Study finds no clear advantage for trans women over cisgender women in sports
bjsm.bmj.com
bjsm.bmj.com
Edit: I did find Canadian soccer player Quinn who is described interchangeably as non-binary and trans, despite those two things not being the same. The Canadian team did win Olympic gold in 2020. So maybe there’s one?
It's the same disorder Caster Semenya has. Semenya is another male athlete who took gold in the female category in the Olympics, for the women's 800m. While two other males took silver and bronze. No trans identity, but the same issue of being mistakenly assigned female at birth and, many years later, having this erroneous birth record used to compete as if female, despite how unfair this was to female athletes.
If you're referring to the reportedly leaked 2023 Kremlin-Bicêtre hospital assessment by doctors Jacques Young and Soumaya Fedala, (assuming that the leak is real) the assessment concluded that Imane Khelif is female based on the entirety of her clinical history (as well as the parts of the report which were not leaked?). Khelif is very likely to have XY chromosomes (not certain because the SRY gene that she confirmed is not 100% indicative of the XY chromosome pair) and I was incorrect to conclusively refer to her as female, but based on her physical development, on a scale between female and male I don't think Khelif crosses the ambiguous middle zone toward male.
> Lin kept quiet after failing sex verification so we don't know the full details
That is not evidence in any direction, and IBA did not reveal its testing methodology or data. That is, the IBA kept quiet. The IBA also contradicted itself [1] (ignore the pasted Wikipedia citation numbers):
> During the International Boxing Association (IBA) press conference in Paris on 5 August 2024, the position of the organization and its president Umar Kremlev regarding the nature of the conducted tests underwent changes and became contradictory. Initially, the IBA claimed that gender tests were conducted, but at the conference, Secretary General Chris Roberts spoke of "chromosome tests", while Kremlev asserted that the tests were aimed at determining testosterone levels in athletes. The situation was exacerbated by Kremlev's harsh statements; he repeatedly criticized IOC President Thomas Bach, declared his intention to initiate legal proceedings against him and expressed dissatisfaction with the Olympic Games opening ceremony, calling it "humiliating".[25][26][27][28] The IBA claimed to have used laboratories accredited by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) for testing, but WADA denied involvement in gender verification, stating it deals solely with anti-doping matters.
I was a bar the other day and there was an actual ultimate frisbee tournament game on TV with a commentator and everything. There they were, men and women playing a team sport side by side on the same field, and there was me watching with a beer! It was good game too with some banger hucks and bids
> While transgender women exhibited higher lean mass than cisgender women, their physical fitness was comparable. Current evidence is mostly low certainty and has heterogenous quality but does not support theories of inherent athletic advantages for transgender women over cisgender.
I don't find this study especially interesting or pertinent on the subject of sports advantage, as it only covers a small number of possible Whys, but doesn't touch Whats. It would be more useful for researchers to compare actual sports performance. For obvious reasons, these studies are probably not available for metaanalysis.
Like, for example, is the individual in question currently on HRT? When did they start HRT? What is their current testosterone levels? And when we dive into a specific sport, how do they actually perform?
The issue is that for any given sport there's like 1 or 2 transgender people participating in it.
If you had read the short abstract of the linked article, you'd know that they addressed at least these points.
One thing to note and I guess might be a bit of the puzzle is that the data clearly indicates that trans-gendered men have lower upper and lower body strength compared to cis-men, while the opposite scenario (transwomen compared to cisgender women) appears much less conclusive.
The trans-women vs cis-gender strength effects are heavily influenced by a single study. There are only 7 studies for upper body strength, 5 of which lean towards showing greater trans-women strength, 1 that leans towards reduced, and 1 (Alvares 2025) which clearly indicates reduced strength. Similarly for lower body strength there are only 4 studies with a similar pattern (once again, the Alvares 2025 producing the clearest TW weaker than CW effect).
The Alvares 2025 study compares amateur volleyball players. There are 7 trans women in that study versus 8 cis-gender women. Average hours per week of activity (or volleyball? Unclear, I'm working off the meta-review's summary table) is 4 for TW and 14 for CW. Average age is 30 (28-33) for TW and 26 (22-29) for CW.
I don't think that makes the Alvares study useless, but I do feel that it's deeply limited. 4 hours vs 14 hours a week is a pretty big difference in activity level.