It would seem superfluous now to argue that women and men are equally competitive in athletics and thus there should be no sex-spcific categories. We know that, with puberty, comes differences in may traits involved in athletic success, including muscles mass, bone density, grip strength, throwing speed, and so on. (Equestrian sports may be one in which women have either no disadvantage or even an advantage, but I haven’t looked for the data.) This intersexual difference in athletic ability is in fact why we have separate men’s versus women’s leagues. I was surprised to find, in the Lundberg et al. paper below, that even before puberty boys have significant athletic advantages over girls, which one has to consider when deciding whether to separate the sexes in secondary-school competitions.
But the International Olympic Committee (IOC), which a few years ago punted in a general policy for its athletes, deciding that each sport has to set its own rules, has led to the publication of the Lundberg et al. paper, reiterating again that there seems to be no physical sport in which men don’t have an inherent, sex-related advantage (largely coming from testosterone), so the Bayesian presumption is that there will be a difference. The paper’s publication was apparently prompted by the IOC’s abandoning standards. As the authors note, “The IOC framework does not provide suitable guidance to sports authorities to protect the female category in sports.”
But of course the burning question now is whether or not transgender women (natal men), even under testosterone suppression, retain athletic advantages over natal women, and, if so, whether those advantages disappear over time. And Lundberg et al. paper says that advantages remain and do not go away with time. (We’ve had evidence for this for a long time.)
In classifying individuals for athletics, then, “transgender women don’t count as women”, a fact that goes against all the mantras of gender activism. Nevertheless, truth is stronger than mantras, and the data show that, in those sports that have been examined, transgender women have a similar (but smaller) advantage over natal women as do natal men do over natal women. The authors (and I) see the inclusion of natal men in women’s sports, then, as unfair. But others disagree, thinking that inclusivity trumps fairness. Since all of us think that those who want to compete athletically should have a way to do so, some hard thinking is involved. Should we have “open” categories, in which only a few will compete? Or should trans women compete only in men’s sports? I have no solution, but surely we need to know the facts before we make a decision like this.
I found the Lundberg paper because a reader sent me an article from the conservative Federalist that linked to it. And yes, the Federalist does accurately characterize the paper. You can read the Federalist by clicking below, but if you want a deeper dive in to the data, one with lots of references, click on the second headline too (get the pdf here). All access is free
Excerpts from the link above:
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) developed its 2021 framework on sex and “gender” around the concepts of fairness, inclusion, and non-discrimination. This framework leaves it to each sport’s governing body “to determine how an athlete may be at a disproportionate advantage against their peers.” However, they admonish sports organizations against “targeted testing … aimed at determining [athletes’] sex, gender identity and/or sex variations.” Instead, it’s up to each sport to “[provide] confidence that no athlete within a category has an unfair and disproportionate competitive advantage.”
The IOC’s sophistic gymnastics to deny sex-based categories in sport prompted 26 researchers from around the world to rebut the IOC’s framework. Their paper, published last week in the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports, is the latest peer-reviewed study providing evidence of the obvious about sex in sports.
The researchers reviewed studies from “evolutionary and developmental biology, zoology, physiology, endocrinology, medicine, sport and exercise science, [and] athletic performance results within male and female sport” to refute the IOC’s position that male athletes warrant “no presumption of advantage” over female athletes based on “biological or physiological characteristics.”
That statement “is ridiculous on its face,” says Kim Jones, co-founder of the Independent Council on Women’s Sports (ICONS). “This is the basic knowledge we all understand and see play out in front of our eyes every day. [This new] paper is brilliant at laying out how clear the differences are between men and women. There are thousands of differences between male and female development in humans across the entire maturity path that result in these huge performance gaps.”
John Armstrong, a mathematician at King’s College London who was not affiliated with this research, highlights this “central flaw” of the IOC’s framework. “To say we should not presume male advantage in a sport unless we have specific data for that sport is like saying that just because most of the apples in a tree have fallen to the ground, one shouldn’t presume the remaining apples are also subject to gravity,” he said.
“There is overwhelming evidence of male advantage from across different sports and there is little to be gained from demonstrating this again and again, sport by sport,” Armstrong noted.
So much for untreated natal men versus untreated natal women. What about when testosterone is suppressed?
But even sports that have copious research into sex differences in performance have permitted males to compete in the female category at all levels of competition and age. One path has been through misguided policies based on testosterone levels.
Over the last decade, various sports governing bodies — including the IOC and USA Boxing — have attempted to define females through testosterone levels. Those organizations relied heavily on a publication by Joanna Harper, a trans-identifying male medical physicist. The paper consisted of eight self-reports by trans-identifying male recreational runners who had suppressed their testosterone pharmacologically and recalled that they ran slower after doing so. Harper excluded the one respondent who said he ran faster and then concluded that males who were suppressing their testosterone could compete fairly in the female category.
Read the paper if you want to see how weak Harper’s evidence was, yet was used to buttress allowing transgender women to run against natal women. The subjects, whose times were self-reported, weren’t even athletes. But I digress:
Last week’s paper builds on research by lead authors Tommy Lundberg, Emma Hilton, and others who demonstrate the persistence of male advantage after testosterone suppression.
While testosterone suppression decreases various measures of anatomy, physiology, and physical performance, those changes are a small fraction of the differences between men and women on these metrics. A testosterone-suppressed male will have less muscle mass than his former self, but as a category, testosterone-suppressed men remain larger and stronger than women. Further, testosterone suppression does not change attributes like height, bone length, or hip and shoulder width.
And the part below surprised me, as I always thought athletic differences became significant almost entirely after puberty, which could justify having only a single league for younger kids. I’m not so sure now, but remember that winning may not be as important for younger kids than for high-school, college, or professional athletes, so combined leagues may still be considered “fair” in, say, elementary or some secondary schools.
Even before puberty, though, males outperform females in athletic competitions. Greg Brown is an exercise physiologist at the University of Nebraska at Kearney and was a co-author on the Lundberg paper. Brown recently published research based on national youth track and field championships. He found that by age 8, the boys ran faster in their final rounds than the girls did in theirs, at race distances from 100 meters to 1,500 meters.
Again, click to read:
Here’s the paper’s abstract with the IOC’s unjustified conclusion and the data from transwomen (my bolding). Note that what they consider most fair is disallowing transwomen from competing against natal women.
ABSTRACT
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) recently published a framework on fairness, inclusion, and nondiscrimination on the basis of gender identity and sex variations. Although we appreciate the IOC’s recognition of the role of sports science and medicine in policy development, we disagree with the assertion that the IOC framework is consistent with existing scientific and medical evidence and question its recommendations for implementation. Testosterone exposure during male development results in physical differences between male and female bodies; this process underpins male athletic advantage in muscle mass, strength and power, and endurance and aerobic capacity. The IOC’s “no presumption of advantage” principle disregards this reality. Studies show that transgender women (male-born individuals who identify as women) with suppressed testosterone retain muscle mass, strength, and other physical advantages compared to females; male performance advantage cannot be eliminated with testosterone suppression. The IOC’s concept of “meaningful competition” is flawed because fairness of category does not hinge on closely matched performances. The female category ensures fair competition for female athletes by excluding male advantages. Case-by-case testing for transgender women may lead to stigmatization and cannot be robustly managed in practice. We argue that eligibility criteria for female competition must consider male development rather than relying on current testosterone levels. Female athletes should be recognized as the key stakeholders in the consultation and decision-making processes. We urge the IOC to reevaluate the recommendations of their Framework to include a comprehensive understanding of the biological advantages of male development to ensure fairness and safety in female sports.
Finally, the data on transwomen athletes. I’ve left the references in showing the plethora of studies concluding that testosterone suppression doesn’t eliminate male advantage. Bolding in the text is mine
4. TESTOSTERONE SUPPRESSION POST-PUBERTY DOES NOT NEGATE MALE PERFORMANCE ADVANTAGE:
The IOC framework suggests that testosterone concentrations could be investigated as a means to mitigate performance in transgender women. However, no study has demonstrated that transgender women with suppressed testosterone levels after puberty reach biological or physical parity with females. Conversely, numerous studies have shown that biological differences persist after testosterone is suppressed,25, 44, 46 with physical performance implications. There is no plausible biological mechanism by which testosterone suppression could reduce height and associated skeletal measurements (e.g., bone length and hip or shoulder width) that may confer a discipline-dependent performance advantage. Consequently, no study has reported reductions in skeletal advantages in transgender women who suppress testosterone after puberty.25
Twelve controlled longitudinal studies44, 47–57 collectively following more than 800 untrained or moderately trained transgender women have shown that testosterone suppression for 1 year induces only a 5% loss of pre-transition muscle mass/strength. This loss accounts for only a fraction (one-fifth or less) of typically observed male versus female muscle mass and strength differences.25, 26, 58 For example, in the study by Wiik et al.,44 thigh muscle volume differences of 39% between transgender men and women were reduced only marginally with 1 year of testosterone suppression, and 83% percent of the initial male advantage was retained. The result is higher levels of muscle mass and strength in transgender women compared to females for at least 3 years after testosterone suppression (i.e., the longest sampling duration of current longitudinal studies), with male advantage still evident in cross-sectional studies of transgender women who suppressed testosterone for up to 14 years.59–61
Note, however, that factors affecting endurance performance, like supermarathon running, have not been tested sufficiently to come to any conclusion. It may turn out that in these endurance sports transwomen are on par with men. But certainly this isn’t the case for marathon running.
The effects of testosterone suppression on biological factors underlying endurance performance are less well explored than those of strength and power. Nonetheless, untrained or moderately trained transgender women who have successfully suppressed testosterone after puberty achieved female-typical hemoglobin concentrations within 3–6 months.44, 46 In contrast, the effect on hemoglobin mass, which, unlike hemoglobin concentration, is strongly related to VO2max,39, 62 is unknown, and other factors related to endurance performance, such as work economy and fractional utilization, have not been studied.
We argue that the existing literature on physical changes induced by testosterone suppression constitutes the most robust dataset currently available, and is relevant for elite athletes, because it confirms the principle of persistence of biological characteristics even in the absence of training. These longitudinal studies are then complemented by studies in which testosterone suppression in males has been accompanied by exercise training, which demonstrate that training can partly, or even completely, attenuate reductions in muscle mass and strength.63, 64 Therefore, a rational hypothesis based on current evidence would be that retained male advantage would be larger, not smaller, in highly trained transgender women if they continued to train during testosterone suppression, compared with untrained or moderately trained individuals. This hypothesis is also supported by the observation that sex-specific differences in athletic performance are at least equally pronounced in elite athletes compared to untrained or moderately trained individuals.26
The findings documented in the scientific literature, and the hypothesis that retained male advantage would be larger in athletes, predict that the relative ranking of transgender women in competitive sports would improve significantly after they switch from the male to the female category. This is illustrated by a case study of an American transgender swimmer, who achieved significant National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) ranking improvements (from middle to top) across a range of events after switching from the male to the female category.65 This occurred as a result of performance decreases that were significantly smaller than male versus female performance differences, supporting the retention of male biological advantage and illustrating the resultant unfairness.
The swimmer referred to above is certainly Lia Thomas. At any rate, 12 women athletes are suing the NCAA for forcing them to compete against trans women. You can read about the suit at the Free Press, by clicking the link below. Again, Lia Thomas seems to have been the spur for this suit (article archived here). The unarchived piece has a YouTube discussion of the lawsuit by two of the plaintiffs, Riley Gaines and Réka György:
As I understand, males are born with more testosterone receptors than females. This further negates the simple use of blood levels of testosterone as a useful standard.
Because, with their more numerous receptors, males have a higher sensitivity to testosterone?
Thanks for that.
There are two pieces of misinformation exploited by the trans activists.
1). “Testosterone doesn’t make men stronger and faster so there is no basis for segregating sport according to sex.” This comes from the IOC’s recognition that suppressing testosterone in adult men for two years doesn’t negate their athletic advantage they got from puberty years before, which is true. The activists twist this to say, “See, testosterone doesn’t matter! Transwomen are women.”
2). “Not all men are stronger and faster than all women, so there is no basis for arbitrarily excluding us transwomen.” Sure, it’s easy to find any number of men who are weaker and slower than well-trained women. Just put me in a cycling race against a women’s amateur club. Even if I could have beaten them when I was their age, I certainly couldn’t now. (Although if the rules said we all had to jump off our bikes every 5 km and do 25 standard pushups before proceeding, I’d give them a run for their money.). And if you include all the male times in a marathon and compare them to the best 10% of women, the men don’t look very impressive on average. The slowest women don’t even finish to get counted in the female average.
Both these non-arguments are being advanced by advocates for trans inclusion. There is no inherent right to compete in a category just because you can win in it. Trans athletes can compete as men…and lose. Just as nearly every male or female athlete does who competes, loses. There has to be a reason for competing other than winning, because most of us never do.
The past scandal involving the East German (GDR) Women’s Olympic Team regarding doping, including testosterone use, that led to superior performance by their female athletes at the Games is something the IOC can’t ignore for the sake of giving in to male transgender athletes.
Indeed! British swimmer Sharron Davies was cheated out of a gold medal at the 1980 Summer Olympics – the East German winner, Petra Schneider, has since apologised to her and offered her the medal, but Davies declined on the basis that it is for the IOC to correct the record and award her the medal she deserved. Davies is also very sympathetic towards Schneider, who suffered physically as the result of her unwilling testosterone doping. (These are the same ill health problems suffered by women who identify as men and take cross-sex hormones, of course.)
Davies’ 2023 book Unfair Play: The Battle for Women’s Sport is highly recommended.
A great way to celebrate Transgender Day of Visibility 2024.
In light of the growing body of evidence that people are going to use actual science when evaluating whether it’s fair for trans-identified males to compete in women’s sports, the argument is starting to shift to what “fair” means.
Why is competition so important compared to human rights? Is there an acceptable degree of injustice towards those Assigned Female at Birth in order to affirm the identities of women who didn’t have that privilege? Sure they’re going to win. So what? Wouldn’t it be fairer to let the Trans Women’s natural physical advantage help compensate them for their emotional struggles for acceptance?
I say no, but can’t use the biological data here — which is the point.
That argument that having trans women compete with women and then win (or at least do quite well) because they are oppressed in other ways is one of what I call ‘the best arguments’ from trans activists. Other best arguments are that in sports, there is already a huge range of other advantages and disadvantages even within a natal sex. People differ in their natural gifts at excelling in a sport and not everyone is able to become an elite athlete. People also differ in their opportunities to really dedicate time and training to get where they can earn scholarships or earn a salary in a sport. Getting there can cost a lot of $$, and not everyone has those opportunities. Since large inequalities are already there, what is one more inequality? Besides, trans women athletes will be rare, so c’mon, let ’em in.
So those are the best arguments, I think.
But note that when those arguments are made, it means that the claimant is also admitting that men have physical advantages.
New study from Stanford Medicine. Would be interesting to see if transgender folks lean more towards their natal or neo with respect to the below.
“Leveraging recent advances in artificial intelligence and large multicohort fMRI (functional MRI) datasets, we identify highly replicable, generalizable, and behaviorally relevant sex differences in human functional brain organization localized to the default mode network, striatum, and limbic network.”
https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.2310012121
In a slightly different context, this was sorted out, we hoped, half a century ago. The Press sisters abruptly retired after sex testing was introduced for Olympic athletes. The issue then, as now, was about cheating.
The website Boys vs Women keeps a record of the elite women’s sporting records routinely broken by high school boy athletes. No testosterone suppression involved, but a stark illustration of the difference between male and female sporting performances: https://boysvswomen.com/#/
Why does it matter? It’s not just an exercise in “fairness”, there is also the allocation of resources for athletes. High school women compete for college athletic scholarships just as men do, and thanks to Title IX, colleges are required to allocate sufficient funds to women’s athletics as are given to men. If trans women outcompete cis women, they will take away all those resources.
Of course, the counter argument will be that trans women ARE women. But they are in male bodies, which gives them what most people believe is an unfair advantage over women by birth. And that sucks for those born into female bodies, who might be denied athletic opportunities and even access to higher education as a result.
+1
The Lundberg et al. piece is excellent and very clearly written. To me, the most consequential sentence in the entire article is this:
“Thus, it is not the adult level of testosterone that predicts the performance of an individual athlete, but rather developmental exposure to testosterone and the development of male secondary sex characteristics that underpin the existence of the male category and category-level differences between the sexes.”
What this statement does is essentially nullify the practice of using present testosterone levels as measures of eligibility. Testosterone’s effects are global and permanent, as the amazing text figure (Figure 1) in Lundberg et al. shows. The male advantages simply do not go away and cannot be made to go away. (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/sms.145810)
I wonder what the reception of this paper will be. It wades into controversial waters, so critiques will no doubt soon appear. But it seems to me that this article is also a test of the public’s acceptance of science itself. For if facts of the world, clearly stated, cannot overcome beliefs that are shown to be false, then what is left to tether us to the truth? We’ll see.
+1
RE: “it seems to me that this article is also a test of the public’s acceptance of science itself”
The public (as we know from opinion polls) is against the inclusion of males who identify as women in female sport. It’s many sport officials who have greenlighted this inclusion for various reasons.
Ultimately, sport depends for public support on social acceptability. That is why males who identify as woman will ultimately be excluded from almost all female sports. The big sports like track and field, swimming & cycling have already done this on the international level – and more will follow. Female sports where the officials refuse to exclude males will lose public support and, consequently, sponsorships, etc.
NCAA will lose the suit that has been brought against it.
The whole woke agenda has little support among the public, and for that reason will be beaten back. It takes time. But this is what will happen. For instance, the backlash against the takeover of the US higher education by the woke is gathering strength.
I agree with Susan below (comment # 12).
“Ultimately, sport depends for public support on social acceptability.”
Nowhere more true than professional sport, which is of course not just sport but expensive entertainment with high-priced talent paid for by fans and subscribers. It’s noteable that the WNBA is not overrun by transwomen, perhaps (or at least one hopes) because the sensible business interests that try to make money from the WNBA’s franchises and TV licensing recognize that fans and viewers want to see female players, not gigantic males larping as women. The one WNBA player rumoured to be a male was supported by a full-course press of WNBA stories to the effect that oh no she’s just gay not trans (a missed opportunity if the WNBA was looking to embrace transwomen).
Will amateur sport be the high water mark for trans inclusion in sport? Will the financial interests of pro sports franchises and leagues set the limit on inclusion of transwomen? One indication comes from women’s pro golf, where players and tour organizers have come out against trans inclusion.
https://golfweek.usatoday.com/2024/03/08/transgender-golfer-hailey-davidson-banned-nxxt-mini-tour-changes-gender-policy/
Women’s pro golf has lots of male TV viewers for lots of reasons, including the sex appeal (sorry) and because a lot of the high handicappers watching from home find the women’s pro game much more relatable than the golf played by the male pros who crush the ball vast distances. If those guys at home wanted to watch a mediocre male golfer poke the ball some flaccid distance up a green fairway, all they have to do is tune in the Champions Tour (the senior men’s pro tour), they don’t need the women’s pro tour for that.
A second interesting test case will be the new Professional Women’s Hockey League, which is both a good idea (and a good product) but also the spawn of the NHL and its relentless search for diversity and for absolution from some really horrendous sexual abuse by hockey players. Will the NHL and the PWHL go so far as to add transwomen to PWHL squads for the sake of some extra diversity brownie points? Will they risk the good will of viewers and ticket buyers the vast majority of whom want to see female players, and don’t want to see some hulking trans goon crush a female opponent into the boards?
quillette.com/blog/2022/12/09/ignoring-biological-reality-puts-female-hockey-players-at-risk/
And then there’s that transwoman from my home town 🙁 who wants to play tackle football with females.
.www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/trans-athlete-competition-alberta-1.7157218
Story courtesy of the ever-lovin’ CBC of course.
As they say on twitter, you don’t hate journalists enough. You think you do, but you don’t.
twitter.com/AuronMacintyre/status/1579651858901393408
Thank you Jerry.
I once thought overwhelming evidence of sex differences would be enough to preserve female spaces for females. Silly me! Instead, as Sastra states, the goalposts keep moving. These men want what they want, and I haven’t seen an argument yet that they will consider.
I am grateful to all who are fighting the good fight. Facts do not deter the activists, but may help more normies stand their ground.
+1
The woke are too keen to destroy women’s sport for the benefit of a few male cheaters. I suspect that at one point, the only (long-run) winning tactic will be to declare that sex is a social construct, and from now on, all sexes and genders will compete together. Of course, women will have no chance, but neither will the cheaters. Somewhen in the future, the world may return to normalcy.
The Federalist is a hotbed of election denial, so not the kind of people that should be considered allies.
Who cares if they’re allies if they point me to a relevant piece of science. Are you say that nothing they say should ever be cited because they’re not “allies”? No, they’re not to my political taste, but I detest the idea that we should ignore everything that our ideological opponents say.
Just look at the (non Federalist) paper they cite.
Of course, applying biological differences to “ideas of what human society should be” is actually a “naturalistic fallacy”, and you only need to point it out to silence most scientific intellectuals.
I think the transition zone between intellectuals who really apply evolutionary biology (mostly pro-conservatives) to social ideas and leftist gnosticism who are completely hostile to biological facts is disappearing. How about biologists accept that? Be sheltered by the political right and preserves their research results, or for the sake of “morality” joins the anti-scientific left and becomes its accomplice in destroying biology.
Of course you can pretend to be a leftist while adding biology to your ideas of “how society should be”, but don’t forget that this is the kind of leftist who is trying to explain why a decrease in the black population due to legalized abortion is good for social progress.
It is not only biology that is being destroyed. Vulnerable people, includiing children, are destroyed by being gaslighted until they agree to mutilate themselves. Women and girls are destroyed by being put at the mercy of predatory males. Women’s careers are destroyed, as this post explains. Free speech is destroyed. I see no morality here.
It’s a slippery slope. Dividing athletic competitions into ‘male’ (presumed XY) and ‘female’ (presumed XX) groups originally seemed a straightforward way to make the competitions fair. But once we start recognizing more subtle factors that affect athletic performance, whether inherited or due to hormonal or other interventions, where do we stop?
There is no need to “recognize[e] more subtle factors that affect athletic performance”, other than weight classes for boxing and wrestling which are well-established as fair by both sexes who compete in those sports. Dividing athletic competitions into male and female still is a straightforward way to make competition fair.
There are edge cases that challenge the definition of what is a female in terms of whether a competitor can be eligible to compete against other women. Some are straightforward: a person with an SRY gene and no testosterone receptors is physiologically female for purposes of competition. Others are not. But none of these edge cases involves trans people.
I’ve said it before, we need some years of this happening for anything to come of it. We need a number of trans winners by wide margins and biological women in hospital before it is rethinked.
Aren’t we at both of those points already?
Edit: Actually what we need to precipitate a rethink are women to just turn their backs on sports where the trans guys will either win or put them in the hospital. Women don’t have to sacrifice their health to prove your point.
The ‘range’ argument mentioned above by Leslie (“Not all men are stronger and faster than all women”) would, if taken seriously, be an argument for not having any sex segregation in sport. Women athletes wouldn’t be happy about this, since they’d never make the finals of elite events. The possibility of a professional career in sport would be pretty much closed off for them. And it wouldn’t satisfy transwomen athletes either, since what they want is to compete with women.
Incidentally, there is at least one exception to the general truth that men have inherent advantages over women in sport. In some women’s gymnastic events, such as the beam, it’s an advantage to be small, light, supple and gracile (not to mention the painful consequences if a man were to fall astride the beam). But I don’t see transwomen athletes clamouring to be allowed to compete in this event, for some reason.
I wrote above that maybe this is what remains to be done. Once the male cheaters are driven to obscurity by authentic male athletes, and the world return to normalcy, sport may also return to normalcy.
Thanks for this update and link to the scientific article.