Sports court-ordered to allow trans competitors. Fair? [Science]

Chapters

00:00 Introduction

02:04 Testosterone limits

06:02 Prenatal testosterone exposure

07:02 Anatomical advantages

09:09 Mental advantages

13:13 Brief summary

13:52 Policy implications

Transcript

USA Powerlifting was recently court ordered to allow trans competitors, meaning that biological men that identify as female so transwomen are allowed to compete with regular women. Since this goes for powerlifting and this was court ordered, this should now go for all sports. And this is also the position of the current Olympic committee. And also in Canada, we can get a preview of how this might go, because in Canada, the Canadian powerlifting Union is already very gender inclusive. And recently, Avi Silverberg competed there, basically identifies as male, but for the purpose of the competition said that he was female. To prove a point, I’m assuming. He dominated the bench press record.

So a guy that identifies as male but for the purpose of the competition said that he was identifying as female, competed with women and set a new record. The previous record was also set by a trans individual, an actual trans individual though, in this case, I’m sorry, this video might get confusing at times. That individual was, it’s not unfair to say, dominating the competition already, I think her name is Anne Andres and she won the last eight out of nine competitions. So trans individual was already dominating the competition, a real trans individual and now a fake trans individual came in and dominated the already dominating competitor. So what does this mean? And is this fair? And in this video, I’m mainly going to look at the science of the competitive advantage that trans athletes have. And of course, I’m going to focus on biological men that want to compete and identify as women. It’s almost never an issue if biological women want to compete with biological men because they, in almost every sport we know, don’t have a competitive advantage. I don’t think there’s much concern about that. It’s inclusive and not unfair, so I don’t think there are a lot of people that are opposed to that. But that might be a topic for another video.

In this video I’m going to focus on trans women competing with regular women. Now, the obvious solution to this is testosterone limits. Everybody knows men have more testosterone than women, testosterone is associated with anabolic properties and a lot of competitive advantages. So if you just lowered the testosterone of the athletes down, they should be like women, right? If you take a guy and you lower his testosterone, then he’s basically woman, right? Yeah. No, it doesn’t work like that at all.

A recent systematic review on this included the following from 2021. The data show that strength, lean body, mass, muscle size and bone density are only trivially affected by testosterone suppression. The reductions observed in muscle mass size and strength are very small compared to the baseline differences between males and females in these variables, and thus there are major performance and safety implications in sports where these attributes are competitively significant, which would be basically every sport. they also found that the average trans woman is in the top 10% of regular women for lean body mass and grip strength. Even after years of hormone therapy. Another 2021 systematic literature review found that hormone therapy decreases the strength, lean body mass and muscle area. Yet values remain above that observed in CIS gender women, even after 36 months. These findings suggest that strength may be well-preserved in trans women during the first three years of hormone therapy. And if it’s preserved for three years, we can be pretty sure that it’s preserved pretty much indefinitely because all the hormonal factors to that point are gone. Now, why is this, why is it not the case that just lowering testosterone levels brings you back to a competitive level as a woman, as a guy? There are actually a lot of reasons for this.

And the most obvious one is that this is not the only factor. And secondly, that your current testosterone or energy level in general is but one of the factors that make you have body mass, strength, competitive advantage, etc., that you currently have. also important issue your total lifetime exposure to this and very importantly, your exposure during puberty and even prenatally. Moreover, it’s worth noting that the current testosterone limits set by, I think the Olympic Committee and some other organizations, they typically vary between ten and five nmol per liter. I used to be ten and now they’re leaning more towards five, and they definitely should because the upper limit of the reference range for most women is two. So ten is five times higher than that and five is still more than double that. So you take a very genetically gifted woman in terms of testosterone levels and then she still has probably half the testosterone that trans athletes might have or is allowed to have under these rules.

We can also look at research on pre pubertal children. And we have a nice study on this that found the boys presented higher values in all selected tests except tests of balance and flexibility in which girls scored better. So basically, even before puberty, boys already have very significant competitive advantages in almost every domain of sports except flexibility and balance. And I think the perfect illustration of this is what happened in 2017 when the US national soccer team who has won the World Cup, if I’m not mistaken, scored two five, meaning they lost to the FC Dallas under 15 boys, meaning 15 year old boys absolutely dominated the women’s national soccer team. Now, this was not an official match, but I think competitive advantage, competitive athletes would be reluctant to let this slide and not do their best. They were in training and it was normal official match rules. So I think that’s pretty telling.

We also have good research showing that prenatal testosterone exposure, which can be measured as the ratio of your 2 to 4. So if you’re very long ring fingers and relatively short index fingers. And that’s actually strongly correlated and reflective of your prenatal testosterone exposure. And this is correlated with a wide range of things, both in sports and in other domains, like even within, for example, homosexual couples, the likelihood that one is femme or butch has been correlated to the ratio of the ring fingers by virtue of prenatal testosterone exposure, and also a predictive of success in sumo wrestling, soccer, a wide range of physical abilities and sports. So it’s very interesting that even the amount of testosterone you’re exposed to in the womb before you’re actually born already explains a lot about how your body is made up. Your anatomy, even your brain. Speaking of which, it’s not just testosterone levels and previous testosterone levels that give you a competitive advantage as a guy over a girl. There’s also a big difference in anatomy Unless you’re blind. So you’ve probably seen that men and women have quite a different body structure. And some of these differences have profound implications for athletic ability.

So men typically have longer proportionate arms and legs, higher center of gravity, and these things can be good or bad depending on the sport, but especially their relatively longer forearms, combined with a lower carrying angle, are an advantage for grip strength. So the carrying angle of men is lower than that in women, which basically means that women have their kind of their arms more out to the side, which you can see here in this image, and that’s a disadvantage for grip strength. Now, as I said, the previous review found that the average trans women had grip strength that was top 10% of regular women. And if you look at the research on grip strength, the advantages are huge. Even before puberty, like a previous study that I showed there’s already a difference, a very substantial difference, especially by adulthood, the male advantage in grip strength is massive. just the average untrained man has grip strength that is beyond that of most female athletes, even those trained in strength sports. It’s a really big advantage. That’s a part mediated by hand size, structure of the elbow and just lean body mass in the area. Now that’s not the only anatomical advantage that men have.

There’s also a difference in the Q angle. So women have approximately double the Q angle of men, and that means that essentially they have wider hips and their legs go a little bit more inward. As you can see in the image here and that is disadvantageous for sports pretty much across the board because it reduces the amount of torque you can put on the knee. So it reduces knee extension strength it also predisposes you towards injury. So basically women are anatomically predisposed towards higher knee injury rates and lower knee extension strength Now, even this doesn’t tell the full story because most organizations and most of the debate really just centers on testosterone and they’re not looking at these anatomical features. But it’s not just physical. There are also big mental differences, although you could say that the structure of the brain is also physical. So here we’re going into kind of metaphysical. if you look at personality and cognition, there are also significant differences between men and women. And some of these are advantageous for men in sports.

For example, number one, women typically have higher trait neuroticism as measured by big five personality tests. It’s one of the biggest personality differences between men and women, and that has generally disadvantageous effects for sports, research finds. Higher neuroticism is related to greater susceptibility to negative emotions, greater anxiety, greater fear. And you can probably intuitively tell that greater fear and anxiety is not going to be great for sports. And indeed, research finds that it’s associated with lower motivation and also lower performance. you’re not going to be as risk taking. You’re going to be more fearful, and especially in sports, with high contact or high impact that might make you not go for that last pass, not go for the tackle or whatever, and therefore it reduce performance.

A great example of this is traffic accidents. If you look at how many traffic accidents are caused by young men, it is extremely disproportionate. Young men take far greater risks than women. So clearly it’s not always a good thing to be more of a risk taker. But in sports generally it is means you are more likely to rise up to the challenge, even if it puts yourself at risk, even if that’s objectively a bad thing for yourself, for your own health. Now, there are also difference in visual spatial abilities, and these differences are actually quite large and probably a lot more important even than personality differences. like women have advantages in some areas of cognition, men have an advantage in visual spatial cognition. And this is pretty huge. If you, for example, look at men’s ability or boys ability, even, even before puberty to track objects in space like ball during sports, then you see very significant differences between men and women.

And also, if you combine this with different anatomy of the forearm and the ability to manipulate objects and motor skills, then you see that men are a lot better at throwing objects to desired locations, which makes a lot of sense evolutionarily speaking, because men have evolved more towards to hunt and to fight, and therefore they are better evolutionarily adapted to those things, whereas women are better evolutionarily adapted to other things, such as verbal memory, language, social skills, reading emotions. So men and women both have advantages, it’s just that. It so happens that most of the male advantages are for things related to hunting and fighting, which means there are going to be related more to sports.

Now, overall, it’s clear that men have significant advantages over women, and if you are transgender, testosterone suppression is not going to fully eradicate these differences, not even close, actually. So if we currently look at examples of trans athletes competing and how they’re doing, it’s quite clear that there are a lot of cases where trans athletes are dominating female competitions. right. Let’s sum up briefly before we get to the policy implications. Men have significant athletic advantages over women in anatomy, visual spatial abilities, lower neuroticism and prenatal and pubertal testosterone exposure, which gives them greater grip strength and not to mention a lot of anatomical advantages ranging from advantages for the Q angle, carrying angle, body structure, grip strength, wide variety of ways and importantly, hormone therapy alone or testosterone suppression therapy is not enough to fully eradicate these differences and level the playing field. There is still a substantial difference of the average trans woman over the average regular woman. So what does this mean for policy implications?

Well, strictly in terms of fairness, I think it is quite clear that scientifically speaking, men have a significant advantage over women, which means that trans women cannot fairly compete with biological women. Of course, the reverse trans men competing with biological men is fine because they have a disadvantage. So if they want to do that, I don’t think a lot of people will have an issue with that. But trans women competing with biological women is probably unfair in the vast majority of cases. does this mean that it should not be allowed? Maybe we should have laws against it? I don’t think so, because there are other factors to consider. First of all, fairness is inherently basically a delusion. I think a lot of people are onto this idea that sports are fair, but really they’re not because just like there are significant athletic differences in predispositions between men and women, between the sexes, there are also massive differences between individuals in terms of genetic ability.

So if you are a midget and you want to be the next Michael Jordan, tough luck. It’s not going to happen. if you look at Ronnie Coleman in bodybuilding, for example, he went pro before he started using steroids. It’s like unheard of. Be honest with you, I just got a burning desire to be successful in life. I’ve always had it. I was pretty much born with it. Just look at the physics of some of these individuals before they really knew what they were doing. And you could clearly see that in terms of muscle mass strength, just raw athletic ability. In almost any sport, we see individuals that are just massive outliers compared to the norm, and there are a lot of physical traits that you basically need to have, whether it’s height or strength or visual spatial ability or reflexes that you have very little control over. But you just need to have to compete at the top level. especially here, we’re mostly talking about world records, you know, national championships, etc.. So in that sense, we can say, well, sports is also a social activity. It’s about fun, it’s about inclusivity, and maybe we shouldn’t care that much about fairness.

And I think that’s a fair argument. If you’re doing like local competitions and, everyone is okay with it. However, especially at the pro level, I think it’s probably not fun for women and we have to strike a balance between trans rights and women’s rights because it’s maybe fun for the one trans woman, the weightlifter that’s winning all the competitions, but maybe that’s not so fun for all the women competing and training their whole life for something that’s they now have no shot at winning.

So basically, fairness is not the only factor we should consider, but especially at the top level, it is almost certainly important. And this also brings me to a point that we probably need to think of a more utilitarian approach to this because it’s not about, you know, what is fair … fairness itself is kind of a vague concept and in large part a delusion inherently because of the genetic differences between individuals. So we just need to strike a balance that is utilitarian, meaning it achieves the greater good, the most happiness of every individual combined.

And that brings me to the second counter arguments that we should not allow trans women to compete with biological women. And I counterargument would be It’s unfair to trans women. And it is and I get it. So you’re , if you’re born in the wrong body, this is kind of contentious but let’s assume let’s not go into that. You didn’t really choose to be trans individual. Most trans individuals experience gender dysphoria and a lot of discomfort, social unease. It’s not really a choice in that sense to be trans. I’m all for you know, if people want to use your preferred pronouns, you want to change your identity, you want to change your name. If it doesn’t pose a security risk, change your passport.

All of these things completely fine. Marry who you like, be who you like. As long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else. Great. In sports, though, you are hurting someone else, and that’s women. So your rights have to be balanced out with women’s rights. And from a utilitarian perspective, there are simply far fewer trans individuals than there are women, especially competing in women’s sports. So we’re looking at the rights of the 1% versus the rights of the 99%. I think a simple balancing scale act would be to say probably we have to go for the 99% and prioritize that. Also, it’s worth noting that trans individuals have a choice, whereas women do not. So if you are a trans woman, then you can still compete with men, so you can still play the sport. Whereas women don’t have that choice at all. Women cannot choose to compete with men. there’s also that to consider. Now, all in all, what’s my position? I think that the current position standpoint from the courts that ordered USA Powerlifting and thereby essentially set the precedent for all sports to mandate trans inclusion in sports is wrong. I think that it is blatantly unfair from a scientific competitive advantage point of view and it’s also not good to mandate these things, and especially mandating this sets the precedence, like I said, for other sports, including martial arts.

Now, do we really want trans women to fight biological women? I think that given the advantages that trans women have, including in this part, also higher bone density in the face, which is likely reduces injury risk, it might be very dangerous for biological women to compete against trans women. So I don’t think we want a blanket law that mandates the inclusion of trans individuals in all sports or in any sport for that matter. But I also don’t think there should be a law against it. If an organization wants to allow trans individuals to compete in whatever manner they choose, I think that should be up to the organization, know, your party, your rules. So I think we should just allow individuals to organize this for themselves and organizations not have any rules prohibiting it or enforcing anything. And then we see how things solve themselves. solution that I’ve often heard is that organizations should create a trans category. And I think that’s not going to work because for one, there are probably not enough competitors. We see this in things like with masters class bodybuilding, even women’s bodybuilding, women’s physique.

Often there are simply not enough competitors and not enough interest in the sport, not enough people that want to watch it to make that really a viable project. And it’s like nice to say that there exists a category in theory, but It’s not going to work. And also probably for trans individuals, it won’t really feel very inclusive that you have to compete in your own category. I mean, it’s great that there is a category, but I imagine it’s still not an ideal solution and certainly not one that’s going to work very well. So I think a trans category is one a solution, but probably not the solution for everyone. I think possible better solution for organizations to consider, again, should be up to organization, in my view, is that there should be an open category similar to, for example, in bodybuilding. There is an open category where men and women and trans individuals, everyone is allowed to compete and win the kind of open medal. you could also make this trans and women. you know, they’re still more interested in there and they’re also a greater rewards.

Otherwise trans individuals, you know, competing with the other two trans individuals there where nobody’s watching might also not be the greatest. So I think those are possible solutions that organizations should consider. And I think the current law and precedent set by the court ruling that USA Powerlifting should force trans inclusion is step in a very wrong direction.

So I hope this video will help inform people about the matter and allow them to come up with their own solutions. And maybe we can come up with a scenario that is better for everyone, which is not clearly unfair and also still inclusive.

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