4 ms·

Study finds no clear advantage for trans women over cisgender women in sports

38 points by startupfreak 4mo ago

jazz9k 4mo ago
[flagged]
- nunobrito 4mo ago
  It is always a matter of looking who did the "study" and what are their affiliations. There are also studies proving that the earth is flat: https://guides.loc.gov/flat-earth https://guides.loc.gov/flat-earth
- PaulHoule 4mo ago
  Prior to 1970 or so there wasn't an objective medical test used to tell men from women in sports and you had the problem of men who would participate in the Olympics as a women to win medals. And I think the frame was that, not "I am someone who lives as a woman" My wife on the other hand thinks that gender-variant people are frequently alienated from their bodies and less inclined to participate in sports and other physical or nature-oriented things. I do photography for a running club in a very queer-friendly town which has me looking at the list of participants. We let people register as NB and have medals for the top 3 but frequently out of a few hundred entries we get 0 NBs even though running in a 5k on the flats would be an easy way to get a medal if you can pass for NB. On the other hand I've witnessed people set world records at more serious events and I can see people concerned about a record being set that natural women could never beat. My strongly held view that seems to be profoundly unpopular is that I don't want the state settling the issue but rather it is a question for sports leagues to decide. Different leagues have different goals and different sports are different: I think transgender people should have a place where they can benefit from participating in sports and I think people have real concerns. We have a running gag about a male friend of our family who was one of the first players on an amateur women's hockey team because they were struggling to get a quorum -- he's not a big guy and not a great hockey player but he played a role in helping woman enjoy sports participation.
  - deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
- happymellon 4mo ago
  So they have citations and data. You have...?
  - solid_fuel 4mo ago
    [flagged]
- cindyllm 4mo ago
  [dead]
- dodu_ 4mo ago
  [flagged]
akramachamarei 4mo ago
Despite title, this study did not investigate the question of sports advantage, at least not directly. It looked at physical fitness, concluding: > While transgender women exhibited higher lean mass than cisgender women, their physical fitness was comparable. Current evidence is mostly low certainty and has heterogenous quality but does not support theories of inherent athletic advantages for transgender women over cisgender. I don't find this study especially interesting or pertinent on the subject of sports advantage, as it only covers a small number of possible Whys, but doesn't touch Whats. It would be more useful for researchers to compare actual sports performance. For obvious reasons, these studies are probably not available for metaanalysis.
- cogman10 4mo ago
  Yeah, it's just going to be pretty hard to really do any sort of good study here. Like, for example, is the individual in question currently on HRT? When did they start HRT? What is their current testosterone levels? And when we dive into a specific sport, how do they actually perform? The issue is that for any given sport there's like 1 or 2 transgender people participating in it.
  - angoragoats 4mo ago
    > Like, for example, is the individual in question currently on HRT? When did they start HRT? If you had read the short abstract of the linked article, you'd know that they addressed at least these points.
bad_username 4mo ago
[flagged]
icegreentea2 4mo ago
Didn't find the full study, but what I'm pretty sure is a preprint is here: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.05.05.25326994v1 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.05.05.25326994v... One thing to note and I guess might be a bit of the puzzle is that the data clearly indicates that trans-gendered men have lower upper and lower body strength compared to cis-men, while the opposite scenario (transwomen compared to cisgender women) appears much less conclusive. The trans-women vs cis-gender strength effects are heavily influenced by a single study. There are only 7 studies for upper body strength, 5 of which lean towards showing greater trans-women strength, 1 that leans towards reduced, and 1 (Alvares 2025) which clearly indicates reduced strength. Similarly for lower body strength there are only 4 studies with a similar pattern (once again, the Alvares 2025 producing the clearest TW weaker than CW effect). The Alvares 2025 study compares amateur volleyball players. There are 7 trans women in that study versus 8 cis-gender women. Average hours per week of activity (or volleyball? Unclear, I'm working off the meta-review's summary table) is 4 for TW and 14 for CW. Average age is 30 (28-33) for TW and 26 (22-29) for CW. I don't think that makes the Alvares study useless, but I do feel that it's deeply limited. 4 hours vs 14 hours a week is a pretty big difference in activity level.
catheter 4mo ago
Excited to hear some very normal and nuanced opinions on this.
corsendonk 4mo ago
[flagged]
- fauchletenerum 4mo ago
  Excellent reference
dodu_ 4mo ago
[flagged]
- fauchletenerum 4mo ago
  > If one truly cared about (un)fairness in sports there are other issues that you'd address long before you ever even think of trans Such as?
- nicenicen 4mo ago
  > The easiest test for this: If you were presented with a way to include transgender people in sports in a perfectly fair manner, would you be in favor of it? There already is: competing with others of the same sex. Most people have no issue with this. As an example, consider Hergie Bacyadan in the Paris Olympics. There was no controversy at all, as this was perfectly fair.
- a_conservative 3mo ago
  I've thought about this comment a lot over the past 3 days. It was the top comment in this discussion for a while. People think about the world differently. Is there really no room for anyone to disagree with you without being a bigot?
  - dodu_ 3mo ago
    [flagged]
leevilux 4mo ago
Given that there are so few trans athletes and assuming there is no advantage over women, it is very surprising that we have seen so many trans gold medalists.
- angoragoats 4mo ago
  Best I can tell there are currently zero trans Olympic gold medalists. Did I misunderstand your post, or if not, what am I missing? Edit: I did find Canadian soccer player Quinn who is described interchangeably as non-binary and trans, despite those two things not being the same. The Canadian team did win Olympic gold in 2020. So maybe there’s one?
  - leevilux 3mo ago
    The 2024 Olympic gold medalists in women's boxing, Imane Khelif (Algeria) and Lin Yu-ting (Taiwan).
    - hn_acker 3mo ago
      Neither Imane Khelif nor Lin Yu-ting are transgender [1][2]. There is no possible good faith reason for leevilux to claim otherwise. (It makes me wonder about the overlap between transphobia and misogyny.) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imane_Khelif https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imane_Khelif [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lin_Yu-ting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lin_Yu-ting
      - nicenicen 3mo ago
        That is true, but they are both male athletes, with male physiological advantage, competing in the female category. Which is the same problem.
        hn_acker 3mo ago
        There is no possible good faith reason for nicenicen to double down on leevilux's blatant falsehoods. Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting were assigned female at birth, and have always been women.
mike_prixe 4mo ago
what about MMA/Boxing?
conartist6 4mo ago
Perhaps the time is right for a new wave of interest in ultimate frisbee? I was a bar the other day and there was an actual ultimate frisbee tournament game on TV with a commentator and everything. There they were, men and women playing a team sport side by side on the same field, and there was me watching with a beer! It was good game too with some banger hucks and bids
timnetworks 4mo ago
A study would presumably also find no clear advantage in a fistfight between a husband and wife? Protecting half the population is countably higher stakes.
sapphicsnail 4mo ago
The amount of people who wade into this fight without knowing a single thing about HRT baffles me.
- aaron695 4mo ago
  [dead]
rotichi 4mo ago
Here's a detailed critique of this paper and its many flaws: https://www.voidifremoved.co.uk/p/beef-trifle https://www.voidifremoved.co.uk/p/beef-trifle

38 points by startupfreak 4mo ago

jazz9k 4mo ago

[flagged]

nunobrito 4mo ago
It is always a matter of looking who did the "study" and what are their affiliations. There are also studies proving that the earth is flat: https://guides.loc.gov/flat-earth https://guides.loc.gov/flat-earth
PaulHoule 4mo ago
Prior to 1970 or so there wasn't an objective medical test used to tell men from women in sports and you had the problem of men who would participate in the Olympics as a women to win medals. And I think the frame was that, not "I am someone who lives as a woman" My wife on the other hand thinks that gender-variant people are frequently alienated from their bodies and less inclined to participate in sports and other physical or nature-oriented things. I do photography for a running club in a very queer-friendly town which has me looking at the list of participants. We let people register as NB and have medals for the top 3 but frequently out of a few hundred entries we get 0 NBs even though running in a 5k on the flats would be an easy way to get a medal if you can pass for NB. On the other hand I've witnessed people set world records at more serious events and I can see people concerned about a record being set that natural women could never beat. My strongly held view that seems to be profoundly unpopular is that I don't want the state settling the issue but rather it is a question for sports leagues to decide. Different leagues have different goals and different sports are different: I think transgender people should have a place where they can benefit from participating in sports and I think people have real concerns. We have a running gag about a male friend of our family who was one of the first players on an amateur women's hockey team because they were struggling to get a quorum -- he's not a big guy and not a great hockey player but he played a role in helping woman enjoy sports participation.
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
happymellon 4mo ago
So they have citations and data. You have...?
- solid_fuel 4mo ago
  [flagged]
cindyllm 4mo ago
[dead]
dodu_ 4mo ago
[flagged]

akramachamarei 4mo ago

Despite title, this study did not investigate the question of sports advantage, at least not directly. It looked at physical fitness, concluding: > While transgender women exhibited higher lean mass than cisgender women, their physical fitness was comparable. Current evidence is mostly low certainty and has heterogenous quality but does not support theories of inherent athletic advantages for transgender women over cisgender. I don't find this study especially interesting or pertinent on the subject of sports advantage, as it only covers a small number of possible Whys, but doesn't touch Whats. It would be more useful for researchers to compare actual sports performance. For obvious reasons, these studies are probably not available for metaanalysis.

cogman10 4mo ago
Yeah, it's just going to be pretty hard to really do any sort of good study here. Like, for example, is the individual in question currently on HRT? When did they start HRT? What is their current testosterone levels? And when we dive into a specific sport, how do they actually perform? The issue is that for any given sport there's like 1 or 2 transgender people participating in it.
- angoragoats 4mo ago
  > Like, for example, is the individual in question currently on HRT? When did they start HRT? If you had read the short abstract of the linked article, you'd know that they addressed at least these points.

bad_username 4mo ago

[flagged]

icegreentea2 4mo ago

Didn't find the full study, but what I'm pretty sure is a preprint is here: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.05.05.25326994v1 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.05.05.25326994v... One thing to note and I guess might be a bit of the puzzle is that the data clearly indicates that trans-gendered men have lower upper and lower body strength compared to cis-men, while the opposite scenario (transwomen compared to cisgender women) appears much less conclusive. The trans-women vs cis-gender strength effects are heavily influenced by a single study. There are only 7 studies for upper body strength, 5 of which lean towards showing greater trans-women strength, 1 that leans towards reduced, and 1 (Alvares 2025) which clearly indicates reduced strength. Similarly for lower body strength there are only 4 studies with a similar pattern (once again, the Alvares 2025 producing the clearest TW weaker than CW effect). The Alvares 2025 study compares amateur volleyball players. There are 7 trans women in that study versus 8 cis-gender women. Average hours per week of activity (or volleyball? Unclear, I'm working off the meta-review's summary table) is 4 for TW and 14 for CW. Average age is 30 (28-33) for TW and 26 (22-29) for CW. I don't think that makes the Alvares study useless, but I do feel that it's deeply limited. 4 hours vs 14 hours a week is a pretty big difference in activity level.

catheter 4mo ago

Excited to hear some very normal and nuanced opinions on this.

corsendonk 4mo ago

[flagged]

fauchletenerum 4mo ago
Excellent reference

dodu_ 4mo ago

[flagged]

fauchletenerum 4mo ago
> If one truly cared about (un)fairness in sports there are other issues that you'd address long before you ever even think of trans Such as?
nicenicen 4mo ago
> The easiest test for this: If you were presented with a way to include transgender people in sports in a perfectly fair manner, would you be in favor of it? There already is: competing with others of the same sex. Most people have no issue with this. As an example, consider Hergie Bacyadan in the Paris Olympics. There was no controversy at all, as this was perfectly fair.
a_conservative 3mo ago
I've thought about this comment a lot over the past 3 days. It was the top comment in this discussion for a while. People think about the world differently. Is there really no room for anyone to disagree with you without being a bigot?
- dodu_ 3mo ago
  [flagged]

leevilux 4mo ago

Given that there are so few trans athletes and assuming there is no advantage over women, it is very surprising that we have seen so many trans gold medalists.

angoragoats 4mo ago
Best I can tell there are currently zero trans Olympic gold medalists. Did I misunderstand your post, or if not, what am I missing? Edit: I did find Canadian soccer player Quinn who is described interchangeably as non-binary and trans, despite those two things not being the same. The Canadian team did win Olympic gold in 2020. So maybe there’s one?
- leevilux 3mo ago
  The 2024 Olympic gold medalists in women's boxing, Imane Khelif (Algeria) and Lin Yu-ting (Taiwan).
  - hn_acker 3mo ago
    Neither Imane Khelif nor Lin Yu-ting are transgender [1][2]. There is no possible good faith reason for leevilux to claim otherwise. (It makes me wonder about the overlap between transphobia and misogyny.) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imane_Khelif https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imane_Khelif [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lin_Yu-ting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lin_Yu-ting
    - nicenicen 3mo ago
      That is true, but they are both male athletes, with male physiological advantage, competing in the female category. Which is the same problem.
      - hn_acker 3mo ago
        There is no possible good faith reason for nicenicen to double down on leevilux's blatant falsehoods. Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting were assigned female at birth, and have always been women.

mike_prixe 4mo ago

what about MMA/Boxing?

conartist6 4mo ago

Perhaps the time is right for a new wave of interest in ultimate frisbee? I was a bar the other day and there was an actual ultimate frisbee tournament game on TV with a commentator and everything. There they were, men and women playing a team sport side by side on the same field, and there was me watching with a beer! It was good game too with some banger hucks and bids

timnetworks 4mo ago

A study would presumably also find no clear advantage in a fistfight between a husband and wife? Protecting half the population is countably higher stakes.

sapphicsnail 4mo ago

The amount of people who wade into this fight without knowing a single thing about HRT baffles me.

aaron695 4mo ago
[dead]

rotichi 4mo ago

Here's a detailed critique of this paper and its many flaws: https://www.voidifremoved.co.uk/p/beef-trifle https://www.voidifremoved.co.uk/p/beef-trifle