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 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.