So the latest attempt to exclude is based on T-values. A 2011/2013 IAAF study (commissioned against Semenya/ASA) came up that the limit of 5 is supposedly 7.5x the "average" value. At least according to LRC uncited facts (I'll fill it in: BJSM Bermon & Garnier 2017, incidentally heavily criticized in multiple other papers --see Table 3 (and 4 if you include non-running events), but note 400m where the average is 2.82 and the highest tertile is 7.08!). Well, mathematicians can argue about "mean" (average?) in a distribution, but lets' not.
5 nmol/L — a figure that is still 7.5 times the value of the average woman competing at the 2011 and 2013 track and field World Championships...
Incidentally (but largely irrelevant), I don't get the claimed 0.67 average of Table 1 (Bermon & Garnier). In fact almost every event is higher than this! On the running side, only 10000m is lower, and for the others, only 20km racewalk.I get the average from Table 3 as 1.08 and 0.95 when Table 4 is included .
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But instead the paper of Healy 2014 BMJ, Endocrine profiles in 693 elite athletes has female T-values in track & field averaging 4.1 from 48 samples. See Table (3b).
Which facts do you trust?
Furthermore, LRC goes in quotation of Amby Burfoot, who unwarrantedly claims not a single "healthy" woman (defined for ad hoc purposes as XX chromosomes, ovaries, and producing estrogen at puberty -- something which males often do BTW) can reach 5 nmol/L:
and a figure that not a single healthy woman born with XX chromosomes, ovaries, and producing estrogen at puberty can reach
Yet again, this is pseudo-facts! If this were an actual definition of "healthy" (and Burfoot's reference Handelsman 2018: Circulating Testosterone as the Hormonal Basis of Sex Differences in Athletic Performance
doesn't define it), one might be able to verify it. In no case, is such a data catalogued from science anyway ("not a single" -- what hyperbole!).
In fact, 7.4% of 298 Russian women (NON ATHLETES) exceeded 2.7 (the upper end of the scale devised by White Westerners) themselves in a 2019 study conveniently ignored by LRC.
There were 11.6% female athletes and 7.4% female controls with a T level above 2.7 nmol/L, the upper limit of the normal reference range.
Controls (n = 298) were age-matched (16-35 years old) Russian women without any sports experience.
Pretty clearly, when the reference scale ITSELF is limited at 2.7, you aren't going to be too careful about being above/below the arbitrary notion of 5, w/o going into further (more expensive) measurements. So the claim about "not a single healthy" blahblahblah seems more of a figment of LRC imagination.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/cen.12445https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/557348v1https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/51/17/1309