I may be wrong, but until Elon Musk bought Twitter, I’m not really sure it is fair to call this a “massive media apparatus”. The wikipedia articles here makes it sound like it is mostly driven in a decentralized way, with popular social media influencers such as Libs of TikTok pushing it, and most of the media companies in question trying to keep it down. It seems like structural forces have generally been opposed to this discussion.
After Elon Musk bought Twitter, the “massive media apparatus” phrasing makes sense; I’m pretty sure a large part of Elon Musk’s motivation was to change the discourse on trans topics to be more negative towards transness, and Twitter is in fact a truly colossal media apparatus.
Or maybe I’m thinking about it wrong. I guess the articles are more saying that it started out as a decentralized conservative activist thing which resonated with a lot of people, and then mainstream conservative media picked up on it?
I don’t know if “decentralized” is quite right. For example, the Alliance Defending Freedom specifically has been an instrumental driving force behind legislative pushes in many states in the last few years. Legislation, election messaging, and media cycles more generally tend to be driven by a handful of conservative/evangelical nonprofits with long-established national operations, also including, for example, the Independent Women’s Forum and the Family Research Council. I would also characterize it as more of a wedge issue than a resonant one, although that’s more complicated.
For a while, there have been conservative organizations working on legal foundations etc. to challenge the trans movement, mostly working in the background. As the trans movement has grown, so has decentralized populist opposition to it, until recently where the concerns of influencers such as Libs of TikTok have become so big that they have been picked up by a lot of conservative media. And finally, something happened in Elon Musk’s family which probably involves Elon Musk wanting to prevent Vivian Jenna Wilson from transitioning and wanting to treat her as male, or Elon Musk being mad at Grimes, and therefore using a big chunk of his wealth for buying a major progressive media institution to push back against transgender ideology.
I was going to post this in my original comment, but decided not to: the quantum of belief is the story, not the study. “They’re going after the children” and “they’re pretending to be women so they can win sporting events” have shown to be two of the most easily-believed stories, so conservative media has been leaning on those angles. Even some people who are nominally cool with my existence believe the latter if pushed a bit, despite the preponderance of the evidence [0] showing that there’s no significant advantage after enough feminizing HRT.
Incidentally, there’s a dominoes meme I’ve been meaning to make for some time now, with “Someone posts a mathematical monograph on a new kind of decision theory to the Internet” at the small end and “Pop star leaves world’s richest man for transfemme hacker” at the big end.
Regarding the claims about trans women’s advantage in women’s sports, I had heard the opposite, that studies had found trans women to have an advantage. So I decided to just quickly spot-check your given link, and it included this section:
Height and Lean Body Mass (LBM) are rarely adjusted for as a fair assessment would require. When adjusting for height and fat-free mass, relative differences in strength between cis men and cis women largely disappear (Harms et al., 2011) making this a critical step in conducting population level comparisons. To illustrate this, the average 5’10’’ cis woman carries significantly higher muscle mass than a 5’4’’ cis woman. As we do not currently consider height to be an eligibility criterion (no threshold exists which would limit participation in sport), significant as in many men and women’s elite sport, participants tend to be taller than population averages. Unless sporting organizations put limits on height for competition, a fair comparison would use height-adjusted cis women (i.e., comparing the muscular mass and strength of a 5’10’’ trans women to a 5’10’’ cis women).
This feels like Everest regression to me. I think you should have been more up-front about the fact that you are using this criterion, and it makes me less inclined to bothered with giant documents that you give in the future.
The Everest regression here is “when you control for height and lean body mass, cis men aren’t actually stronger than cis women”, yes? That would be a deal-breaker if they were comparing cis men and cis women, I agree, but they’re not. I don’t think I’ve seen anybody make that claim. The claim that’s being made is, as I follow it:
Feminizing HRT brings muscle mass and strength to “within the normal distribution...for cis women (Janssen et al., 2000)”, thereby controlling for LBM, and
the arena of elite sport selects in some way for height (note that greater height does not confer an advantage in all sports; the canonical example is powerlifting, in which shorter lifters have less distance to move the same weight);
hence the statistical application of those controls is justified; and
while there is a statistically significant difference in LBM and strength after feminizing HRT, it is within distribution (Janssen again) and not clearly more egregious than other biological differences at the elite level; e.g., those possessed by Michael Phelps and Caster Semenya; and
the Harms study shows (or purports to show; I haven’t scrutinized it too closely) that other commonly-cited factors (bone density, etc.) do not confer any significant advantage.
Feminizing HRT brings muscle mass and strength to “within the normal distribution...for cis women (Janssen et al., 2000)”, thereby controlling for LBM, and
I don’t really follow this. In the data I’ve seen, HRT brings trans women halfway between cis men and cis women. Janssen et al 2000 does not contain any trans women, and the place you are quoting from in the linked report is kind of convoluted and since the report has already been misleading one time I don’t really feel like wasting time following the report’s argument. Please lay out the argument for this if you want me to believe it.
Am I following your contention?
I’m somewhat confused about what you are asking.
My understanding of the debate about trans women in sports is:
Competitive sports ranks people by athletic performance, which depends on innate capacities, hard work, and luck
Women are by and large biologically inferior to men with respect to athleticism, mainly due to being smaller and having smaller muscles
As a result, women can’t win in non-sex-segregated sports competitions
Some people feel that the point of women’s sports is to provide women with a competition they can participate in since they can’t win against men
Trans women want to participate in women’s sports so that they can be treated like women, but some people worry that trans women would retain some of the male advantage
One might suggest that it is fair if HRT makes trans women have the same biological capacities as cis women
You suggest that after controlling for height (which I think basically functions as a proxy for body size) and lean body mass (which I think basically functions as a proxy for muscle size), trans women have the same athletic capacities as cis women.
But I don’t think that people are concerned about innate capacity residualized for body size and muscle size; I think people are concerned about whether trans women keep some of their innate capacity due to being male, even if it is due to body size and muscle size.
the arena of elite sport selects in some way for height
Obviously people might differ on how they evaluate it, but I think those who are concerned about fairness here would make a distinction being tall due to being male vs being taller for other reasons. Like if you are explicitly making a competition for women because women are bad at sports, the ways in which women are bad sports would be logical to treat specially in the rules.
It’s like if you made a competition for mentally handicapped people, this competition is probably going to select for a better cognitive understanding of the rules and techniques of the sport compared to that of mentally handicapped people who don’t participate in the sport. But if some ordinary people want to identify as mentally handicapped and participate in the sport, this doesn’t obviously justify controlling for cognitive understanding of rules and techniques when trying to evaluate whether it’s fair for them to participate. I mean maybe you have some argument for why it does, but it’s not clear what that would be.
while there is a statistically significant difference in LBM and strength after feminizing HRT, it is within distribution (Janssen again) and not clearly more egregious than other biological differences at the elite level; e.g., those possessed by Michael Phelps and Caster Semenya; and
With respect to Michael Phelps, again like for height if you are explicitly making a competition for women, there is a distinction between the advantages he gets due to being male, vs the advantages he gets for various other genetic reasons/due to hard work/etc..
Caster Semenya is a difficult case that I don’t really understand fully. Many of the people who are critical of trans women in women’s sports also seem critical of Caster Semenya in women’s sports.
I don’t really follow this. In the data I’ve seen, HRT brings trans women halfway between cis men and cis women. Janssen et al 2000 does not contain any trans women, and the place you are quoting from in the linked report is kind of convoluted and since the report has already been misleading one time I don’t really feel like wasting time following the report’s argument. Please lay out the argument for this if you want me to believe it.
Here is my interpretation. The relevant data are contained in Table 6 of the 2022 report on page 25, and show that the relative muscle loss caused by 12 months of feminizing HRT in sedentary trans women is around 4 percentage points. Table 1 of Janssen 2000 gives the normal distributions the 2022 report seems to be referring to: for cis women, mean 30.6% and SD 5.5%; for cis men, mean 38.4% and SD 5.1%. This supports, I think, both your claim that a year of HRT puts trans women at about the halfway point and the 2022 report’s claim that this is nevertheless “within the normal distribution.” That’s a mathematically imprecise claim but I think they mean “within one sigma.”
I think all this is a wash. In particular, I agree with your halfway-point claim at 12 months, but disagree with it on longer timescales. I would like to see a paper examining a longer timescale.
I certainly have the sense it could. But those comparisons are in sedentary people, not athletes, and it’s also possible that out in those tails training causes the differences to mostly disappear.
This has been a nice exercise but I think it’s tangential.
I’m speaking from memory of reporting here, but my understanding is that there was a specific turning point in 2019/2020 when one of these orgs focus tested a bunch of messages and found that trans youth issues worked well, particularly as a wedge. (That is, the opposition were split on it.) US Americans, when polled, have a bunch of weirdly self-contradictory answers to questions on trans issues but are generally more supportive than not, depending on how they’re asked. My guess is they mostly don’t think about it too much, since there are plausibly a million or two trans people in the US, many of whom pass or are closeted.
In the previous cycle, “bathroom bills” had failed and generated backlash. In the current cycle focused on trans youth, there’s more uncertainty among people who think of themselves as liberals, and for a variety of reasons large news media organizations like the NYT have been happy to play along with conservative agenda-setting. There’s some decentralized, populist opposition, but it’s largely activated by forces far out of proportion to the number of trans athletes or minors getting gender-affirming surgery.
No idea what Musk’s deal is. Unrelatedly, I’m also very skeptical that Libs of TikTok is primarily motivated by sincere concerns.
Edit: here’s a handful of sources just from looking around again.
That was the first article I found. Delving too deeply into what these people say about me tends to be hazardous to my health.
Here are some well-cited Wikipedia articles that should serve as good jumping-off points.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_grooming_conspiracy_theory
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020s_anti-LGBT_movement_in_the_United_States
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libs_of_TikTok
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transphobia_in_the_United_States
I may be wrong, but until Elon Musk bought Twitter, I’m not really sure it is fair to call this a “massive media apparatus”. The wikipedia articles here makes it sound like it is mostly driven in a decentralized way, with popular social media influencers such as Libs of TikTok pushing it, and most of the media companies in question trying to keep it down. It seems like structural forces have generally been opposed to this discussion.
After Elon Musk bought Twitter, the “massive media apparatus” phrasing makes sense; I’m pretty sure a large part of Elon Musk’s motivation was to change the discourse on trans topics to be more negative towards transness, and Twitter is in fact a truly colossal media apparatus.
Or maybe I’m thinking about it wrong. I guess the articles are more saying that it started out as a decentralized conservative activist thing which resonated with a lot of people, and then mainstream conservative media picked up on it?
I don’t know if “decentralized” is quite right. For example, the Alliance Defending Freedom specifically has been an instrumental driving force behind legislative pushes in many states in the last few years. Legislation, election messaging, and media cycles more generally tend to be driven by a handful of conservative/evangelical nonprofits with long-established national operations, also including, for example, the Independent Women’s Forum and the Family Research Council. I would also characterize it as more of a wedge issue than a resonant one, although that’s more complicated.
So maybe an accurate model is something like:
For a while, there have been conservative organizations working on legal foundations etc. to challenge the trans movement, mostly working in the background. As the trans movement has grown, so has decentralized populist opposition to it, until recently where the concerns of influencers such as Libs of TikTok have become so big that they have been picked up by a lot of conservative media. And finally, something happened in Elon Musk’s family which probably involves Elon Musk wanting to prevent Vivian Jenna Wilson from transitioning and wanting to treat her as male, or Elon Musk being mad at Grimes, and therefore using a big chunk of his wealth for buying a major progressive media institution to push back against transgender ideology.
I was going to post this in my original comment, but decided not to: the quantum of belief is the story, not the study. “They’re going after the children” and “they’re pretending to be women so they can win sporting events” have shown to be two of the most easily-believed stories, so conservative media has been leaning on those angles. Even some people who are nominally cool with my existence believe the latter if pushed a bit, despite the preponderance of the evidence [0] showing that there’s no significant advantage after enough feminizing HRT.
Incidentally, there’s a dominoes meme I’ve been meaning to make for some time now, with “Someone posts a mathematical monograph on a new kind of decision theory to the Internet” at the small end and “Pop star leaves world’s richest man for transfemme hacker” at the big end.
We appreciate power.
[0] https://www.cces.ca/transgender-women-athletes-and-elite-sport-scientific-review
Regarding the claims about trans women’s advantage in women’s sports, I had heard the opposite, that studies had found trans women to have an advantage. So I decided to just quickly spot-check your given link, and it included this section:
This feels like Everest regression to me. I think you should have been more up-front about the fact that you are using this criterion, and it makes me less inclined to bothered with giant documents that you give in the future.
The Everest regression here is “when you control for height and lean body mass, cis men aren’t actually stronger than cis women”, yes? That would be a deal-breaker if they were comparing cis men and cis women, I agree, but they’re not. I don’t think I’ve seen anybody make that claim. The claim that’s being made is, as I follow it:
Feminizing HRT brings muscle mass and strength to “within the normal distribution...for cis women (Janssen et al., 2000)”, thereby controlling for LBM, and
the arena of elite sport selects in some way for height (note that greater height does not confer an advantage in all sports; the canonical example is powerlifting, in which shorter lifters have less distance to move the same weight);
hence the statistical application of those controls is justified; and
while there is a statistically significant difference in LBM and strength after feminizing HRT, it is within distribution (Janssen again) and not clearly more egregious than other biological differences at the elite level; e.g., those possessed by Michael Phelps and Caster Semenya; and
the Harms study shows (or purports to show; I haven’t scrutinized it too closely) that other commonly-cited factors (bone density, etc.) do not confer any significant advantage.
Am I following your contention?
I don’t really follow this. In the data I’ve seen, HRT brings trans women halfway between cis men and cis women. Janssen et al 2000 does not contain any trans women, and the place you are quoting from in the linked report is kind of convoluted and since the report has already been misleading one time I don’t really feel like wasting time following the report’s argument. Please lay out the argument for this if you want me to believe it.
I’m somewhat confused about what you are asking.
My understanding of the debate about trans women in sports is:
Competitive sports ranks people by athletic performance, which depends on innate capacities, hard work, and luck
Women are by and large biologically inferior to men with respect to athleticism, mainly due to being smaller and having smaller muscles
As a result, women can’t win in non-sex-segregated sports competitions
Some people feel that the point of women’s sports is to provide women with a competition they can participate in since they can’t win against men
Trans women want to participate in women’s sports so that they can be treated like women, but some people worry that trans women would retain some of the male advantage
One might suggest that it is fair if HRT makes trans women have the same biological capacities as cis women
You suggest that after controlling for height (which I think basically functions as a proxy for body size) and lean body mass (which I think basically functions as a proxy for muscle size), trans women have the same athletic capacities as cis women.
But I don’t think that people are concerned about innate capacity residualized for body size and muscle size; I think people are concerned about whether trans women keep some of their innate capacity due to being male, even if it is due to body size and muscle size.
Obviously people might differ on how they evaluate it, but I think those who are concerned about fairness here would make a distinction being tall due to being male vs being taller for other reasons. Like if you are explicitly making a competition for women because women are bad at sports, the ways in which women are bad sports would be logical to treat specially in the rules.
It’s like if you made a competition for mentally handicapped people, this competition is probably going to select for a better cognitive understanding of the rules and techniques of the sport compared to that of mentally handicapped people who don’t participate in the sport. But if some ordinary people want to identify as mentally handicapped and participate in the sport, this doesn’t obviously justify controlling for cognitive understanding of rules and techniques when trying to evaluate whether it’s fair for them to participate. I mean maybe you have some argument for why it does, but it’s not clear what that would be.
With respect to Michael Phelps, again like for height if you are explicitly making a competition for women, there is a distinction between the advantages he gets due to being male, vs the advantages he gets for various other genetic reasons/due to hard work/etc..
Caster Semenya is a difficult case that I don’t really understand fully. Many of the people who are critical of trans women in women’s sports also seem critical of Caster Semenya in women’s sports.
Here is my interpretation. The relevant data are contained in Table 6 of the 2022 report on page 25, and show that the relative muscle loss caused by 12 months of feminizing HRT in sedentary trans women is around 4 percentage points. Table 1 of Janssen 2000 gives the normal distributions the 2022 report seems to be referring to: for cis women, mean 30.6% and SD 5.5%; for cis men, mean 38.4% and SD 5.1%. This supports, I think, both your claim that a year of HRT puts trans women at about the halfway point and the 2022 report’s claim that this is nevertheless “within the normal distribution.” That’s a mathematically imprecise claim but I think they mean “within one sigma.”
I think all this is a wash. In particular, I agree with your halfway-point claim at 12 months, but disagree with it on longer timescales. I would like to see a paper examining a longer timescale.
One sigma feels like it would make a huge difference for something like competitive sports which is mostly about the tails of the distribution.
I certainly have the sense it could. But those comparisons are in sedentary people, not athletes, and it’s also possible that out in those tails training causes the differences to mostly disappear.
This has been a nice exercise but I think it’s tangential.
For all I know, it could be that training causes the differences to shrink, but it could also equally well be that it causes them to grow.
I’m speaking from memory of reporting here, but my understanding is that there was a specific turning point in 2019/2020 when one of these orgs focus tested a bunch of messages and found that trans youth issues worked well, particularly as a wedge. (That is, the opposition were split on it.) US Americans, when polled, have a bunch of weirdly self-contradictory answers to questions on trans issues but are generally more supportive than not, depending on how they’re asked. My guess is they mostly don’t think about it too much, since there are plausibly a million or two trans people in the US, many of whom pass or are closeted.
In the previous cycle, “bathroom bills” had failed and generated backlash. In the current cycle focused on trans youth, there’s more uncertainty among people who think of themselves as liberals, and for a variety of reasons large news media organizations like the NYT have been happy to play along with conservative agenda-setting. There’s some decentralized, populist opposition, but it’s largely activated by forces far out of proportion to the number of trans athletes or minors getting gender-affirming surgery.
No idea what Musk’s deal is. Unrelatedly, I’m also very skeptical that Libs of TikTok is primarily motivated by sincere concerns.
Edit: here’s a handful of sources just from looking around again.
NYT (2023): How A Campaign Against Transgender Rights Mobilized Conservatives (“it was also the result of careful planning by national conservative organizations to harness the emotion around gender politics”)
Axios (2023): The forces behind anti-trans bills across the U.S.
NBC News (2017), on ADF and bathroom bills: This Law Firm Is Linked to Anti-Transgender Bills Across the Country
The Guardian (2020), on other ADF activities and the new focus on student athletes: The multimillion-dollar Christian group attacking LGBTQ+ rights
Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (2023): NYT’s Anti-Trans Bias, by the Numbers
I don’t endorse everything that’s written in these, but this is more or less the thing I’m talking about.
That’s correct.