RunRagged wrote:
Just Another Hobby Jogger wrote:
But the real question is whether a trans woman retains sports specific advantage after losing muscle strength with hormone therapy. A bigger frame without corresponding strength is not necessarily an advantage in a given sport. Otherwise, a bigger athlete would always win over a smaller athlete in every sport. Whether there is any significant residual advantage after hormone therapy can be determined only with sports specific data. And I don't think we have anything close to sufficient data in any sport.
Thomas proves the current NCAA rule is not sufficient in swimming, The current FINA rule may or may not be sufficient in swimming. We will not know until Thomas swims in a FINA sanctioned event. We know the current NCAA rule is not sufficient for track & field. (Cece Telfer example above.) But we don't know if the current WA rule is sufficient until a trans women competes under the WA rule, and we get to compare the pre and post transition performances.
Can you link to the current FINA rule(s) you are speaking of? I can't find them on the FINA website or anywhere else.
Your suggestion that data needs to be gathered for each particular sport to determine "whether a trans woman retains sports specific advantage after losing muscle strength with hormone therapy" seems to rest on several questionable premises: 1) that the "hormone therapy" that some males who "identify as" women take usually leads to marked reductions in their T levels (it doesn't); 2) that hormone therapy and/or T suppression in trans-identified males causes them to lose significant "muscle strength" the way trans pressure groups and activists assert; and 3) that given males' generally bigger bodies, giving them "hormone therapy" for a year with the aim of reducing their T levels might well put them on par with females in terms of sports performance.
But major sports organizations that have looked into all the evidence in detail and at length, such as UK Sports Council and World Rugby, have come to different conclusions even in cases where hormones have been used successfully to reduce T and to keep it at reduced levels.
UK Sports Council's recent report found that when testosterone in trans-identified males is suppressed consistently, strength, stamina and physique are affected as follows:
•Strength: Modest change within 12 months: Muscle mass (and perhaps cardiac size) and hence strength appears retained at significantly higher levels than females.
• Stamina; Restoration of haemoglobin levels to female typical levels within 12 months: with relevant effect on oxygen carrying capacity as yet undefined.
• Physique; Minimal change: Structural features including the skeleton, bone density, height, lung and airway size, and tendon/ligament strength will remain, with modest loss of muscle mass.
This evidence suggests that parity in physical performance... cannot be achieved for transgender people in female sport through testosterone suppression. Theoretical estimation in contact and collision sport indicate injury risk is likely to be increased for female competitors.
https://equalityinsport.org/docs/300921/Transgender%20International%20Research%20Literature%20Review%202021.pdfWorld Rugby's thorough examination of the effects of T suppression in trans-identified males found:
Based on the available evidence provided by studies where testosterone is reduced, the biological variables that confer sporting performance advantages and create risks as described previously appear to be only minimally affected. Indeed, most studies assessing mass, muscle mass and/or strength suggest that the reductions in these variables range between 5% and 10% (as described by Hilton & Lundberg [10]). Given that the typical male vs female advantage ranges from 30% to 100%, these reductions are small and the biological differences relevant to sport are largely retained.
For instance, bone mass is typically maintained in transgender women over the course of at least 24 months of testosterone suppression, with some evidence even indicating small but significant increases in bone mineral density at the lumbar spine [32-34]. Height and other skeletal measurements such as bone length and hip width have also not been shown to change with testosterone suppression, and nor is there any plausible biological mechanism by which this might occur, and so sporting advantages due to skeletal differences between males and females appear unlikely to change with testosterone reduction.
With respects to strength, 1 year of testosterone suppression and oestrogen supplementation has been found to reduce thigh muscle area by 9% compared to baseline measurement [35]. After 3 years, a further reduction of 3% from baseline measurement occurred [36]. The total loss of 12% over three years of treatment meant that transgender women retained significantly higher thigh muscle size (p<0.05) than the baseline measurement of thigh muscle area in transgender men (who are born female and experience female puberty), leading to a conclusion that testosterone suppression in transgender women does not reverse muscle size to female levels [36].
This finding has been replicated and confirmed by numerous studies examining the effects of testosterone suppression on lean body mass or muscle size in transgender women [37- 44]. Collectively, these studies find that 1 year of testosterone suppression to female typical reference levels results in a comparatively modest loss of lean body mass (LBM) or muscle size, with consistent changes between 3% and 5% reduction in LBM after 1 year of treatment (as summarized from source research studies by Hilton & Lundberg [10]).
Muscle force-producing capability is reduced after testosterone suppression, though as appears to be the case for muscle/lean mass, these reductions are considerably smaller in magnitude that the initial male-vs-female differences in these variables. For instance, hand-grip strength was reduced by 7% and 9% after 1 and 2 years, respectively, of cross hormone treatment in transgender women [39], and by 4% in 249 transwomen after 1 year of gender-affirming treatment, with no variation between different testosterone levels, age or BMI tertiles [45]. Transgender women retained a 17% grip-strength advantage over transgender men at baseline measurement, with a similarly large, retained advantage when compared to normative data from a reference or comparison group of biological females.
Most recently, Wiik et al found that isokinetic knee extension and flexion strength were not significantly reduced in 11 transgender women after 12 months of testosterone suppression, with a retained advantage of 50% compared to a reference group of biological females and the group of transgender men at baseline [41]. This absence of a reduction in strength occurred in conjunction with a 4% to 5% reduction in thigh volume, and no difference in the contractile density of the muscle, which suggests that the reduction of testosterone for a period of a year had no effect on the force-producing capacity per unit of cross sectional area [41], a variable that is known to be higher in males than females.
In conclusion, longitudinal research studies that have documented changes in lean mass, muscle mass/area and strength show consistently that small decreases occur as a result of testosterone suppression, with a resultant relatively large retained advantage in these variables compared to a group of biological females.
https://www.world.rugby/the-game/player-welfare/guidelines/transgender/womenI have a simpler solution than going to all the effort of obtaining the data you say are needed, sport by sport, with women's sports made a mockery of by male competitors like Lia Thomas and CeCe Telfer in the meantime. Instead of allowing male athletes the chance to keep participating and winning in female events until it's proven beyond all doubt that they retain their male advantage at all levels of competition regardless of which governing body is setting the rules, let's go back to not allowing males of any kind - DSD or with trans identities - into any girls' and women's sports at all. The female category of sports was created to give females a chance to participate, compete and excel. Not to be a consolation prize for males born with anomalies of their urogenital anatomy or male endocrine disorders - and not to be a source of support, "inclusion" and "affirmation" for males who are unhappy with their sex, or a means for obtaining "validation" of one's gender identity.