Yeah it’s absolutely true that there is nuance here and it’s not an easy question to answer. How do you both keep the integrity of sport and also allow trans women a place to compete?
Current evidence suggests that trans women have effectively no physical advantage after I think it was 6 months of HRT. But I’ve also seen some articles suggesting that there isn’t an inherent physical strength advantage between men and women to begin with. Basically men typically start with more muscle but men and women typically build muscle similarly.
And honestly if there actually are small advantages to be had for one gender vs another, imagine how cool it would be to have a team span between big burly people doing big burly things and small nimble people darting around between them, and the tactics one could do by changing up where they place which strength and how many of a given strength to have on the team
Current evidence suggests that trans women have effectively no physical advantage after I think it was 6 months of HRT
It varies by sport, which is why I mentioned that as one of the factors. At least according to a study referenced by Mia Mulder in this video, in middle-distance running trans women retain a 12% advantage over cis women after 2 years of hormone therapy. (And frankly, that video as a whole is an incredible overview of the subject of trans women’s sports.)
imagine how cool it would be to have a team span between big burly people doing big burly things and small nimble people darting around between them
So, uhh… You know this is already a thing, right? Even when the entire team is cis men, in a sport like rugby you have the forwards who are huge walls of muscle, and wingers tend to be smaller and faster. I don’t actually follow it, but I suspect gridiron may have an even higher degree of this…I guess you could call it positional dimorphism. While soccer has much less. This comes about due to the different nature of those sports.
But I’ve also seen some articles suggesting that there isn’t an inherent physical strength advantage between men and women to begin with. Basically men typically start with more muscle but men and women typically build muscle similarly.
Men have something like 20x more testosterone than women, and testosterone has a massive impact on strength and endurance.
Current evidence suggests that trans women have effectively no physical advantage after I think it was 6 months of HRT. But I’ve also seen some articles suggesting that there isn’t an inherent physical strength advantage between men and women to begin with. Basically men typically start with more muscle but men and women typically build muscle similarly.
And honestly if there actually are small advantages to be had for one gender vs another, imagine how cool it would be to have a team span between big burly people doing big burly things and small nimble people darting around between them, and the tactics one could do by changing up where they place which strength and how many of a given strength to have on the team
It varies by sport, which is why I mentioned that as one of the factors. At least according to a study referenced by Mia Mulder in this video, in middle-distance running trans women retain a 12% advantage over cis women after 2 years of hormone therapy. (And frankly, that video as a whole is an incredible overview of the subject of trans women’s sports.)
So, uhh… You know this is already a thing, right? Even when the entire team is cis men, in a sport like rugby you have the forwards who are huge walls of muscle, and wingers tend to be smaller and faster. I don’t actually follow it, but I suspect gridiron may have an even higher degree of this…I guess you could call it positional dimorphism. While soccer has much less. This comes about due to the different nature of those sports.
Men have something like 20x more testosterone than women, and testosterone has a massive impact on strength and endurance.
Anabolic steroids are literally meant to mimic testosterone. It’s a hell of a drug