Myths about Testosterone | Hacker News Reader

Myths about Testosterone

blogs.scientificamerican.com

30 pointsLinuxBender56 comments

"The IAAF’s enforcement of gender normativity is also evident in its rebuttal of concerns raised by the World Medical Association and the United Nations, among others, about mandating that healthy athletes undergo medically unnecessary interventions in order to compete. Rather than viewing the serious and long-term consequences of lowering testosterone as “side effects,” the IAAF proposes that they are “the desired effects.” These changes—including reduced muscle and increased fat—are supposed to produce the kind of body that Stéphane Bermon, Director of the IAAF Health and Science Department, has presented as the “ideal female phenotype” at scientific conferences.

"Disregarding women athletes who have resisted these interventions, even to the point of bringing legal challenges against the regulation, the IAAF insists that these “medications are gender-affirming” and “change their body to better reflect their chosen gender.” The latter statement insinuates that women athletes who do not willingly modify their bodies to fit IAAF standards actively “choose” their gender, which deliberately encourages confusion with transgender athletes."

What the heck?

This is about Caster Semenya and attempts to mandate that she take testosterone-reducing medication in order to compete.

And apparently to be closer to the "ideal female phenotype."

It's because she has a condition where she has XY chromosomes (typically signifying a male)

"In April 2018, the IAAF announced new "differences of sex development" rules that required athletes with specific disorders of sex development, testosterone levels of 5 nmol/L and above, and certain androgen sensitivity to take medication to lower their testosterone levels, effective beginning 8 May 2019. Due to the narrow scope of the changes, which also apply to only those athletes competing in the 400m, 800m, and 1500m, many people thought the rule change was designed specifically to target Semenya."

-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caster_Semenya#2018_testostero...

It’s a poor wording, trans people don’t choose their gender either

People need to reframe the problem. It’s not an issue of men vs. women. It’s an issue of segmenting the population into groups that can fairly compete with each other. As I can see it, those groups should be split up such that the number of men/women who win is proportional to the number of men/women who compete (i.e. if the group is split up based on height and there are 10% men in that group, men should win about 10% of the time).

Wrestling does it via weight, and different sports might have different metrics.

I think the proper framing here is that there is no ambiguity when competition attempts to select the best human. The ambiguity is introduced by people adding rules in order to select the best human fitting some criteria. And usually this means excluding 'men.' This is usually the only reason to introduce the notion of sex into the rules and is the source of all of the ambiguity. Such leagues used to be about selecting women who are the best at competing but are now increasingly becoming about selecting women who are the most man.

A little research on the author shows she is:

> an "American sociomedical scientist whose research focuses on sex, gender and sexuality, as well as the epidemiology of HIV/AIDS"

and her own profile says: https://womensstudies.barnard.edu/profiles/rebecca-jordan-yo...

> "I am an interdisciplinary feminist scientist and science studies scholar whose work explores the reciprocal relations between science and the social hierarchies of gender, sexuality, class, and race."

This author is less of a scientist and more of a sociologist that is using data points to leverage an agenda about gender, sexuality and sports. Putting 'feminist' before 'scientist' implies a host of biases.

This is politically expedient propaganda that can be used to leverage the idea that trans-women (biological men) should continue to compete in women's sports because "it's not all about testosterone."

And then there's this lovely disclaimer by SA, as if to say 'we know...':

>"The views expressed are those of the author(s) and are not necessarily those of Scientific American."

Are there ANY medical doctors, chemists or biologists who want to weigh in on this, not just "feminist scientists" who have made a career in "science studies" via identity politics?

Non-myth: People with higher testosterone tend to have higher bone density and muscle mass and a whole host of other things, and people who have had higher testosterone for most of their life retain all of these advantages to some degree.

It's all fine and good that you want a space for trans athletes, but the experiment is going poorly; many women's leagues are being dominated by biological males, to absolutely nobody's surprise.

> and people who have had higher testosterone for most of their life retain all of these advantages.

Transgender woman here.

The lack of testosterone in my blood resulted in my muscle mass reducing to the point that I cannot do regular push-ups anymore. Granted, I could have trained if I wanted to retain this muscle mass but didn't.

I also have to take supplements as prescribed my by healthcare provider to retain bone density.

Both of those facts are well documented.

IMO athletes should be weighted & tested and then put in devisions as is done in boxing. A heavyweight will never fight a light flyweight. The same concept should be applied independently of gender.

> IMO athletes should be weighted & tested and then put in devisions as is done in boxing. A heavyweight will never fight a light flyweight.

That's certainly an option, but if that's it, then that's the end of women's and girls' leagues. I don't particularly enjoy watching sports, and I can't name more than a couple athletes of any league, but it seems to me like a lot of people will be very disappointed by that.

> The lack of testosterone in my blood resulted in my muscle mass reducing to the point that I cannot do regular push-ups anymore. Granted, I could have trained if I wanted to retain this muscle mass but didn't.

This takes time, is more what I was getting at. I didn't write it all that well in my original comment so I guess it's going to get ripped to shreds. ;- )

> then that's the end of women's and girls' leagues

So what? Why should we have "women's hockey" and not "lightweight hockey"?

This would insure that everyone can compete in their division independently of gender. This is pretty much already what's happening but with a naming system based on gender. The ability to carry children or lactate is pretty much useless as a differentiator of skills.

Some athletes would probably also push themselves to reach the division above their current one as if often done in boxing and this would results in interesting sportsmanship. Again, this is my merely my opinion and I'm sure that this would require more thought than the few minutes I've spent pondering the question.

> This takes time

This happened in a few months. Granted, I'm a programmer and my only exercise is hiking.

Because the lightweight hockey would still be dominated by men. In most sports that require power/speed men still maintain a significant advantage even for size.

Also many sports require people of varying body sizes for different positions. In football for instance a wide receiver will look very different from a lineman.

When I said "weighted & tested", I meant it as some magical way that would ensure that individuals of similar body type and physical characteristics are grouped together independently of gender.

Taking boxing as an example again, sure if you put a female heavyweight (179 pounds / 81 kg) against a male heavyweight (201 pounds / 91 kg) the male will dominate. But if you standardize the divisions and have her compete against an equal the situation might be different.

The again, you would have to take into account things like bone density, etc. In a sport like boxing, that's not very straightforward to do because of the fact that individuals with testosterone usually have greater upper body strength and that's a big advantage.

In a team sport, this might be different since they allow for the team to be balanced depending on their members. For example, some individuals might have greater endurance but lower strength, etc. I'm sure that we would also see a more diverse cast of males as opposed to only "peak athletes" (7 ft+ basketball players, super heavyweight hockey players, etc.) and that would be great.

I do agree that's it's a complicated question that should be deeply analysed and that we won't come to a solution in this comment section.

However, a statement such at that one from the article is simply anachronistic and wrong in 2019. This isn't the right way to tackle the problem.

"mandating that healthy athletes undergo medically unnecessary interventions in order to compete [...] These changes—including reduced muscle and increased fat—are supposed to produce the kind of body that Stéphane Bermon, Director of the IAAF Health and Science Department, has presented as the “ideal female phenotype” at scientific conferences."

If you put a mediocre male featherweight against a female heavyweight champion in any contact sports the male would pummel her into a pulp we had these experiments before in show matches.

Gold medal women winners would not pass the men’s qualifiers in most Olympic sports, in fact in many of them the world record for women isn’t enough to pass the qualifiers for mens.

Anyone who is advocating turning sports into coed brackets has never competed in their life professionally on at least a national level or they don’t mind women not wining a single match from that point onwards.

Now as far as transwomen (I’m assuming that’s the correct term for M2F gender reassignment) in professional sports this would likely require a separate bracket if we get to the point where there is a sufficient mass of trans athletes, or if there will be explicit proof that it doesn’t matter allowing them to compete in the women’s bracket under certain conditions.

However the doesn’t matter is also a tricky part there is a big difference between someone who transitioned before going through puberty and someone who transitioned 6 months ago.

Humans are a dimorphic species males are stronger, faster have better response time and ironically when trained are even more flexible than females because they are stronger and have better joint stability.

The irony is also that the closer you get to peak performance the wider this gap gets which is why while in say high school track or varsity basketball some females can play in the same ballpark as males once you go into professional sports and Olympic sports they might as well not be the same species.

Raphmedia is talking about improving competition through better classifier, and you are pointing to experiments when people removes all classifiers.

There are searcher studies on how much of athletic success is heredity. That number is estimated to be around 66% at a minimum for all athletic sports, and around 80% for sports which has highly heritable (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3993978/).

That number is with gender separated sport classes. If we did coed brackets it would naturally go up, and in many sports above 90%. No one is advocating for such solution.

Instead what is suggested is to replace current classifier with those that reduces heredity as a determining factor. If we take endurance sports like biking, skiing, and running, blood values should not all be in the 99.9999 percentile of rare blood disease. Blood doping tests use conservative numbers and allow extreme range of blood values, and yet most contestant in world championships and the Olympic tend to be on the border of doping.

Heredity should not determine the outcome of professional competition. Weight, height, blood, musculoskeletal, cardiovascular, respiratory, nervous, and more all influence outcome. As can be read in the linked study, there are key performance genes linked directly to performance.

As the study conclude, Current evidence suggests that a favorable genetic profile is critical for the achievement of elite athletic status. Splitting sports into male and female does not fix this problem, and the discussion around rare chromosomes disorders that Caster Semenya has is a good reason why we should look into fixing unfair advantages that favorable genetic profiles has in competitive sport.

You don’t need a study to know genetics play a major role, in fact the only role elite athletes would be elite athletes regardless of the sport they play which is why the US has more football and basketball players than soccer and rugby it’s not because Germany and Australia have better genetics for the latter than the former but because the same elite athletes choose sports based on cultural and environmental factors.

You can’t classify people based on genetics we don’t have enough information and at that point it’s going to be boring might as well give the gold to the one with the best genes and be done with it.

However if you take the top 0.1% of males and the top 0.1% of females of even further 0.001% it’s still not a competition.

Heck the world record for women’s 100m which likely will never be broken as it was achieved with both doping and a timer screw up isn’t enough to pass the qualifiers to even compete in the 100m men’s event.

I find it pretty boring that 41 percent of skiers that won medals between 2001–2010 had blood values that only has a probability of happening in 1 per 10000. It is basically theater where the audience is told to ignore that aspect.

Maybe in 100m the effect is smaller but I do not know who would win a marathon between a top 0.1% woman that has blood levels close or above doping levels vs a top 0.1% man who has average blood. As research say, the effect from blood doping is more noticeable in long distance endurance sports which a 100m dash is not.

We do have some understanding on what genetic factors give a performance benefit in sports. Weight, height, blood, hormones, and so on. Gender is just a fuzzy proxy. People who advocate for better classifiers is against a fuzzy proxy when current science can produce better competition where the result is less dictated from the start. I theory, such competition is more fair, healthy, and more interesting to watch.

It’s pretty simple elite athletes already are a one in 10^the_power_of_whatever it’s all about gaming the system and gaming the game beyond that.

Better suits, better shoes, high altitude training, pressure chambers, “supplements” these are all in play.

If you aren’t in the top 0.1% or even rarer than that you ain’t gonna win any Olympic medals.

Take Phelps for example the guy is a genetic phenom he produces almost no lactic acid, he is double jointed which allows him to swim butterfly like no other, his proportions are utterly fucked up with having a longer torso with stubby legs, a longer wingspan than his height and huge flipper feet.

His mom might as well had gotten knocked up by a dolphin considering how near perfect he is for swimming.

Like that time a bunch of teenagers beat the australian women soccer team?

https://www.standard.co.uk/sport/football/australian-womens-...

Or when the ~200 men tennis seat, a smoker, beat the Williams?

http://www.tennisnow.com/Blogs/NET-POSTS/November-2017-(1)/T...

That magical way exists already, and it's called gender.

> That magical way exists already, and it's called gender.

If it was magical we wouldn't be having this conversation. What of individuals like Caster Semenya? Should we ban her from all sports because she does not fit classical gender classification? One thing is clear in my mind is that we should not force hormones on her as if she was cattle.

Anyone can participate in "men" events, since there are no biological restrictions other than being a human as already explained elsewhere in these comments.

This is definitely tough. It seems like society has two competing goals, we want women to be able to compete at a national/international level, but we also don't want to have to put people in one bucket versus the other.

I don't necessarily think that punting the decision to the "weight/tested algorithm" solves this hard problem. I think you'd create the equivalent of minor league vs major league. With a few women in the minor league and none in the major.

You're getting "ripped to shreds" because it doesn't sound like you really know much about the topic. Muscle and bone density changes on hormone replacement therapy start happening pretty darn fast and the effort required to maintain or increase it increases significantly (personal anecdote n=1). Best I can tell, and generally supported by the science, doom and gloom about the end of women's leagues if they aren't trans exclusionary seems greatly exaggerated.

Caster Semenya isn't trans.

Right, but she does have XY chromosomes - which is what sparked this whole debate

She has XY chromosomes and broken androgen receptors. Which is why her body didn't develop along masculine lines. I'm not sure anyone to say what testosterone levels mean in that context. Flit it around and say someone has a gene that makes their muscles hyper sensitive to testosterone, we gonna ferret them out and ban them[1]?

I only have two points.

One: Is I'd be really interested in seeing the rate of XY women in sports vs the general population. I'd put $5 that the difference isn't particularly significant. If it isn't than all these argument are superfluous.

Two: If you drilled down in to elite athletes DNA you'll certainly find that a whole bunch of them have rare genetic alleles or combinations of such. What are we going to do ban them too?

Three: (off by one error) Also sure the international Court of Arbitration for Sports ruled on this the same way the Warren Court ruled about what was erotica vs what was porn; whatever gives Justice Warren a guilty boner is porn. Same deal, the CAS judges think Caster Semenya is icky so they don't want her to compete.

[1] Likely Ans: No if they are 'men' yes if they are 'women'

The article in question covers "women with naturally high testosterone."

"[The IAAF's] initial analysis of data from two world championship competitions showed that women with higher T had significantly better performances in only five of 21 events. [In a corrected version, in] three of 11 running events, the lowest T group did better, and the strongest association across all events was the negative association between T and performance in the 100 meters, where lower T athletes ran 5.4 percent faster than the highest T athletes. In none of the events where high T athletes performed better was the gap greater than 2.9 percent."

"Consider a recent analysis of teenage Olympic weightlifters, in which the best predictor of strength was lean body mass, which has a complicated relationship to T. Among girls, body mass was initially the only significant predictor of weightlifting performance, and T was a predictor of body mass. But, counterintuitively, once the investigators controlled for the girls’ size, they unmasked a strong negative relationship between T levels and performance: girls with lower T lifted more weight. Controlling for body mass, there were no relationships between any hormones and performance in boys, even though their T levels ranged from 0.5 to 30.2 nanomoles per liter. In short, T (and other steroids) affect multiple body systems, and the relationships sometimes work in a positive synergy to improve performance, but they sometimes detract from performance."

This article cherry picks research, ignoring mounds of research that shows the opposite.

This is a topic upon which it is impolitic to express an honest opinion, so I flagged.

lol and then left this useless comment just to make sure everyone knew your opinion anyways.

Genders equal right? Why not just have 1 category? Do all athletes fall into male/female only?

Since it becomes increasing clear that gender isn't a binary property, shouldn't we do away with gender difference in sports altogether?

It may not be binary, but gender certainly follows a bimodal distribution.

Could you please cite some sources for your claim?

Edit: wow, I didn’t expect so much hate by simply asking for sources.

Less than 3% of Minnesota teens did not identify with traditional gender labels such as "boy" or "girl." That's bimodal. https://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/141/3/e201716...

Thank you!

Do you understand "bimodal"?

Yes? Bimodal = the probability density function has two local maxima.

Still I don’t see how that’s necessarily true for the gender spectrum. Is it really established that the gender spectrum only has two local maxima?

It is simply obvious? Ask the next twenty people you meet on the street what gender (or sex) they are and if it isn’t a bimodal Distribution you would be at a very curious place.

I guess so, but what you call bimodal is just a definition, not an absolute truth.

To my knowledge we have that. The “men’s” division in most sports is actually the “open” division.

I believe the idea for a women’s division was to give a whole bunch of individuals a chance to champions who otherwise wouldn’t be competitive.

To my knowledge there is no rule whatsoever preventing involvement in the NBA or NFL on the basis of gender.

Women compete in NASCAR and very occasionally the PGA.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfonsina_Strada

Just a note, you're advocating for the end of women in professional sports. Only a tiny handful of women could continue to compete at the professional level.

Not really, it was just a question. I think that perhaps we could shift to different sports where "men" don't have a clear advantage.

How would we switch sports? Get together and sign a global treaty that bans any sports where men show an advantage?

Sports are incredibly ingrained in culture, traditions, and institutions around the world.

Well, as pointed out, some trans women might still be competitive in the open division.

This is rather silly. The existence of heavyweight boxing doesn't stop people from watching (and enjoying) lightweight boxing.

Most men's leagues are open to women†. Women's leagues exist to make it possible for (biological) women to compete at high levels of a sport. Serena Williams is an amazing tennis player, but she is no match for a #200 men's tennis player.

The consequence of dissolving women's leagues is that, in most sports, no women compete at the top of any sport, except for the most extreme outliers.

† One famous beneficiary of this being Manon Rhéaume

> The consequence of dissolving women's leagues is that, in most sports, no women compete at the top of any sport, except for the most extreme outliers.

But when we watch any big sports event, we're already looking at extreme outliers.

> But when we watch any big sports event, we're already looking at extreme outliers. It's already the case that genes determine one's fitness for a particular sport.

People already don't have as much interest (in most cases) in women's leagues; do we really just have to accept that there will be no biological female human champions in any top pro league in some sports?

Maybe genes have a big effect, but surely there's room for people with whole different chromosomes. Nobody has a right to glory, but is it right to deny such a huge group of people any chance at some form of ultimate glory?

Again saying this as somebody who does not watch professional sports in any capacity.

Why does having more than two choices mean we must abolish all categorization?

It's not impossible, but it does get unwieldy. The Paralympics, for example, has lots of categories. https://www.paralympic.org/classification There's a bunch of arguing about the categories and sometimes athletes will intentionally injure themselves to move into a lower category (like a boxer starving down to a lower weight class, but usually more damaging).

Seems like they face another binary choice: abolish categories, or argue about the categories forever.

Or categorize based on something besides sex or gender, like height or weight.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com