Hmm.

New article in the Nation about how swimming is especially transphobic.

There is a particularly interesting passage:

World Aquatics, the international federation that governs the sport of swimming, released a new transgender participation policy in July 2022 that essentially bans trans women from competing by creating incredibly restrictive requirements for their inclusion. (As I have written previously, there is no real evidence that trans athletes have an inherent advantage over their cisgender counterparts.)

Frankie de la Cretaz

If you click through those links, you will see they all cite back to the same study, from the Canadian Center for Ethics in Sport, performed by the pro LGBTQ+ group E-Alliance.

It’s key biomedical findings are these:

Tl;DR is that trans-women retain some athletic advantages after 12 months of HRT (bone density, height, strength, muscle-mass), while losing others (hemoglobin density, perhaps muscular endurance).

Okay, got it.

That result is basically confirmed by studies of gender transition in the military and many other studies

If you ever encounter this debate going forward, the actual scientific results are surprisingly consistent:

1. Controlling for height, transwomen retain some athletic advantages over cis women, but not all.
2. Some advantages quickly disappear after starting HRT, controlling for height.
3. Other advantages survive 36 months or more.
4. Height/weight/body size is an independent source of advantage in most sports.
5. But trans women become unable to compete on even footing with male athletes soon after beginning HRT.

What I hoped to achieve by writing this blog post is that all of my (two or three) lovely readers learn the facts. Those are the facts, as confirmed by every study, including the one by the Canadian Center for Ethics in Sport.

The Canadian Center for Ethics in Sport discribed their findings a little differently than I would:

Available evidence indicates trans women who have undergone testosterone suppression have no clear biological advantages over cis women in elite sport.

E-Alliance

A conservative might call that description a “lie.”

I don’t think that’s quite correct.

I think that the word “clear” used above is a load-bearing-modifier: a tiny little word that most people skip over, but which turns an obvious falsehood into something basically true. Very important to lawyers. You could rephrase E-Alliance’s description as:

There is insufficient evidence to clearly demonstrate that trans women who have undergone testosterone suppression have biological advantages over cis women in elite sport.

E-Alliance, rephrased.

That’s correct, because there have been basically no studies on trans-women in elite sport. Plus, if you think about it, it’s not clear how you would measure “clear biological advantages” in a specifically elite-sport context. Clear biological advantages compared to whom?

Whatever rules we choose will leave some people rightly feeling pissed off.

Some people think that the cis-female athletes should just shut the fuck up, because trans-women already face startling disadvantages, so they should take the L and move on.

I think that’s reasonable to say to most people.

The problem is that some people care about elite women’s sports more than anything else in the world, so telling them to just shut up is pretty unfair. Those people are called “elite women’s athletes.”

Hmm.