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“Under the new rules by USA Swimming, a transgender woman must have a testosterone level of ‘less than 5 nmol/L’ continuously for at least three years. Additionally, a three-person panel comprised of independent medical experts will determine if the transgender athlete has a ‘competitive advantage’ over biological women based on ‘prior physical development of the athlete as a male.’” - C.Headlines

Discussion

Fri, 02/04/22

I think what we have here is an attempt to parse out justice, where a panel of people is going to say “has he been off testosterone long enough?”, and lost in the mix are the other factors involved in athletic performance. For most sports, bone density, height, lack of breasts, and lack of child-bearing hips are advantageous, and hormone therapy doesn’t address all of these.

To draw a picture, heavy testosterone use among East German women swimmers and runners in the 1970s and 1980s gave them pretty much a 2% advantage over non-using (or perhaps “less-using”) women of other countries. They were still behind the men by about 8-10%, and that means that other factors besides testosterone were in play.

So when you take a man “the other way” and remove testosterone, you would expect, say, a 2-3% reduction in his performance, and that’s exactly what we saw in the high school sprinters in CT, the college hurdler who went from “also-ran” to NCAA D2 champion, and Ms. Thomas. More or less, the non-testosterone effects of maleness seem to shift one’s performance about one standard deviation vs. that of women. One standard deviation takes one from high school competitive to NCAA competitive, and another standard deviation takes you from NCAA D1 competitive to Olympic competitive.

So the woman’s perspective is “hey, wait a minute, I’m losing all my opportunities to these guys that would have been also-rans in their own gender”, and my question as well—I have no good answers—is what proportion of men would consider “transitioning” for athletic glory. There was a famous study in the 1980s that suggested a huge portion of Olympic athletes would take a drug that would kill them by age 35, but would guarantee Olympic gold. What portion would consider this? What would it do to elite sport?

It’s also worth noting that blood tests only detect testosterone for about three weeks after it’s injected, so until someone’s checking in routinely, it’s fairly easy to cheat. Now that could really put the kibosh on womens’ sport.

Aspiring to be a stick in the mud.