerobic thresholds etc. would quickly conclude the obvious facts.

From the study: "No cisgender or transgender athletes were competing at the national or international level."

The study was done on actual hobbyist.

If you actually took the time to read the study, you’d know the answer to all those questions. But you keep staying inside your bubble, little fella.

The study had 23 trans-women and 21 females. That's a ridiculously small sample size rendering the results meaningless.

The lead researcher and author is Blair Hamilton, a 6' tall male PhD student and football (soccer) goalie who's now 36 or 37. Hamilton used to play on men's teams but started playing women's football around five years ago after declaring an opposite-sex gender identity and starting "hormone therapy" in 2016-17.

In 2019, when Hamiltion was playing on a Scottish women's team, Stonehaven Ladies FC, the then-32 year-old told the BBC that male players who take medications to reduce their testosterone starting in adulthood like Hamilton claims to have done have "absolutely no advantage on the pitch" over female players.

In the BBC interview, Hamilton said that prominent women in sport who were speaking out against males in female sport at the time such as tennis legend Martina Navratilova and former Olympic swimmer Sharron Davies

"need to look at the science of what transitioning does to a [male] person’s body."

“It does take away your muscle mass, your explosiveness. Your ratios from type-one to type-two fast-twitch fibres change – your whole body completely changes. I don’t think they realise how much of a change hormone therapy makes."

In 2020, Hamilton began playing for the Hastings United women’s Team.

Hamilton has helped Hastings become a league powerhouse. In 2022, the team finished with the best attack in the league, scoring 80 goals, and the best defence in the league, with just 10 goals getting past Hamilton the whole season.

Hamilton's profile on the University of Brighton's "research portal" says:

Introducing Blair Hamilton, a trailblazer in the world of sports research at the University of Brighton's School of Sport and Health Sciences. Not only are they a dynamic lecturer in Exercise and Health at the School of Applied Sciences, but they're also a driving force behind the scenes as the lead investigator of the groundbreaking "Sporting Performance of Athletes of the Gender Spectrum" study.

Blair's curiosity knows no bounds. Their main focus? Unraveling the impact of gender-affirmative endocrine care on the incredible athletic abilities of transgender athletes. In simpler terms, they're delving into how hormone treatments affect these athletes' performance, paving the way for a more inclusive and equitable sports environment.

Great idea. So men’s track should give up say 4 scholarships for this new category right?

The study might be right. But we also have basically zero insight into what hormone suppression and replacement anyone is doing. I assume HS is zero and ncaa is supposedly 1 year of test suppression but nothing about taking estrogen.

That's not the biggest issue. We have no idea whether the differences detected are related to transition or some unmeasured variable. In addition, the researchers measured a subset of potential differences between groups of athletes; there are likely important differences that they did not measure.

This kind of "science" is typical of the cherry-picking obfuscation of critical and post-modern theory-driven research. It zeroes in on the details of the forest, while ignoring the trees. This is how people wind up with dumb ideas, such as the propostion that sex is on a spectrum (it's not). We all know that males outperform females in sports and that one cannot change sex since it is determined at conception. You can go ahead and show that a small group of non-randomly sampled males perform more poorly than a small group of non-randomly sampled females, but this doesn't mean that male advantage is gone.

This is all kinds of dumb, and it doesn't take a scientist to see it. I outrun thousands of men every time I run a major marathon, but this doesn't mean I wouldn't be approximately 10% better if I had developed along the male pathway. It doesn't matter if some male are worse athletes than some females. What matters is whether one athlete has an advantage that is unavailable to another athlete. When that advantage is carbon fiber blades in place of calves, we say that person can't compete against people with human calves. When that advantage is male development (this is an advantage that unfolds over time starting at conception and cannot be undone), we say that that person can't compete against females.

From the Telegraph article I linked to above:

The International Olympic Committee has been accused of sinking to a new low after funding research into transgender athletes that claims they are at a physical disadvantage to biological females.

The research paper, which has been published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, reported that physically active transgender women performed worse in certain cardiovascular tests and had less lower-body strength than cisgender females. Researchers at the University of Brighton also found that, contrary to previous claims, transgender women’s bone density was equivalent to cisgender females, which has links to muscle strength.

The study collected data from 69 volunteers, who had responded to social-media adverts seeking participants in the research.

The cohort comprised 19 transgender women, 20 cisgender women, 19 cisgender men and 11 transgender men. To qualify for the study, they had to be taking part in competitive sport or physical training at least three times a week, and the transgender volunteers needed to have undergone hormonal therapy for at least a year. None of the subjects were competing in national or international sport.

The findings produced a strong backlash from women’s sport campaigners, who described the research as unreliable and “like giving someone the answers to an exam.”

Dr Ross Tucker, a sports scientist and high performance sports expert currently working as a research scientist for World Rugby, questioned the reliability of comparing groups of women and transgender women from such a small pool and with varying fitness levels.

“I have to say, I think it is a poor study, and It’s amazing that it’s being described as ‘a landmark study’ by anyone,” Dr Tucker told Telegraph Sport. “This study is a comparison, one moment in time, between transgender women and a group of female athletes, and then they are using it as though it gives us insights into what happens when a person suppresses testosterone.

“When I first read it, it made me think that the IOC and their researchers simply could not find enough transgender athletes to study over time, and so instead, they’ve just taken whatever they could find, and then compared to them a group of whatever females they could find, and tried to portray it as a valid comparison.”

Dr Tucker explained that the pool of transgender women displayed V02max (the maximum level of oxygen a body can use during exercise) put them in a “mid-range of untrained or moderately trained adults”, whereas the group of females were in “a significantly higher category of training status”.

“One of those groups would be described as overweight, and the other athletic,” Dr Tucker added. “The transgender women have a body fat percentage of 31.6 per cent, the females 26.6 per cent.

“These demographic characteristics should already make us pause – these groups may not be comparable for reasons that really matter. We have a group of females who are on the higher end of cardiovascular capacity along the female spectrum, and there is a group of transgender women in the middle of that range, even the lower side of it. One group is overweight, the other is not.

“I would not be comparing these groups with any expectation that the comparison is like for like. The females are fit and well trained, and the transgender women are well below the same standard. Their physiological capacity suggests untrained.”

You could say the same about tall athletes