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woozy pawsies
Nov 26, 2007

Herstory Begins Now posted:

i was mostly paraphrasing some greg nuckols articles wrt overall role of hormones in strength development and muscle growth.

Also i have a major personal bias against people reducing athletic performance to hormone use and imo a lot of the yelling about trans athletes seems to come from a similar place of people making arguments that just have no connection to the things that actually lead to athletes performing well for long enough periods of time to actually become dominant in a sport.

That’s fair. Nuckols knows what he’s talking about, not sure if I’ve read his article on hormones though. I think some people have won the genetic lottery for certain sports, and hormones probably are part of it (along with many other things). And I’m bitter about it.

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Herstory Begins Now
Aug 5, 2003
SOME REALLY TEDIOUS DUMB SHIT THAT SUCKS ASS TO READ ->>

woozy pawsies posted:

That’s fair. Nuckols knows what he’s talking about, not sure if I’ve read his article on hormones though. I think some people have won the genetic lottery for certain sports, and hormones probably are part of it (along with many other things). And I’m bitter about it.

In competitive strongman the consensus was generally that you'd get about one tier of competitive performance from supplementing hormones (eg if you're competitive at a state level without, they would get you to regionally competitive). Clint Darden in particular talked a lot, openly, about the role of hormone use in high-level strongman and the tldr of that generally was that they're both significant but also hugely overstated (and also incredibly overdone, as in people thinking that you need literally 4 grams a week of hormones to even be competitive).

https://www.strongerbyscience.com/steroids-for-strength-sports/ this was I think the best Nuckols piece on the actual magnitude of impact of ped use in strength sports, iirc. He takes tested vs untested federation records a bit too at face value perhaps, but iirc he accounts for that later.

Yeah I get that bitterness lol. Truly elite athletes seem to be winning a ton of genetic and social dice-rolls from having basically ideal proportions conferring specific biomechanical or metabolic advantages adapted to their specific sport to responding extremely favorably to training and recovering rapidly to being fortunate enough to have the time and resources and family and coaching and community support to fully devote themselves to their specific sport and so on. More on the subject of this thread, I suspect that it's specifically the latter reasons more than anything else that is the major reason there are so few trans athletes dominating their sport despite some amount of, at least on paper, advantage.

Personally I want everyone to have the opportunity to compete or play sports. Most of our systems for evaluating individual performance already struggle to adequately account for the full range of individual differences to the extent that whatever your individual story, past a certain point your real competition are the handful of people that can keep up with you and who can still force you to keep pushing harder. Plus, for kids in particular, finding a community around a sport is a really huge deal to someone coming from a home with hostile family and the effort to push trans kids out of sports seems much more about denying them that supportive community than anything to really do with fairness.

woozy pawsies posted:

For those interested, Dr Jordan Feigenbaum of Barbell Medicine has a really good summary of the science regarding trans athletes and the ethics involved (its loving long): https://www.barbellmedicine.com/blog/shades-of-gray-sex-gender-and-fairness-in-sport/ It was written in 2019, i believe after USAPL's ban on FTM transgender athletes from competing in the women's division. it is powerlifting-centric but whatever, still goes over the literature regarding sports in general. however, it does not include one of Harper's latest systematic reviews, which i think is important for strength sports: https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/55/15/865.long How does hormone transition in transgender women change body composition, muscle strength and haemoglobin? Systematic review with a focus on the implications for sport participation

I'm about a third of the way through this and it is by far one of the best things I've ever seen on this subject, ty for linking this.

Herstory Begins Now fucked around with this message at 09:45 on Apr 15, 2022

Cranappleberry
Jan 27, 2009

woozy pawsies posted:

That’s fair. Nuckols knows what he’s talking about, not sure if I’ve read his article on hormones though. I think some people have won the genetic lottery for certain sports, and hormones probably are part of it (along with many other things). And I’m bitter about it.

yea of course there is that. And it sucks if you do a sport and don't have those advantages.

But they also have to have talent for the sport on top of the genetics and then drive to make their skills the best possible (along with other systemic reasons that confer advantages).

It's a cross-section that yields very few competitors and there are people that break the mold, they are just extremely rare.

Shageletic
Jul 25, 2007

Herstory Begins Now posted:


Personally I want everyone to have the opportunity to compete or play sports. Most of our systems for evaluating individual performance already struggle to adequately account for the full range of individual differences to the extent that whatever your individual story, past a certain point your real competition are the handful of people that can keep up with you and who can still force you to keep pushing harder. Plus, for kids in particular, finding a community around a sport is a really huge deal to someone coming from a home with hostile family and the effort to push trans kids out of sports seems much more about denying them that supportive community than anything to really do with fairness.

That's what is so horrible about these trans sports bans currently passing in US legislatures. Kentucky just passed one and as far as anyone knows, there is only one trans kid playing in a school system there, and she started playing because she started her school's first ever girls field hockey team. Now a whole state has told her she can't play sports. It's hosed

PT6A
Jan 5, 2006

Public school teachers are callous dictators who won't lift a finger to stop children from peeing in my plane

Fritz the Horse posted:

Looking at their posts and rap sheet seems to me like they're drunk. Drunk transphobic "jokes" are just as unacceptable as sober ones, of course.

They're on a placeholder while further action is processed (requires admin approval for anything more than 24 hours).

Yeah, I’ve been drinking even while posting in this thread, and no matter whether I’m sober or tipsy or drunk, trans women are still women and should be allowed to compete against other women.


Shageletic posted:

That's what is so horrible about these trans sports bans currently passing in US legislatures. Kentucky just passed one and as far as anyone knows, there is only one trans kid playing in a school system there, and she started playing because she started her school's first ever girls field hockey team. Now a whole state has told her she can't play sports. It's hosed

Yeah, if you can count the affected people on your fingers, chances are it’s a law being specifically targeted for an unacceptable reason. That’s just common sense. If the law is aimed at one person, as in this case, it is functionally a bill of attainder, which is something that we consider vile and unacceptable for obvious reasons.

silence_kit
Jul 14, 2011

by the sex ghost

TheSpamalope posted:

Animals should be allowed too it's bullshit they can't I'm pretty sure theyd kick are asses at lots of stuff

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HgqbCq_sxmo

Colonel Cool
Dec 24, 2006

I think there are legitimate good faith concerns people can have over protecting the competitive integrity of high level sports that can represent things like people's careers, or one of the most important moments of their entire life.

None of these concerns apply to high school sports. :rolleyes:

Shageletic
Jul 25, 2007

I feel like that, and pretty much this entire thread, is a solved problem? As previous pages have shown, if a sport is prestigious enough that there's actually money on the line, the people overseeing those leagues will impose incredibly stringent and invasive levels of testing regarding hormones, their fixed ideas of gender, etc that its nearly impossible for a trans person to compete with an "unfair" advantage?

Colonel Cool
Dec 24, 2006

Is it solved? I'll admit I'm not exactly an expert on the subject, but I was under the impression that the effects of transitioning on elite level athletes is a relatively unexplored field so far just because it's fairly new, and there aren't a ton of examples to work with yet. I wouldn't be surprised if we saw a lot of interesting new data coming out on the subject over the next decade or so.

And to be clear, sports organizations should absolutely be free to set whatever guidelines they believe to be fair given the best current data they have to work with. It just seems way too early to start making very strong statements about what we definitely know for sure on the subject right now.

Dog King
May 19, 2021

by Fluffdaddy

Shageletic posted:

I feel like that, and pretty much this entire thread, is a solved problem? As previous pages have shown, if a sport is prestigious enough that there's actually money on the line, the people overseeing those leagues will impose incredibly stringent and invasive levels of testing regarding hormones, their fixed ideas of gender, etc that its nearly impossible for a trans person to compete with an "unfair" advantage?

I wouldn't mind continuing to use the thread as a jumping-off point for discussion of why parametric divisions of sport are better than gender divisions, but yes, if the point is to answer the question in the title, it's useless. Whether transgender athletes should be allowed compete is a trivial definitional issue. If there are divisions exclusively for women, and trans women are women, then trans women may compete in those divisions, regardless of any advantages they get from being trans.

Colonel Cool
Dec 24, 2006

Should non-transitioning trans women compete in women's divisions? Genuine question.

Dog King
May 19, 2021

by Fluffdaddy

Colonel Cool posted:

Should non-transitioning trans women compete in women's divisions? Genuine question.

If by non-transitioning you mean not engaging in hormone therapy, yes. They'd annihilate, but like I've been saying that's a problem with having gender divisions.

BRAKE FOR MOOSE
Jun 6, 2001

Dog King posted:

If by non-transitioning you mean not engaging in hormone therapy, yes. They'd annihilate, but like I've been saying that's a problem with having gender divisions.

Sex divisions generate an obvious philosophical issue, but I'm not sure how you'd replace them in a sport like elite running. There's no easily observable characteristic that would act as a proxy, and we're not going to be measuring maximal oxygen uptake or doing muscle biopsies to put collegiate runners into the right competitive bins.

Colonel Cool
Dec 24, 2006

Again, not an expert, but it seems like sorting for other characteristics is just going to end up sort of de facto recreating sex divisions anyway, isn't it? Maybe with a very small handful of outliers. Which might be a thing worth doing in a vacuum, but in reality seems like spending a lot of effort and burning through an enormous amount of goodwill over something that's a pretty niche philosophical issue.

Gumball Gumption
Jan 7, 2012

Colonel Cool posted:

Again, not an expert, but it seems like sorting for other characteristics is just going to end up sort of de facto recreating sex divisions anyway, isn't it? Maybe with a very small handful of outliers. Which might be a thing worth doing in a vacuum, but in reality seems like spending a lot of effort and burning through an enormous amount of goodwill over something that's a pretty niche philosophical issue.

Probably but that's because we're now using gender as a short hand for all those measurements and characteristics and then going "Uhhh, guess they can gently caress off and die?" when those outliers show up. I wouldn't call that a philosophical problem though, it's a flawed system of classification. That's pretty technical.

Dog King
May 19, 2021

by Fluffdaddy

BRAKE FOR MOOSE posted:

Sex divisions generate an obvious philosophical issue, but I'm not sure how you'd replace them in a sport like elite running. There's no easily observable characteristic that would act as a proxy, and we're not going to be measuring maximal oxygen uptake or doing muscle biopsies to put collegiate runners into the right competitive bins.

There plenty of anthropometrics you could use for elite running. They'd differ between marathon running and sprinting.

General:
- Ratio of leg length to overall height
- Q-angle or other measure of pelvic mechanical advantage (this is the one that differs most between men and women)

Sprinting:
- Height
- Fast twitch muscle fiber mass

Marathon:
- Somatype (higher points for ecto)
- Slow twitch muscle fiber mass


Colonel Cool posted:

Again, not an expert, but it seems like sorting for other characteristics is just going to end up sort of de facto recreating sex divisions anyway, isn't it? Maybe with a very small handful of outliers. Which might be a thing worth doing in a vacuum, but in reality seems like spending a lot of effort and burning through an enormous amount of goodwill over something that's a pretty niche philosophical issue.

It would have some divisions that had more men or more women but none of them would exclusively be men or women. You could also have more divisions this way, allowing more people to compete meaningfully, like they do in combat sports because of weight divisions.

The other advantage of this is that it's future proof, which male and female divisions aren't. When you start seeing genetic engineering and in vivo biomods, worrying about people like Caster Semenya will feel quaint.

Dr. Stab
Sep 12, 2010
👨🏻‍⚕️🩺🔪🙀😱🙀
What do you do about the significant overlap in typical male and female values for those measurements?

Dog King
May 19, 2021

by Fluffdaddy

Dr. Stab posted:

What do you do about the significant overlap in typical male and female values for those measurements?

In a fully paramaterized system you do nothing, because that's irrelevant to performance. In fact, them having overlap is one of the reasons why this system is better.

Colonel Cool
Dec 24, 2006

Dog King posted:

It would have some divisions that had more men or more women but none of them would exclusively be men or women. You could also have more divisions this way, allowing more people to compete meaningfully, like they do in combat sports because of weight divisions.

The other advantage of this is that it's future proof, which male and female divisions aren't. When you start seeing genetic engineering and in vivo biomods, worrying about people like Caster Semenya will feel quaint.

Fair enough, I suppose I can see some value that would make it an improvement over the current system. I still think in the world as it exists right now where half the nation thinks children transitioning is child abuse there's probably more meaningful battles to choose than breaking down gender segregated sports.

woozy pawsies
Nov 26, 2007

You sound like a person who doesn't watch sports. It's human vs human, in all the different shapes and forms. Sports are cool because different shaped people compete despite apparent biomechanical advantages and disadvantages, and it is also competitive despite them. Weight classes exist in certain sports where there is greater chance of harm or major loss of competitiveness based on body mass. Same with age brackets. And, to some extent, this is the same reasoning for different divisions based on sex. The idea is to be as inclusive as possible to allow all people to compete in a way that still fosters competitiveness -- the sport will self-select for those certain biomechanical and anthropometric advantages. It's loving stupid and even more exclusive, incredibly tedious, and just nerdy as gently caress (in the derogatory pointdexter style nerdy) to try and make up categories based off these measurements. You're pissing me off.

Archer666
Dec 27, 2008

Colonel Cool posted:

Should non-transitioning trans women compete in women's divisions? Genuine question.

Looking at contact sports alone should tell you how much of a bad idea this is.

BRAKE FOR MOOSE
Jun 6, 2001

Dog King posted:

There plenty of anthropometrics you could use for elite running. They'd differ between marathon running and sprinting.

General:
- Ratio of leg length to overall height
- Q-angle or other measure of pelvic mechanical advantage (this is the one that differs most between men and women)

Sprinting:
- Height
- Fast twitch muscle fiber mass

Marathon:
- Somatype (higher points for ecto)
- Slow twitch muscle fiber mass

It would have some divisions that had more men or more women but none of them would exclusively be men or women. You could also have more divisions this way, allowing more people to compete meaningfully, like they do in combat sports because of weight divisions.

There is no accurate indirect way of measuring muscle fiber type, you have to go in and take a chunk out. It's probably only scalable at the world elite level, certainly not for collegiate athletics. VO2Max is more predictive for distance events than either of those, but also requires laboratory measurement. And these are variables that change over time and with training, so they have to be regularly assessed. None of those other measurements you provided actually have predictive value in those disciplines, to my knowledge, though I'm only an expert in physiology for 5km+ events.

This isn't going to happen and it's not a realistic solution. Beyond that, it also creates fundamentally boring categories, and pitting elite women against mediocre biological men just makes for boring races. It's probably genuinely better to eliminate classifications than do this, but then I have no idea how you get women equal attention.

Dog King
May 19, 2021

by Fluffdaddy

woozy pawsies posted:

You sound like a person who doesn't watch sports. It's human vs human, in all the different shapes and forms. Sports are cool because different shaped people compete despite apparent biomechanical advantages and disadvantages, and it is also competitive despite them. Weight classes exist in certain sports where there is greater chance of harm or major loss of competitiveness based on body mass. Same with age brackets. And, to some extent, this is the same reasoning for different divisions based on sex. The idea is to be as inclusive as possible to allow all people to compete in a way that still fosters competitiveness -- the sport will self-select for those certain biomechanical and anthropometric advantages. It's loving stupid and even more exclusive, incredibly tedious, and just nerdy as gently caress (in the derogatory pointdexter style nerdy) to try and make up categories based off these measurements. You're pissing me off.

I know sports are about people with different shapes and forms competing, and there'd still be just as much of that if not more, because all of the parameters would be weighted. So you could have one person who happens to have a disadvantage in one shape and an advantage in another vs someone with the inverted advantage and disadvantage. And that's how it already is. You're just selecting for the same things intelligently the way the competition does automatically.

Having these brackets is exactly for the goal you're talking about of being as inclusive as possible while still fostering competitiveness. The more divisions you had, the more different people would be eligible to compete, instead of just Men's and Women's plus Pro and Amateur. And because it's parameterized, everyone competing would feel like they have an actual fair chance. It would be more competitive.

Edit: Reading your post again, you might have been under the impression I was advocating different divisions for things like "long-legged people" or "ectomorphs." I should have made it clearer that I'm talking about having a single talent/predilection score that takes everything into account with weights for how important they are. So the divisions would just be like, A, B, C, etc.

Dog King fucked around with this message at 18:39 on Apr 15, 2022

Dog King
May 19, 2021

by Fluffdaddy
Here's a paper by three bioethics experts who agree with me: https://jme.bmj.com/content/45/6/395

One of the authors, Dr. Alison Heather, is an athlete herself as well as a specialist in doping and how hormones affect non-reproductive tissue.

VitalSigns
Sep 3, 2011

Colonel Cool posted:

Fair enough, I suppose I can see some value that would make it an improvement over the current system. I still think in the world as it exists right now where half the nation thinks children transitioning is child abuse there's probably more meaningful battles to choose than breaking down gender segregated sports.

If you don't care about this issue why are you spending your time arguing about it on a message board.

Odd comment.

(USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)

Dog King
May 19, 2021

by Fluffdaddy

BRAKE FOR MOOSE posted:

There is no accurate indirect way of measuring muscle fiber type, you have to go in and take a chunk out. It's probably only scalable at the world elite level, certainly not for collegiate athletics. VO2Max is more predictive for distance events than either of those, but also requires laboratory measurement. And these are variables that change over time and with training, so they have to be regularly assessed. None of those other measurements you provided actually have predictive value in those disciplines, to my knowledge, though I'm only an expert in physiology for 5km+ events.

This isn't going to happen and it's not a realistic solution. Beyond that, it also creates fundamentally boring categories, and pitting elite women against mediocre biological men just makes for boring races. It's probably genuinely better to eliminate classifications than do this, but then I have no idea how you get women equal attention.

Well, weight fluctuates just as much as any of these would and we still use it as a division criterion. We have probably a few decades before switching to biometrics instead of our current divisions gets really important, so we'll probably have much more sophisticated measurements by then, taking into account not just phenotype but genotype. Also I gotta disagree with you that evenly-matched races between top female athletes and guys with weird/weak bodies would be boring. That sounds really entertaining.

Gumball Gumption
Jan 7, 2012

Colonel Cool posted:

Fair enough, I suppose I can see some value that would make it an improvement over the current system. I still think in the world as it exists right now where half the nation thinks children transitioning is child abuse there's probably more meaningful battles to choose than breaking down gender segregated sports.

We can do both. No one is saying we can't do both. In fact the only real reason this is an argument, considering the current classification system actually does handle outliers decently and while it can be improved does work, has been because people are using it as a Trojan horse for child abuse.

It's really three separate issues being discussed here. There's the culture war stuff that is just a Trojan horse to roll back changes and allow more abuse. There is then the real discussion/problem about how our classes in sports are not as well measured as they could be and often use gender as a "Eh, well, if your gender is this you'll probably be like this" and we now have the capability to measure more accurately and make better divisions. And finally, the world sucks and there are lots of other places where trans people are being abused and we should stop that too but we can just do that at the same time.

woozy pawsies
Nov 26, 2007

Dog King posted:


Having these brackets is exactly for the goal you're talking about of being as inclusive as possible while still fostering competitiveness. The more divisions you had, the more different people would be eligible to compete, instead of just Men's and Women's plus Pro and Amateur. And because it's parameterized, everyone competing would feel like they have an actual fair chance. It would be more competitive.


Being a big fish in a small pond is boring and stupid.

Dog King
May 19, 2021

by Fluffdaddy

woozy pawsies posted:

Being a big fish in a small pond is boring and stupid.

Okay, go ahead get rid of women's leagues, weight divisions, the special olympics, college sports, and amateur bowling leagues then.

woozy pawsies
Nov 26, 2007

Dog King posted:

Okay, go ahead get rid of women's leagues, weight divisions, the special olympics, college sports, and amateur bowling leagues then.

All of those divisions, despite their flaws, are better than what you are suggesting, is what I’m saying.

Colonel Cool
Dec 24, 2006

VitalSigns posted:

If you don't care about this issue why are you spending your time arguing about it on a message board.

Odd comment.

I never said I didn't care about the issue. I think the question of how to sort transitioning people into gender segregated sports is interesting and meaningful in the real world right here and now for a number of practical and philosophical reasons. What I said probably isn't worth doing right now is going ten steps further and breaking down the concept of segregated gender in sports entirely. Because that position is going to lose 90% of the population immediately, even if we were to grant that it might be something worth thinking about, which I'm not convinced it is.

What I'm interested in is if it does end up being the case that trans women have a noticeable advantage (and I suppose along with that trans men having a noticeable disadvantage) across a wide range of athletic competitions, what should sports policy be? I don't think the data exists right now to be able to give a definite answer to if they do or not, but it seems inevitable that the data will eventually be there.

VitalSigns
Sep 3, 2011

Colonel Cool posted:

What I said probably isn't worth doing right now is going ten steps further and breaking down the concept of segregated gender in sports entirely.

Why not, nothing said here is going to be read by anyone beyond a few nerds on a dying comedy forum, the conversation is just for us. Why shouldn't we analyze alternatives to the way things are, "oh no one will do that right now" applies to like 99.9999% of the stuff people talk about on here, just shut down the forums if we can't talk about anything that isn't going to happen in the next 5 minutes

Colonel Cool
Dec 24, 2006

VitalSigns posted:

Why not, nothing said here is going to be read by anyone beyond a few nerds on a dying comedy forum, the conversation is just for us. Why shouldn't we analyze alternatives to the way things are, "oh no one will do that right now" applies to like 99.9999% of the stuff people talk about on here, just shut down the forums if we can't talk about anything that isn't going to happen in the next 5 minutes

I suppose what I'm trying to do in this thread is form an opinion about the topic that I'm not an expert on. I'm not asking questions like "what should we do in sports if trans women turn out to have a noticeable advantage?" rhetorically, I want to have an answer to that question, for carrying outside of this thread to other people I talk to elsewhere.

But I'm sorry, I shouldn't have implied that there's no value in having entirely theoretical discussions about topics that aren't going to be as impactful in the real world. They can be interesting subjects too, and I didn't mean to sound like I was trying to say they shouldn't be discussed at all.

Dog King
May 19, 2021

by Fluffdaddy

Colonel Cool posted:

I never said I didn't care about the issue. I think the question of how to sort transitioning people into gender segregated sports is interesting and meaningful in the real world right here and now for a number of practical and philosophical reasons. What I said probably isn't worth doing right now is going ten steps further and breaking down the concept of segregated gender in sports entirely. Because that position is going to lose 90% of the population immediately, even if we were to grant that it might be something worth thinking about, which I'm not convinced it is.

What I'm interested in is if it does end up being the case that trans women have a noticeable advantage (and I suppose along with that trans men having a noticeable disadvantage) across a wide range of athletic competitions, what should sports policy be? I don't think the data exists right now to be able to give a definite answer to if they do or not, but it seems inevitable that the data will eventually be there.

The data generally indicates MtF athletes do have an advantage, even on hormone therapy. Different studies show different levels of advantage, but some advantage is always almost always conferred.

BRAKE FOR MOOSE
Jun 6, 2001

Colonel Cool posted:

I suppose what I'm trying to do in this thread is form an opinion about the topic that I'm not an expert on. I'm not asking questions like "what should we do in sports if trans women turn out to have a noticeable advantage?" rhetorically, I want to have an answer to that question, for carrying outside of this thread to other people I talk to elsewhere.

But I'm sorry, I shouldn't have implied that there's no value in having entirely theoretical discussions about topics that aren't going to be as impactful in the real world. They can be interesting subjects too, and I didn't mean to sound like I was trying to say they shouldn't be discussed at all.

Well, eliminating gender categories from sport is a solution to the problem of transgender individuals performing differently from cisgender individuals while maintaining fairness and inclusivity. It introduces new problems, so you then have to recategorize, which is not easy, but people pretend it is easy so they can just argue from first principles of universal fairness and inclusivity. I'm convinced that there will be no fair answer to this question and you have to decide who gets the short straw.

empty whippet box
Jun 9, 2004

by Fluffdaddy

Dog King posted:

The data generally indicates MtF athletes do have an advantage, even on hormone therapy. Different studies show different levels of advantage, but some advantage is always almost always conferred.

What data indicates this? Apologies if I missed it.

Colonel Cool
Dec 24, 2006

That's pretty bleak. I suppose if it comes down to those choices then I prefer the (1%?) of the population getting the short end then the 50%, but it doesn't feel good to say.

I assume these advantages go away if people transition before puberty? If so, then I suppose it just highlights the importance of fighting those battles.

Dog King
May 19, 2021

by Fluffdaddy

empty whippet box posted:

What data indicates this? Apologies if I missed it.

No you're good, I hadn't posted it in the thread before because it's doesn't matter for the point I'm making. Here are the two most recent reviews of I know of:

https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/55/15/865
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7846503/

BRAKE FOR MOOSE
Jun 6, 2001

Dog King posted:

No you're good, I hadn't posted it in the thread before because it's doesn't matter for the point I'm making. Here are the two most recent reviews of I know of:

https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/55/15/865
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7846503/

To be scientifically conservative here, these are reviews of measurements of physiological variables, not sport performance, and the studies included are in broad populations, not athletes. It is entirely possible still that in the disciplines with a ~10-15% cis male/female performance gap, that this is entirely made up for by transitioning. Here's a popular article about Joanna Harper and her work on this re: running. Her own experience is that she went from a sub-elite male to a sub-elite woman at about the same percentile when she transitioned, and her work has broadly borne that out. She is an IOC expert.

https://www.science.org/content/article/scientist-racing-discover-how-gender-transitions-alter-athletic-performance-including

quote:

Before her own transition in 2004, Harper expected that her 10,000-meter race time might increase by "a minute or two" as her testosterone level dropped and she slowed. But in less than a year, Harper was running a full 5 minutes slower than her personal best. "It just blew me away, and it very much piqued my interest as a scientist."

In 2005, Harper realized her experience wasn't unique after reading an article in Runner's World about another transgender female runner who had also become significantly slower. But when Harper searched for studies about the physiology of transitioning, she found none. So on nights and weekends, she began to moonlight on a research project.

Harper searched for transgender female distance runners willing to share race times from before and after their transitions. The transgender population, even now, tends to be "small and secretive," Harper says, and it took 7 years of contacting athletes through Yahoo and Facebook groups to collect data from eight runners. All the women had undergone hormone therapy to bring their testosterone levels in line with typical female levels. In Harper's study, titled simply "Race Times for Transgender Athletes" and published in 2015 in the little-known Journal of Sporting Cultures and Identities, she showed that all but one person ran substantially slower after transitioning.

Harper also calculated each subject's age grade, a common metric in track and field and distance running that reflects an athlete's performance compared with the fastest known time by someone of the same age and sex. Harper showed that the athletes' age grades before and after hormone therapy remained nearly the same. That is, the women were as competitive with their age- and sex-matched peers as they had been when competing against men. They weren't, in other words, likely to dominate women's races. "No one had previously looked at actual performance of transgender athletes pre- and posttransition," Vilain says.

Harper has since shown similar results for a transgender rower, a cyclist, and a sprinter. Together, the findings make a case that previous exposure to male levels of testosterone does not confer an enduring athletic advantage.

If I had to bet, I would say it's very unlikely that MtF athletes will not retain a performance advantage in strength-focused sports with a very large cis male/female performance gap. I think there's still a good chance for other sports that the performance advantage could disappear.

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woozy pawsies
Nov 26, 2007

Dog King posted:

No you're good, I hadn't posted it in the thread before because it's doesn't matter for the point I'm making. Here are the two most recent reviews of I know of:

https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/55/15/865
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7846503/

except you should probably read the full text.

quote:

However, several limitations are noted. Although the data we present are meaningful, the effects of GAHT on these parameters, or indeed athletic performance in transgender people who engage in training and competition, remain unknown. The levels of physical activity of the transwomen compared with cisgender women in the studies were not reported. Other limitations include the studies being written in English only, and the research being conducted in Western countries, contributing to geographical bias. Furthermore, as with much research with transgender individuals, there is a sparse data risk66 because of small sample sizes and short study durations, indicative of the relatively small population, difficulties with recruitment and high drop-out rates over time.
...
As previously stated, a major limitation in this area of research is the absence of studies in transgender athletes.
...
These observations in trained transgender individuals are consistent with the findings of the current review in untrained transgender individuals, whereby 30 months of GAHT may be sufficient to attenuate some, but not all, influencing factors associated with muscular endurance and performance.

quote:

The research conducted so far has studied untrained transgender women. Thus, while this research is important to understand the isolated effects of testosterone suppression, it is still uncertain how transgender women athletes, perhaps undergoing advanced training regimens to counteract the muscle loss during the therapy, would respond

There is very little to no research on trans athletes

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