This topic has become ground zero, as it were, for the transmisic* community these days. As of this writing, twenty-five states ban trans students from participation in school-sanctioned sports; seventeen of them for all grades including college. Yet another lawsuit has been filed by the attention-starved Riley Gaines.
This sort of “breaking news” appears widely. What appears less widely is correct scientific information, paired with accurately-quoted statistics on the successes and failures of transgender women in competition. I’m currently writing a book on the topic, but it’s not finished, and the publishing industry is slow. Nevertheless, a few basic – and quite informative – results and themes can be summarized succinctly. And before one can usefully discuss transgender athletes, one has to know the facts about cisgender ones.
1) Physiological differences are not what many people think they are. That absolute values of many strength measures are greater, on the average, for men than for women is not in doubt. Yet the correlation between measurable force output and muscle size (cross-sectional area) is so weak that one research team concluded that “strength is not a useful predictive index of muscle cross-sectional area” (and hence also the reverse). Remember that when the media fixates on the effects of transgender hormones on muscle mass.
Averages alone miss the whole picture by a wide margin. In one of these studies, the women at the upper side of one standard deviation are nearly 25% stronger than the men at the corresponding lower side of their distribution. Another report found up to a 60% difference in available force from exactly the same muscle area of different individuals.
2) Testosterone, widely assumed to be a wonder drug for increasing performance, has been shown in multiple studies to have minimal, if any, effect on measurable physical quantities in men such as weightlifting routines, jump height, and sprint capacity. In some cases values actually decreased. The anabolic (“tissue-building”) effect of this hormone in general is unquestionable. But its actual mechanisms of action are complex. Many of them relate to signaling efficacy, energy metabolism and nervous system inputs. Measuring muscle mass changes is really the tip of an iceberg.
3) The much-vaunted “gender gap” is neither as broad nor as clear-cut as is commonly believed. Men are still about ten percent faster in short races. For extreme distance events, on the other hand, women almost routinely beat the men. A few of many examples: Diana Nyad, Susan Maroney, Chloe McCardel (swimming); Nicky Spinks, Camille Herron, Jasmin Paris (running); Fiona Kolbinger, Leah Goldstein (cycling). It has also happened in surfing (Maya Gabeira) and rock climbing (Lynn Hill). And it happened at least once in baseball (Jackie Mitchell, who at seventeen struck out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig while pitching for the farm team Chattanooga Lookouts).
4) In this “23andMe” age, it should come as no surprise that the fate of athletes lies not in the stars but largely in the genes. Michael Phelps’ genetic advantages have received considerable attention, but there are more dramatic ones. Consider Antero Mäntyranta, a Finnish cross-country skier who took Olympic gold three times, winning the 15 km race in 1964 by the huge margin of 40.7 seconds; never equaled since. His secret? A mutation in the erythropoietin receptor gene which gave him a hematocrit fifty percent higher than the upper limit of normal males. Exogenous erythropoietin is banned, but Mäntyranta didn’t need to dope.
Such genetic advantages occur in many contexts. In the men’s 10 km qualification trials for the 2011 World Championships, nineteen of the top twenty times were set by East Africans, thirteen of them Kenyans. Absent a rule allowing only three competitors per country in the final event, no non-Kenyan would have been there. So much for the thoroughly mythical “level playing field.”
Do transgender women have such advantages? The actual record unambiguously says: on average – no.
Because many have competed incognito, we cannot know the full statistics, but their actual performance record is a very long way from the bugaboo of “destroying women’s sports” that the lawsuits accuse them of. Known transgender women such as Lia Thomas and Terry Miller have won sometimes and lost more times, and the margins in many of those wins would have been losses if they had been in the next (or previous) race. Other prominent examples yield the same conclusion. Some good athletes: yes. Domination: no.
This is a blog, not the book, so further discussion will have to wait. But this much is quite clear: the physiology of trans women is not the same as cis men, and it has a wide distribution. With the statistics just quoted for cisgender athletes in mind, one can see that even the best trans contestants will be at most similar in capability to genetically superior cis women – just as the actual competition data show. To prohibit them from competing with their gender cohort because of suspected genetic advantages while not similarly disqualifying cisgender women on the same basis is blatant discrimination.
*or transphobic, for those who prefer to stick with an incorrectly-used Greek suffix