It wasn’t a problem to begin with. Meta studies recently showed trans women have no biological advantage over cis women after HRT, certainly nothing than cis women don’t have biological variation within anyway. All the rule updates did was exclude and further marginalise an already marginalised extreme minority. There are very few trans women to begin with, fewer of us still are competing in sports. Nothing was studied here, the people who made the rules aren’t scholars, they’re bigots. They’re using us as a distraction from their poor governance.
Yeah, you have to conjure a really weird scenario for there to be any advantage.
Something like waiting until male puberty is already pretty far along and doing extensive strength training and then transitioning and competing immediately in a sport that puts a heavy premium on strength. I think most sports already have rules that would prevent this.
For someone following a more normal transitioning trajectory, there would be zero advantage; probably a significant disadvantage.
A blanket ban is just pure bullying, especially for childrens' sports (which are primarily a social activity, not a consequential competition). Individual sports can have rules to prevent the (primarily hypothetical) abusive cases without preventing children from participating in normal social activities. No one is saying that someone who's 200 lb of solid muscle and started HRT a month ago should be able to compete against girls in football or powerlifting, but pickleball, sure go for it.
> A blanket ban is just pure bullying, especially for childrens' sports (which are primarily a social activity, not a consequential competition).
That I think is the core issue. Way too many people try to live way too hard through their children. Wherever you look, either in the US or (where I'm from) Germany... you'll find absolutely absurd behavior from completely unhinged parents. Just yesterday, that was a topic discussed here [1].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49686134
Except for in Norway, apparently. https://www.ft.com/content/0fe0455d-8633-4e1a-ab8f-f8cd94d60...
So the broken records are just coincidence? There's no need to study this a priori, just let them compete and see all records get broken. I don't see why people even discuss it. Just let women not win anything for a few years and this discussion would be over.
> trans women have no biological advantage over cis women after HRT
As someone who's been into weightlifting and only casual observer-like in regards to testosterone therapy, this doesn't seem to make a lot of sense. After taking TRT/Steroids a person retains a good deal of the muscle/strength they gained even after cessation ... It surprises me to hear that this wouldnt carry over to sports where muscle/strength/power matter.
Additionally, you have to realize that a major concern on the right is that academia itself has become ideological to the point where only politically acceptable studies can be 1) studied and more importantly 2) published. There's a lot of people out there afraid to speak what appears to them (and their work) to be truth for fear of the backlash and career consequences.
> Additionally, you have to realize that a major concern on the right is that academia itself has become ideological to the point where only politically acceptable studies can be 1) studied and more importantly 2) published.
Quite the contrary. If you want to publish something going against "the narrative" (if something like that exists in the first place) has never been easier than now. Proper keywords and the far-right and their pseudomedia are going to give even the worst quackery a time in the spotlight - just look at RFK Jr.
Also a weightlifter (masters olympic weightlifting, nationally ranked). TRT and steroids are actually the opposite. Once you go off of them, your body starts to revert, muscle mass is lost, and often by more than you started with (because the body's natural production rates change with supplementation). It does take time, which is why sports regulatory bodies typically require specific time periods of hormonal therapy before they can participate, but their bodies will eventually adjust.
Sports regulatory bodies still test for hormonal PED, but their concerns have long swayed away from them because of the fact that they are so easy to detect and have the built in disadvantage of potentially altering your life negatively outside of sport. The current concerns have shifted to peptides and other forms of PEDs, because they are much harder to detect because they are 1) often naturally occurring but in smaller quantities, 2) don't actually directly act on the musculoskeletal system, but rather trigger natural processes that act on the system, and 3) often have half-lives dramatically shorter than most drug tests can even account for, and therefore require near continuous monitoring.
Agreed you lose your peak, however once a steroids user you will mostly retain more mass than a natural. It only takes a fraction of stimulus to retain mass versus adding it.
The extrapolation I'm making, and admitting it's an extrapolation, is that a sexed at birth male competing in womens sports will have had a developmental period of hormonal advantage over females which follows them regardless of gender identity.
So here’s the thing with that. My testosterone is in the cis female range. Has been for a while. I strength trained for years and even after having started estrogen. I continued going to the gym while on HRT and my capacity kept decreasing rather than increasing. So I looked into this. Because visibly I still had the muscles I’d gained. To actually activate said muscles, you need testosterone. That’s how it works. No testosterone = the muscles never activate = they atrophy away. While I looked the same in terms of muscles that I had while I was doing 12 pull-ups, I quickly came down to being able to do 0 unassisted. Now the visible bulk is also reducing because they just never get activated. A cis male on steroids still has testosterone after cessation. Hence the muscles they gained can retain stimulus for activation. I’ve been tracking my body comp through DEXA scans for years now and after starting HRT, within a year I was at the higher end of cis female muscle mass and had lost kilos of muscle throughout my body. Can I still beat most cis women at lifting? Yes. Only because I’m trained, not because I lived for years under heavier testosterone influence. I cannot outlift or outrun trained cis women, only untrained ones. I am unable to outlift my brother who is completely untrained. I used to be able to hold my own arm wrestling with cis men but now I know it’ll be foolish to even try it because even cis men with zero training ever have arms twice my size and active testosterone stimulus to be able to activate their muscles.
The ideology is too tied in with their identity, so you’re not going to persuade them of anything lol.
Yeah I'm guessing if someone walked up to you and crowed a bunch of "common sense" that don't align at all with your own lived experience and understanding of how your own body works, you know the one you're living in and actively in the process, with the assistance of medical doctors, of modifying, you'd be pretty unconvinced of that too.
That doesn't mean people who know what they're talking about are "ideological," it means you're talking out your backside.
Or it means you are delusional and they are talking common sense.
> Additionally, you have to realize that a major concern on the right is that academia itself has become ideological to the point where only politically acceptable studies can be 1) studied and more importantly 2) published. There's a lot of people out there afraid to speak what appears to them (and their work) to be truth for fear of the backlash and career consequences.
Oh complete and utter twaddle.
Academia trends toward progressive views because the more educated you get, assuming you have principles and employ critical thinking consistently, the more ridiculous the positions of the right tend to look. You cannot look at the totality of climate change data and go "well clearly it's not man made" unless you either don't understand it, or cherry pick it to oblivion. You can't look at the history of Austerity politics, deployed both here and in the UK by our respective free market goblins (Reagan and Thatcher) and hold that it's good for anyone at all apart from those who are already wealthy.
This boogeyman of BIG SCIENCE holding down all the conservatives is complete and utter dreck. Show me literally one example of it. Show me one individual who's life was ruined and their career decimated to uphold ideological ends.
There are many, many examples of left-wing ideology causing harm to researchers, professors, and the like. If you are in academia, you must submit to the left-wing group think or you will be cast away. Literally takes 10 seconds to research.
https://www.campusreform.org/article/professor-punished-oppo...
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/09/elite-academia-...
And as a fellow enjoyer of HRT, I assure you it didn't enhance shit for me, beyond what I was hoping to get: longer, more full hair, boobies, and smoother skin.
My muscles are gone y'all. Like I've had to buy more breaker bars and larger tools so I can keep working on my cars, otherwise I simply could not break bolts anymore.
I used to be able to do 12 pull-ups, and I did get de-trained but now I can barely manage a single one. I lived and did cardio in the mountains for years and now I get winded up way easier. Maybe the politicians making these rules should go on HRT before making unsubstantiated claims.
I've had to explain to people that lifting something as simple as a case of bottled water can be genuinely difficult after eight-ish years of feminizing HRT.
It's gradual, it's not all at once and I am still slightly taller and heavier-set than the average American woman, so I do have an advantage through having more mass, but anyone that's larger than the average American woman will also have that so it's not really an advantage, just a fact of having a larger body.
Same. You’re further in than me, but it was so alarming at the start when my body looked the same and my remembered priors in strength and cardio capacity, were at my testosterone-dominant baseline. If I didn’t know to expect the steep drop in strength or hadn’t been on HRT knowingly I’d have been incredibly alarmed and probably visited a dozen doctors. I’d look at objects, say to myself, pfft, easy, and be humbled immediately. TBH it’s incredibly affirming and men have been pretty sweet helping me with lifting objects and opening jars.
Btw, feel free to reach out to me I love connecting with fellow trans women in tech :)
Emailed!
"After HRT" is the key word. The new regulations I am referring to had to do with how soon after was sufficient to remove advantages due to residual testosterone. There were other regulations which were total horse shit to your point.
I would agree that the number of people we are talking about is very small. It was to begin with a very niche issue.
The paper you are thinking of did not show this, but that the evidence - of males who had weakened themselves with testosterone suppression having no athletic performance advantage over women - is low to very low quality. Such low quality that this hypothesis is not supported.